Canterbury: When Womanhood Is Liturgy

An Israeli Hebrew Orthodox Christian priest and theologian, the author explores the intersections of Jewish and Christian liturgy. He reflects on the unique appointment of Archbishop Sarah Mullally with openness, though from outside the Anglican path.

When Dame Sarah Mullally, former Chief Nursing Officer of England and Bishop of London, was appointed this week as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, it marked an unprecedented moment in the history of the Church of England. A nurse, a mother of two, a woman whose life was not shaped by monastic renunciation or aristocratic privilege but by the physical care of the sick — she will now occupy St Augustine’s Chair, the oldest office in Britain and the symbolic heart of Anglican Christianity.

A Subversive Nurse

At her installation as Bishop of London in 2018, she told the congregation at St Paul’s:

“Let me reassure you, I do not come carrying bombs — or perhaps not literal ones, anyway. But I am aware that, as the first woman Bishop of London, I am necessarily subversive, and it’s a necessity I intend to embrace.”

The remark recalled the suffragettes who, 150 years earlier, had planted a bomb beneath the bishop’s throne – but it also revealed something deeper. Her very presence in the hierarchy of the Church is an act of theological disruption. She embodies a new kind of authority, one that grows from flesh – from care, vulnerability, and the slow healing work of human touch.

A Hapax in Christian History

Mullally’s appointment is a hapax – a once-only word, a singular occurrence. Not only is she the first woman to hold the title of Archbishop of Canterbury; she also arrives as a nurse, a wife, and a mother, not as a monastic, theologian, or career cleric. In this sense, she brings to the altar not an ideology of gender, but a liturgy of flesh – a way of being that unites body, compassion, and authority.

For centuries, Christian priesthood has been expressed through male metaphors: sacrifice, headship, spiritual fatherhood. But in the person of this nurse-archbishop, something of the ancient biblical rhythm of life and time re-emerges — the vocation of woman as keeper of cycles, of birth, delay, impurity, purification, and rebirth.

I cannot help but see in this the echo of niddah/נִדָּה, machzor/מחזור, and the embodied holiness of time — where blood and waiting become the liturgy of covenant and mercy.

Between Healing and Accountability

Her years in the National Health Service formed her in a culture of accountability, responsibility, and compassion under pressure. As Chief Nursing Officer at age 37, she confronted institutional failures and the moral exhaustion of over-bureaucratized systems. In a recent Church Times column, she wrote candidly of gazing “into the heart of the Church of England and finding, at its core, incoherent governance structures.”

She added, with a nurse’s clarity: “Without accountability and process, the people who are Christ’s body on earth free-fall into voids.”

This language – process, accountability, care – may sound managerial, but in her mouth it becomes ethical. The Church she inherits is wounded by scandals of abuse, moral confusion, and internal division. Her task is not to save a system, but to tend a body that bleeds and mistrusts its own doctors.

The story of Fr Alan Griffin, a priest who took his own life after false safeguarding accusations in 2020, still hangs heavy. A coroner’s report warned of “future deaths” unless procedures were changed. Mullally apologized publicly: “I know that, at times, I have failed, and for that I am profoundly sorry.” Such humility – not defensive but penitent – may be her strongest medicine.

Flesh, Liturgy, and the Wounds of Authority

For many traditionalists, her appointment is an impossible rupture. GAFCON – the Global Anglican Future Conference, an alliance of conservative Anglicans founded in Jerusalem in 2008 – issued a statement declaring that the choice “abandons global Anglicans.” They refuse to recognize Canterbury’s authority and accuse her of promoting “revisionist teachings” on marriage and sexual morality.

GAFCON represents a vast segment of the Anglican world, especially in Africa and Asia, where biblical literalism and male-only priesthood remain the norm. To them, the Archbishop of Canterbury is no longer a focus of unity but of division. Their communiqué ends with a call to repentance and a promise: “The leadership of the Anglican Communion will pass to those who uphold the truth of the gospel.”

It is easy to see this as yet another clash between Western liberalism and global conservatism. But perhaps something deeper is happening. The Christian world, like much of humanity, is wrestling with the meaning of flesh – of bodies, desire, birth, and decay – in an age where technology and ideology often deny their limits. Mullally, as nurse and bishop, carries this struggle visibly in her own person.

