"Episcopal women have done great work, here in Los Angeles over the past century, and elsewhere," Williams said. "You have discovered the joys and strengths of being women together. You have changed the face of poverty and low self-worth for very many people, in this country and elsewhere. You should be justly proud of that record, and I know you will not stop now ... a gathering like this makes me feel that we have the energy and the commitment to do it, provided we do it together."

Welcomed to Los Angeles by diocesan ECW President Martha Estes and Bishop J. Jon Bruno, Williams was keynote speaker at the two-day conference, which drew more than 200 women and men from various dioceses and provinces, including national ECW President Harriet Neer.

In the planning for some two years, Williams' visit came the day that the world's Anglican Primates -- convened by her husband, Dr. Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans -- concluded their week-long meeting in Northern Ireland.

Declining to comment directly on those deliberations or the recent Windsor Report, Williams did, in her address, ask: "At this critical time in our church's life, is there anything that we as women can do to change things, as we discover who we are in the sight of God?"

She said she wrestled, while preparing her talk, to answer that question honestly. "Everything I tried to say sounded stereotyped and false," she continued. "It sounded like another kind of self-image that I was trying to impose upon women, rather than a way of looking to God for our reality.

"I do think," Williams said, "looking at all the magnificent women I have met from around the Anglican world, that women are still more focused on building and maintaining relationships, rather than systems; that women are more interested in negotiating settlements than saving face, that women can still empathize with other women, simply because of our shared womanhood. But I have no idea if that is innate to our being, or just an accident of history."

International approach to life-and-death issues

A former professor of church doctrine and history at Trinity College, Bristol, an Anglican seminary in the evangelical tradition, she noted that many of her women students are leaders in the Anglican Church in places including Korea and the Congo.

"That is a pattern I see repeated everywhere I travel in the Anglican world," she told the gathering. "Last year, I joined Anglican women from all over the world meeting to observe the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women. The issues of poverty, education, justice and safety that the U.N. is concerned about are all issues that these women could speak about from their personal experience, and that they are involved in doing something about.

"Women running AIDS programs, women teaching and preaching, women in government women holding families and communities together. The list is endless. I am truly proud of what women are giving to the life of the church."

March 8 is the annual observance of International Women's Day and will be marked by women's groups, including the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, meeting next week in New York, and with a March 6 international forum of Anglican women at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Commemorated annually at the United Nations, March 8 is also designated as a national holiday in many countries.

Yet, women are still hampered by such issues as poverty, sexism and violence, Williams said. "Women and their dependent children are still poorer, on average, than men. Women are still more likely to be left alone to bring up the children that they could not have produced without the help of men. Violence against women is terrifyingly high, and is a routine weapon in war. Despite the growing number of women's voices in public life, "women's issues" can still be treated separately from the issues that are supposed to affect the whole human race. Imagine a minister for men's issues, and you will see what I mean," she told the gathering.

Poverty as 'face branding'

Noting that when Emperor Constantine became a Christian he outlawed the face-branding of slaves and thieves because it marred the image of God in which they were made. Today, poverty is a modern-day equivalent to face-branding, because it obscures God's image in others, she said.

"Our economic and social systems are designed to hide from us the fact that all over the world other human beings are dying, needlessly," Williams told the gathering. "Every day, women and children die of entirely preventable poverty. They die of disease and hunger when there are cures and food enough for all in the world. Of course, when something makes us notice the plight of the poor, we react with compassion and generosity. When we see their faces on our TV and computer screens, we cannot conceal from ourselves that they are human beings as we are, and that their state could so easily have been ours."

Tragic natural disasters like the recent tsunami in South Asia demonstrate the connection between all people, as well as their ability to reach out to those in need, she added.

"The fantastic response of the American people and others to the victims of the tsunami shows that we do know that all people share a common humanity, and that if one is diminished, so are we all. Christians would call that knowing that we are all made in the image of God. But the trouble is that for too much of the time, it is possible for us not to see the real people, the people just like us, who suffer day in and day out from an endemic poverty that we in the rich West could prevent. Our way of life can only be sustained by keeping other people in poverty."

She compared today's poverty to apartheid, the repressive system of racial segregation that once existed in South Africa.

"I remember when we went to Southern Africa in the days of apartheid and being really taken aback that the good Christian people -- white people -- we stayed with often had no idea about the conditions in which their black maids and houseboys lived in the so-called townships," she said. "But their way of life depended on not knowing. If they had really seen conditions in the black townships, they would have had to change, or else admit that they were not, after all, good people.

"And that is how it is for us nowadays, rich Christians in a world of poverty. This is the new slavery. We believe that we would fight for justice, that we would always stand up for the rights of the minority, the oppressed, the persecuted. But our energy-hungry lives give the lie to that."

Call to Lenten reflection, change

She challenged those at the conference to hear the small still voice of God during this Lenten season, revealing who we are and to embrace change.

She called on women to "use what is ours to give, now, and use it well. Let us take this opportunity, now, this Lent, to see ourselves as we are. We are utterly valuable, because we are God's children, and so we will go out and fight for the abolition of face-branding, wherever we come across it. We will not allow our brothers and sisters to be branded by poverty, and war and hunger and death. We will shout with our longing to see their human faces, made in the image of God, and allow them to see ours, too.

>> that certainty, we can reach out to each other, and we can stand against darkness, and hinder it. I truly believe that as Anglican women, if we will believe what God has promised, we can stand as a great force of light against the darkness of poverty and disease and needless death, and we can hinder it, well and truly."

--The Rev. Patricia McCaughan, senior correspondent for the Episcopal News Service, is associate rector of St. Mary's Church, Laguna Beach, California, and a former news editor with the Detroit News.

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