by Sue Ann Rybak

Rev. Elinor “Nellie” Robinson Greene II’s journey to answer God’s call to serve was not an easy one. It wasn’t part of Greene’s original plan for her life. According to Laura Palmer’s book, “The Rev. Elinor Robinson Greene, II: Through the Narrow Door.” At 18 years old, Greene was a tenacious athlete, a talented singer and actress with a wicked sense of humor, who dreamed of becoming an emissary between the U.S. and the People’s Republic in China. Her future was bright. But, all that changed on September 13, 1970, when Greene and her mother “Cookie” were in a tragic car accident on the way to Hampshire college. Greene, who was a bridesmaid in a wedding in Bedford, N.Y. the night before, was asleep in the back seat of the family’s blue Ford station wagon at the time. In Palmer's book, she recalled what Greene wrote about that day years later.

“Mum started to pull into the left lane to pass the car ahead of us and changed her mind when she saw another car speeding up behind us,” Greene said. “When she pulled back into her own lane, something happened to our car! Our car turned over three times, and I flew out the door as I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. Both of my lungs ruptured, and my right arm and clavicle were severely broken…I bruised a kidney, was instantly blinded, and had a lot of internal bleeding, suffered two heart arrests on the operating table and this, along with other factors, resulted in my suffering severe and extensive brain damage.”

Not only did Greene survive, but she never lost faith in God’s plan for her. After several surgeries and three years of intensive rehabilitation, she returned to Hampshire college determined to earn her degree at a time when people with disabilities were shunned, mocked and denied basic human rights. While Greene’s body might have been broken, her spirit could not be broken.

Whenever God placed an obstacle in her way, she found a way around it. Despite being almost completely blind, Greene would type her papers and send them home to her mother “Cookie” who would later edit and retype them before Greene handed them in.

Laura Palmer said in article about Greene entitled “The Choice is Ours,” that Greene would often have to get up before dawn in order to make it to class on time. Every day activities like taking a shower or walking to the cafeteria required extreme physical effort and determination.

“Once she stumbled on an icy sidewalk and when no one stopped to help, Nellie crawled to the dining hall,” Palmer wrote.

Greene often recalled before she died in 2016 how in a moment of despair, God reminded her of his presence. He asked if she would bring a “ministry of inclusion” into the world. She chose to answer God’s call to serve at a time when the Episcopal Church wasn’t ordaining women.

In a sermon entitled “Faith,” she talked about her long journey to become ordained.

“My call to ordination took a great deal of faith to live into, and when I first received it, …The whole process took 15 years to accomplish and I was sorely tempted to quit at many times during the journey. If I had not been convinced my call was legitimate, I never would have made it.”

The stained glass window dedicated to Rev. Greene is located above the Willow Grove entrance to the church sanctuary. (Photos courtesy of Church St. Martin-in-the Fields)

In 1982, Greene graduated from seminary at Yale Divinity School with a Master’s in Religious Art. After completing three more years of pastoral and liturgical training at Philadelphia School for Diaconate, she was ordained to the diaconate on Oct. 30, 1993 by Bishop Allen Bartlett. Sadly, when Greene needed placement for her diaconal training, the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania could find no placement for her.

At the dedication of the stained glass window at the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Rev. Jarrett Kerbel said that the window of Greene was there to honor her memory including the ways in which the church failed Greene in her life.

“We’re called to hear that uncomfortable voice and say yes, we see God’s liberating work happening and we will join it even if there is a cost,” he said. “Even if there’s pain. Nellie spoke that word to this very church. She was ordained in his space, yet no ministry was found for her here. No ministry was found for her in any Episcopal church in the diocese. Something we need to repent from and learn from. Nellie’s window is a reminder to send us forth repentant and redeemed to walk into the changed life of service that Nellie walked.”

The window depicts the Chestnut Hill native smiling, dressed in her deacon’s vestments, while seated in her wheelchair with her voice box on her lap. The text surrounding the inside of the window frame reads, “My mission is to encourage, enlighten, and inspire, with humor and compassion, all whom I meet so they will know their value as children of God.”

The Rev. Hal Taussig, then pastor of what today is Chestnut Hill United Church, welcomed her into his church, where she served as deacon for 23 years. The Rev. Linda Noonan, the current senior pastor at Chestnut Hill United, said in an earlier interview that “Together God and Nellie broke just about every rule in the book.”

She added that her “abilities, her call to faith, her persistence, her gentle, playful spirit and her ambition have been gifts to this world, and special gifts to this congregation.”

“I pray that her ministry will not just have delighted us and inspired us but caused each of us – in some large or small way – to change,” she said. “To change our understandings of what welcome and access and hospitality. To see how God can work in each of us in radical, life-giving, unexpected ways.”

The most important lesson, The Rev. Elinor R. “Nellie” Greene taught me was that we all have the ability to choose our attitude and reaction to circumstances out of our control. In a poem about herself, she wrote:

“The choice is to accept grace, love and guidance and God’s transformative power because of the work Jesus did here, or we say ‘no.’ It’s a choice and it’s a pilgrimage. I struggle with this a lot because sometimes my faith in God feels so weak as to be nonexistent. But, even when I know I am falling short, and the way ahead is not clear, I still do my best to go through the narrow door. I think that is the best any of us can do.”

The stain glass window was funded by gifts from the extended Greene family. The window design, rendering, production, and installation were done by Willet Hauser Architectural Glass. In addition to the dedicated stain glass window, St. Martin’s supported the writing of a short biography of Rev. Greene’s life and ministry. “The Rev. Elinor Robinson Greene, II: Through the Narrow Door,” by Laura Palmer was presented to family members and friends.