The Rev. Elizabeth Nestor

The Rev. Elizabeth (Libby) Nestor was the first woman ordained to the priesthood within the Diocese of Rhode Island. She pursued her priestly vocation, as well as a career as a physician specializing in emergency medicine simultaneously. She served churches in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Rhode Island. She was interviewed by the Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg.

Question: Where were you 50 years ago this summer when the 11 women were ordained at Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia?

Answer:  I was working as a parish secretary for St. Augustine’s Church in Kingston, Rhode Island. And I saw the headlines. […] And I said to the guy who I was working for, John Hall, “Women get ordained in our church?” I said it out of complete surprise. And I had been an Episcopalian for about a year, a year at that point. And he said, “Oh, I suppose you’re now going to want to be ordained and I’ll lose another secretary.” And really up until then, I hadn’t really thought about it, or I had thought about it, but somebody in authority saying it to me, even though he was a little bitter about it, made me take it seriously. And so that’s exactly where I was. I was in that office I shared with him. He was a university chaplain at the University of Rhode Island. And I had been thinking about this on and off for a little while, but with no idea that it was on the horizon.

Question: So, you had a sense of call though at some level then.

Answer:  Yes. Yeah.

Question: Can you tell me anything about what that call felt like?

Answer: Well, I also spent my early life as a Roman Catholic and in a Catholic girls school. And at one point we took those sort of tests in which you were supposed to come up with an answer, you are best fit to be this profession or that. And the two that came up for me were priest and doctor. My father was a doctor. My father had been a double major, pre-med and theology, in college. So, I showed this to the nun, and she said, obviously what this means is nurse and nun. And I said, “Uh huh, another useless test that tells me something.” I’m saying that to myself. “I’ve got no interest in being a nurse or a nun.” […] By the way, that’s what I ended up being. Both of those things, not nurse and nun, but priest and doctor.

Question: And I do want to ask you about that. Which came first?

Answer: Oh, priest. I definitely did it the wrong way in that you go into medical school with not a lot of savings, because at the time I was ordained in ‘79 as deacon and ‘80 as priest, I was the lowest-paid priest in three dioceses. So, I didn’t go into medical school with a huge cache of money, just to say. I’d say it’s the wrong way. Most people who are doubled like that usually are doctors first. And the other thing is retirement wisdom.

Question: So, you were deacon in 1979 and priesthood in 1980. So there’s some time in between, between 1974 and 1979. And in between there, General Convention made the decision to allow women to be priests and bishops.

Answer: Right. I was in my second year in div[inity] school — beginning my second year, I believe — […] I had known it was likely coming, but I hadn’t predicted those politics correctly. I kind of thought it would’ve been a few years away. […]

Question: And where were you in school?

Answer: I was at YDS [Yale Divinity School] in New Haven.

Question: Okay. And sponsored out of the diocese of Rhode Island.

Answer: Yes.

Question: How did that ordination process feel to you? I mean, you were in seminary when the decision [for] ordination became official. Did that change anything for you, give you assurance or?

Answer: I was in the process already. I had really an outstanding bishop, just an outstanding older man.

Question: And who was that?

Answer: His name was Belden, Bishop [Frederick] Belden, who died at General Convention when it was in Denver (in 1979). It might’ve been in between my priestly and diaconal ordinations. So, in order to get ordained priest, we had to elect a new bishop [Hunt], and he had to come and kind of tackle the Standing Committee, one by one to get them to agree.

Question: Oh, so there was some hesitancy there?

Answer: Yeah, there were on both the Commission on Ministry [and Standing Committee.] This is why Bishop Belden was just, he kind of knew what the score was, and he thought this was an appropriate thing for women to be ordained. But he also knew he had a lot of people in the hierarchy of the diocese that were not a hundred percent in agreement. So, for example, when I started with the Commission on Ministry and was passed through by them for the first time, he said to me that I had to go to them and get somebody to agree to be my mentor, my guide through this process. And he gave me a list in a specific order, and [they] were all the holdouts. In retrospect, he never said to me, “You have an intact ego, I feel like you’ll come okay through this, but I want you to go to this person, then this person, then this person.” And I went to three different guys who all said the same honorable thing. “Oh, I can’t be your mentor here because I disapprove of the ordination of women, but I see now I need to get off a commission.”

It was very deftly done on his part, I think. And then I got to the fourth guy who also said, “I’m still struggling with ordination of women.” Bob Duffy was his name. “But why don’t we struggle together over this, and I will definitely be your mentor.” He was just a sweetheart. So those two older guys, both of them, Bishop Belden and Bob Duffy were very nice, very supportive people.