The Flesh of Woman as Liturgy

The phrase may sound daring, even provocative, but it describes something profoundly theological.
If, as Christian faith teaches, the Word became flesh, then woman – the bearer of life, the one who bleeds, conceives, waits, and gives – manifests this mystery in her very biology. Her time is cyclical, her vocation relational; she lives the liturgy that men often only perform.
In that sense, the flesh of woman is already Eucharistic: it offers, receives, nourishes, and heals. It is not the opposite of priesthood but its hidden grammar.

The early Church saw this in Mary’s fiat – her consenting flesh – but also in the widows, deaconesses, and women disciples who sustained the body of Christ before dogma did. Modernity tends to fragment this unity between soul and body, faith and nurture. But the presence of a nurse at Canterbury reminds the Church – and perhaps all faiths – that salvation is not abstract. It is tactile, physical, timed by heartbeat and breath.

A Divided Communion, a Fragile Hope

The Anglican Communion is going through its own hell: financial collapse in dioceses, empty pews, moral confusion, and sometimes scandalous behavior by clergy and laity alike. It would be naïve to imagine that one woman, however courageous, can heal these wounds.
But her very weakness – her acknowledgment of mistakes, her refusal to posture as a “heroic leader” – may open another kind of authority: maternal, embodied, and merciful.

Her appointment, paradoxically, may remind both Anglicans and outsiders that holiness is not the absence of fracture, but the transparency through which grace passes. The Church of England, in its most English way, may again become a laboratory of brokenness that points beyond itself.

From the Altar to the Hospital Bed

When Sarah Mullally distributes Communion, she brings hands that once tended open wounds.
Her gesture – offering the Bread of Life – has the quiet precision of a nurse’s motion. She knows the difference between tenderness and intrusion, between touch that heals and touch that harms.
And perhaps that is why her presence, more than her policies, may speak to a wounded Church and a wounded world.

In one of her interviews, she said she sometimes wonders why people receive from her at all: “Because, actually, my first reaction is: people don’t receive from me.” That sentence – so vulnerable, so unguarded – could be read as the confession of the Church itself: it no longer knows how to receive grace.

Yet here, through this unlikely woman, that grace insists again. Not as triumph, but as service; not as ideology, but as flesh; not as hierarchy, but as care.

Flesh and Word

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, the Orthodox theologian who crossed from Protestantism into Orthodoxy, once wrote that the Church must rediscover the “feminine dimension of priesthood — the capacity to bear the other within oneself.” Annie Jaubert, the biblical scholar who studied the ancient Hebrew calendar and its rhythms of fertility and fast, discerned in these cycles the secret of divine incarnation in time.

Both women intuited what this new Archbishop might live: that liturgy begins not in the sanctuary, but in the womb of mercy — rachamim/רחמים, from rechem/רחם, the womb itself.
The Church that forgets this ceases to be Church; it becomes a corporation of souls without bodies.

Jerusalem and the Jewish Mirror

Seen from Jerusalem, where prayer still rises in many tongues, this Anglican turn cannot be read apart from a wider awakening among Jews themselves. In recent decades, women have taken visible roles in tefillah/תפילה, Torah teaching, and even serving as dayanot/דינות in family courts, as morot hora’ah/מורות הוראה, and as spiritual guides within masorti and modern Orthodox circles. Their voices, once confined to the home, now sound in beit midrash and synagogue alike, not as imitation of male roles but as the fulfillment of what Genesis foresaw: ezer kenegdo/עזר כנגדו – the companion who faces man, not beneath him but before him.

Here, too, the mystery of the feminine returns as liturgy. The woman who prays, teaches, or judges in Israel does not abolish difference; she sanctifies it. Her cycles, her waiting, her blood and birth, mark the same rhythm that shapes the Jewish calendar itself — the machzor of life and covenant. In that sense, the feminine body remains Israel’s first altar, its first theology of time.

From the courts of Jerusalem to the cathedrals of England, something shared emerges: the recovery of holiness in the flesh, not against Torah or Church but within their most ancient breath. It is not equality that is sought, but revelation renewed through woman’s embodied service — merciful, discerning, and wise.

Toward a New Beginning

Canterbury’s new archbishop will face hostility from many sides: from conservatives who see her as unbiblical, from progressives who expect her to be an icon of ideology, and from ordinary faithful who are simply tired of church politics.
Yet beneath these conflicts lies something ancient and hopeful: the rediscovery of flesh as revelation, and of woman as its liturgical witness.

In a time when many religions, and indeed societies, are torn between abstraction and appetite, her appointment may whisper a truth that is neither modern nor archaic:

That redemption is not an escape from the body, but its transfiguration.