Raindrops of My Life: The Memoir of Florence Tim Oi Li. - book reviews

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 1998 by Janet Crawford

Raindrops of My Life: The Memoir of Florence Tim Oi Li. Toronto, Ont., Anglican Book Centre, 1996, 128pp., $11.95.

Questions about the status and roles of women in the church have been on the ecumenical agenda since the foundation of the World Council of Churches in 1948, while since the 1970s the question of the ordination of women has at times strained relations between -- as well as within -- churches and confessions. Within the Anglican Communion the ordination of women to the priesthood has been the subject of much debate and a certain degree of controversy. Although women priests (and in some cases bishops) are now accepted in a number of Anglican churches around the world, it is still not widely known that the first ordination of a woman to the Anglican priesthood took place over fifty years ago.

On the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul (25 January) 1944 Florence Li Tim-Oi, a Chinese deaconess, was ordained by Bishop Ronald Hall in the Anglican Church in Hsinxing in Guandong, China. Her ordination was to enable her to carry out a sacramental ministry with refugees from the Sino-Japanese war who had managed to reach the Portuguese colony of Macau, where she had been serving as a deacon. Because of war-time conditions news of this ordination was slow to reach the rest of the world; but when it did, reaction from the Archbishop of Canterbury was decidedly negative and, meeting after the war, the Chinese bishops censured Bishop Hall. In 1946, faced with the ultimatum that either she must resign the title of priest or Bishop Hall must resign as bishop, Li Tim-Oi surrendered her licence as priest while always insisting that she had not resigned from holy orders. Raindrops of my Life is the memoir of this remarkable woman, the first woman priest in the Anglican Communion, who was born in Hong Kong in 1907 and died in Toronto, Canada, in 1992.

After leaving Macau in 1947 Li Tim-Oi served as rector of a church in Hepu, China, until it was closed in 1951. From then on her life was deeply affected by the turbulent events in China and the growing restrictions on Christians and their churches which culminated in the terrors of the Cultural Revolution. Li Tim-Oi laboured on a farm commune, worked for many years in a factory, and experienced a year of political re-education which included hard physical labour. In 1979 churches in China were allowed to reopen and in 1981, after waiting for seven years, Li Tim-Oi was granted a visa to travel overseas to visit family members whom she had not seen for many years. Then in her seventies and with no family in China to care for her, Li accepted the invitation of relatives to live with them in Canada. There her priesthood was recognized, as the Anglican Church in Canada had ordained women since 1976, and in spite of her age Li served as a priest in parishes in Montreal and Toronto.

In January 1984 the fortieth anniversary of Li Tim-Oi's ordination was marked by celebrations in Toronto and by a thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey in London at which Li was joined by fifteen women priests from overseas Anglican churches, many deaconesses from all over Britain, eleven male bishops and a congregation of over one thousand. From then on she had a higher public profile and, although never an ardent feminist, was very active in her support of the Movement for the Ordination of Women in England. She travelled widely and made a return trip to China about which a video was made; she collaborated with a journalist who wrote a book about her; she received two honorary doctorates and was a special guest at the 1988 Lambeth Conference.

Raindrops of My Life is Li Tim-Oi's story, told simply in her own words and based on her memories rather than on written records. It is divided into four sections, two dealing with her life in Hong Kong and China and two with her life after she left China. The circumstances surrounding her ordination and the dangers and difficulties of the years from 1947 to 1980 are described only briefly; the significance of her ordination, and Anglican reactions to it, are dealt with more fully in Much Beloved Daughter by Ted Harrison (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985).

The memoir is supplemented by a helpful brief chronology of the Christian Church in China after 1949, by a remembrance of her later years and final illness by her sister, and by sermons preached on the golden jubilee of her ordination by Archbishop Ted Scott of the Anglican Church of Canada and by the Archbishop of York. A third sermon by Christopher Hall, son of the bishop who ordained Li Tim-Oi, recalls that his father was tempted to rename her "Cornelia" because he saw a close parallel between the first baptized gentile and the first woman priest.

All descriptions of Tim-Oi emphasize her humility, her obedience, and her faithfulness and these qualities shine through her own words. Although she made history in the church, she saw her own personal prestige as worthless "for I was merely a small servant of the Lord" (p.22) and she frequently referred to herself, in the words of Psalm 22, as "a worm". Raindrops of my Life introduces readers to the story of this remarkable woman told in a simple personal style with little introspection or analysis. It should appeal to those interested in the ordination of women and in the history of the Anglican Communion.