But then, by the time I was ordained deacon I was in charge of a church almost right away in Connecticut, in New Haven. And the Standing Committee kept refusing to ordain me [to the priesthood?] because they said Connecticut wasn’t doing right by me and needed to be paying me more or giving me insurance. Both of those things were true, but had nothing whatever to do with ordination. So, when Bishop Hunt came, he said he had a retreat with the Standing Committee and one after another took them in a room and just dialogued on different issues. And at the end would say, “And what objection do you have to ordaining Libby Nestor?”

Question: Now, so does that mean, were you the first woman ordained in Rhode Island?

Answer: I was the first one ordained in Rhode Island [as a] priest [at the Cathedral of St. John], but not the first one, ordained of Rhode Island. Because that was Jo-Ann Drake, who you’ll likely speak, right? Yes. She was ordained by Belden, but in Philadelphia, or in Pennsylvania somewhere.

Question: And so how was it that you wound up being at this church in New Haven?

Answer: Oh, well, I had gone to school there. Yeah. I had been an intern at this particular [parish], it was a West Indian parish, Black parish in a tough little section of New Haven, but not too far from the div school, right down the hill in the wrong direction. Newhallville. And they came up onto an interim just as I was getting ordained deacon. So they put me in as deacon-in-charge. The diocese did.

Question: Wow. Interesting.

Answer: Yeah, so extremely interesting. How horrible to do that to people. It’s a Black parish. It’s struggling in a poor community, crime ridden, and you just stick down some total newbie, I don’t know.

Question: So, where did the shape of your ministry take you for the course of your ministry?

Answer: So, I was there from ’79, June of ’79 until I think January of ’82 or so when they got a new vicar.

And I took, by this time, I had been turned down for a parish in Rhode Island right after I was ordained deacon. St. Martin’s, which was a very big place and kind of progressive. And I was offered a job, which I gratefully accepted, and then the vestry of that church made the guy take away the offer. So, I just realized with my contacts in the diocese, they basically said, you’re not going to get a position, a paid position in Rhode Island.

So, in New Haven, I loved that parish and [there] was a lot to do, obviously, but I just thought, I’m draining money from them. Not much money, but I just thought if I want to do both of these things, I had had some experience before divinity school as a VISTA volunteer. Do you know how they take young high school students and bring them into poor places …? I had been one of the supervisors for an expedition like that to Mexico. So I’d seen really extreme poverty there. And then in VISTA in Louisiana, people were still living in slave quarters, literally.

So, I thought, this is the kind of work I would like to do, so why not just go to medical school and then work part-time as a doctor and then work part-time as a clergy person and not have to take money from a parish. So that became my vision, and in ’82, I got accepted into a program at Bryn Mawr, which was for the post-baccalaureate pre-med. Actually, that was starting in June. It was a one year program. So I took off that time, I think February to April, February to March, April, something like that, and went to visit a friend of mine in England and lived at a parish there and helped out at that parish and then, unofficially, because that was before their ordination of women.

So, came back … started that pre-med program at Bryn Mawr, and then fell down in a bathtub, broke a vertebra in my back. It was very sad, and then had a disc herniation and needed a surgery. Of course, at that point, I was working in a parish in Bryn Mawr, very part-time, Redeemer, Bryn Mawr, and I didn’t have insurance there either, so that Lyman Ogilby […]  the very nice bishop of Pennsylvania, the clergy at Redeemer reached out to him and said, could we just throw her on the diocesan insurance policy because she can’t pay for this surgery. And so, they did that [it was] really very nice of him.

Then I had this spinal fusion there and couldn’t work at the parish obviously, couldn’t finish my studies. So I took off about six months and spent some time with my parents to get back on my feet, and then just went to Europe to visit a friend of mine who was living in Italy at the time, came back the next summer and started working in St. Augustine’s Church [in Kingston] again, just as a … doing supply for the summer there. And then they hired me as their assistant in the fall. […] So during the next four years, I did pre-med while I was working in the parish as assistant and college chaplain. So let’s see. Then that was my last full-time job. So, I went to medical school in Chicago at Northwestern, and I volunteered, or probably I was getting paid at that point for a church [Grace Church] in the South Loop on Printer’s Row there.

Very nice church in a converted paper manufacturing space. It’s very, very pretty with a couple of other pretty nice clergy. Now, of course, none of their names come to my mind, […]  Did medical school [in Chicago.] Then I went to Delaware during residency. I really did not have time to do clergy work, but then came back to Rhode Island, which exercised a fairly gravitational pull. […]  Yeah, because my father had died during my residency, and my mother was by herself. So, I came back and moved into my hometown and started a job at Brown Emergency Medicine, Providence. So I worked in a teaching facility, several hospitals, had residents, worked with medical students, blah, blah. And during the first two years, I probably worked at least quarter time in just taking services, mostly at St. Augustine’s, but also around the diocese. I did a lot of supply. Then as my job became increasingly complicated and time consuming, I backed off clergy work, and only really restarted it, taking supply for people, in maybe about the early aughts when I started doing supply at a place called — not really doing supply at this point, I wasn’t taking any money for services — but at a place called St. Paul’s in Wickford, where I did the two, offered to do the two services every year that every clergy person is happy to give to you, which is Easter sunrise, and Christmas morning. No one wants those services. I’ve done those there for 20, 25 years, something like that.

So that’s it. Now I basically am retired from my doctoring work, and I help out my friends at those two parishes, St. Augustine’s, Kingston, and more at St. Paul’s, Wickford, really.

Question: Well, now from when you went to div school to now, you’ve spanned a time of great change in the church in terms of women’s ministry. What changes do you see how things are now and […] compared to how things were when you were first ordained?

Answer: So interesting how fast that changed, isn’t it, really? Because I remember I had friends in the UBE (Union of Black Episcopalians), of course, because that was my parish [in New Haven], and there was a certain time when those numbers were roughly analogous. There were as many black clergy who’d been doing it since before the Civil War as there were women clergy for a brief period, and then women far outnumber black clergy even at this point.

We just blew right past those numbers. All those grumpypants people on the Standing Committee, and my Commission on Ministry, who couldn’t even imagine this. Now, basically there are parishes where kids, this is a famous story. I think I’ve heard it a number of times in different situations where little kids say, “Men can be priests. too?”

Question: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I want to go back to your doctoring for a moment, and I don’t know if you’re comfortable talking a lot about this or not, but you worked all during the pandemic.

Answer: I worked just the first year of the pandemic.

Question: Okay. Can you tell us about that?

Answer: Sure. It was, yeah, very intense doctoring. I would say. Those early COVID patients were so sick. They were among this, so there were a fair amount of them, not, we weren’t overwhelmed in the same way that New York City was, for example. But it was very surprising in my practice, my practice experience to that date, to have just people coming in time and time and time again who were so critically ill with a medical critical illness. Flu didn’t do that, didn’t ever overwhelm us in those numbers. You see septic patients, but you don’t see 20 every day or something like that.

Question: Excuse me. At this point you’re in the emergency room?

Answer: Yeah, yeah. That’s where my practice [was]. So, I did that for a year, and then even after I retired, I spent a couple of months at a field hospital that had been set up for these patients. So interesting. They were so sick. COVID these days is not like that, for the most part.

Question: No. Did you ever find that your ordained ministry helped you during that time?

Answer: Well, I think it helped me throughout my entire career. It’s huge advantage obviously, to have been in a profession where your main job is to speak with people, speak with God also, but speak with people, and then be put in a clinical situation where you can’t get anything done unless you’re speaking to people. But a lot of my peers who just came straight through from college did not have that experience.

And it is just to say it’s the same profession, it is totally the same profession. You have sacred garments, which set you apart. You have instruments which are somewhat mysterious, like magic wands more or less. The stethoscope is a power marker. There are different stethoscopes. You can kind of judge who a person is, what role they have by what kind of stethoscope they have. You have a language which sets you apart also. Words that are common in your profession, but which don’t mean a hundred percent the same thing to people who are not in the profession.

I wouldn’t say an elevated role, but it’s a set apart role. So, I think it was great for me to have had that kind of experience in a different situation, a different setting, so that I was a little bit more aware than they were of how to behave, how to act, how to interact. And certainly, in COVID, that helped almost more for my relationship with my peers and the nursing staff and the tech staff, the clerks. Almost more that’s where the interactions were more intense in COVID because the patients who came in, you didn’t have like an elderly person surrounded by their family, and then your main interactions with their family. So, you have an elderly, confused patient who can’t really talk to you, who’s disoriented because everybody’s coming in like Darth Vader in these gowns. That was so distressing to have people be that ill and die by themselves. I think every medical person that you will talk to who’s been through COIVD will say that it was so distressing. And as we know now, probably not that necessary, but we didn’t know then.

Question: Did you ever find yourself being in both roles with some of those patients as their doctor and their priest, minister, spiritual person?

Answer:  I would say I feel so strongly it’s the same role that I never did a separate thing. I was asked once for the wife of […] Bishop [John] Higgins, who […] predated my friend Fred Belden. Bishop Higgin’s wife came in clearly dying. And it was night shift in the emergency department where I was the only attending at that time with residents and an overwhelming number of patients. And I called her parish priest to come in and give last rites. And he said, “Can’t you do it?” I’m like, “No, I can’t be doing this to her with her and her son that was there, and then get called away to an emergency, or likewise, I can’t leave an emergency to…” Yeah, so that was the one time where I just said, “No, lazy bones. Get out of bed.”

Question: Oh, wow. Yeah, that sounds very challenging. And I wonder, we’re at a time now in the church where I think we’re talking more and more about bi-vocational priests. And I wonder, I mean, that’s what you did.

Answer:  I’m going to tell you that they were talking about it a lot when I was ordained, too. But from the other point of view: that we had so many clergy that it would be really nice if some of them would just go part-time and do something else. So, they encouraged me to go to medical school. They thought that was like the bee’s knees, but now it’s from the other point of view that we could use a little bit more people standing up and getting paid for something else.

Question: And do you think that’s a lesson the church is learning now?

Answer:  I always felt extremely fortunate that I had that mix is all I can say. […] Working emergency department’s not like other jobs. It’s not a 9-to-5, it’s a 3-to-11, it’s 11-to-7, it’s an 18-hour shift, if you have to do that. And it’s on weekends and nights and blah, blah, blah. But I knew what it was to have a job with contractual constraints of that nature, that you had to be there when you said you were going to be there. You can’t, can’t be late. You can’t leave early. And to some extent, clergy have that as well, but not to the same degree that most people do. Most people have to do, punch a time clock, which I never did. But yeah, so I thought that that awareness of what having that sort of a job was like, was very useful. I thought having the awareness of working with people in the church, I thought, having that was immensely helpful to my doctoring career.

Question: Can you say more about that?

Answer: Right. I mean, I think I mentioned it was that since what we do, we’re communicators, we’re speakers. And that is a huge challenge in medicine where […] you learn this other language, I forget how many words it contains, which are specifically medical, but by the time it’s an active translation in my head to talk to a patient and not say words that will confuse them, that they don’t exactly know how those words fit together in a sentence. So, you feel the process of translation when I’m trying to explain to a patient or to a family age-appropriate explanations. So, I think that just the ability to know that I need to communicate is big advantage.

Question:  It’s kind of like not using big theological terms in our sermons.

Answer: Oh my gosh, I know. I preached on Trinity last week. For some reason I got into, I just had a quick look online at now, how many theories of the atonement are there? How many theories of the Trinity? You get to nine theories of the atonement. You just think, click, not interested. […] And then I think I found four of the early controversies about the Trinity and the same thing, just looking at their names made me completely disinterested in pursuing what they meant. Yeah.

Question: This is my second to last question. Do you think, what, are there any lessons that the church needs to take from this journey of struggle to women’s ordination and then maybe we might say a journey through acceptance of women? I mean, ordination was one thing, and the acceptance of women as spiritual leaders is another thing.

Answer: So completely different, isn’t it? And I actually wondered how people fared. I don’t know many people of my generation of women clergy who had a totally standard progress. You start in a parish; you start to grow leadership and then move on. Some of them did. Some of them did. But the early women, people were not interested in it.

I was so enthusiastic and so pleased that I did get encouraged by bishops at many stages, but I was a lot of years without any kind of a standard job. And that’s really what pushed me. I just thought, you know, if I ever want a house or to be able to live independently, this is not the work for me. And so I found a way around. But the church can be not as welcoming as we would like to be, and I wonder if there’s something of a lesson now for us in this big transition that the whole church is undergoing now that I myself desperately love the rites and the rituals of the church, but they can be a little off-putting for people.

Question: That’s true. That’s true. What else haven’t I asked you as you reflect back on this journey, as I said, from ordination into acceptance and about your part in it, what have I not asked you about that you’d really like people in Rhode Island to know about your journey and what it means to the larger church and what it means to you?

Answer: Yeah. Well, it means everything to me. [Tears up] I’m sorry. And along the way, I was encouraged by people that I met and by clergy that I met. And by bishops, as I’ve said. The clergy were the toughest early on.

Rhode Island is a wonderful diocese, really wonderful. It’s a working, for the most part, it’s been a working-class diocese. It got its biggest growth under the Industrial Revolution and the importation of British mill workers into the United States. When I was very young, you could hear people with faint British accents, and they were the children of people that had come to work in the factories. And Rhode Island is a very cheek-by-jowl kind of place. So really, it’s one or two degrees of separation from everyone in the state.

And this [diocese] passed, for example, gay marriage and voted for gay clergy before the national church did. And it’s literally because people stood up and said, “You know my son Bob.”

At diocesan convention: “Yes, we know Bob.”

“Bob doesn’t feel like he can come to church anymore.”

“Oh, why not? We know Bob. We know him from camp.”

“Because he’s gay.”

And it was that kind of ad hominem appeal. I know my neighbors here that led us to be progressive in some kind of old-fashioned ways. It’s a high-and-dry polity kind of thing. Very wonderful, generous, working-class people and middle-class people. So it’s a great place. You really feel enfolded when the diocese finally realizes what’s going on. You’re very enfolded and taken up. So I have nothing but gratitude.

Question: That’s great. I think that’s a good place to end.