A few good women.

Mary's cooperation with the will of God put her in line with the great women of the Old Testament, the women saints of Christian tradition, and Aunt Helen.

VIRGINIA WOOLF Probably started it: the changing of my perspective about everything. I was an English major in college, taking semester-long courses in Shakespeare and Chaucer, reading the classics in Middle English, paying my respects to Keats and Yeats and Byron and Shelley. The parade of important names was endless, and so were their works. Thomas Mann. Herman Melville. James Joyce.

And then came Virginia Woolf, silently entering the room like a breeze, stirring the curtain and making me look up. She made me "think different," as the ad goes. The way to tell a story never looked the same to me again.

What Woolf did as a writer was to reinvent the novel, not as an outward narrative but an inward journey. She didn't spend her words on long descriptions of objects in a room or imagining landscapes for the reader to behold. Instead, she told the story as a series of reactions and reflections of the characters. The technique was dubbed "stream of consciousness," and it attempted to mirror how life really goes for us, not a solid block of context but a wild juxtaposition of experiences incorporated in bewilderment while they are happening.

Virginia Woolf is just one example of a woman who slipped into the world like Diogenes with a lantern, illuminating a new path. When I begin to consider the women who have changed the world for me, here and there along the way, the scroll of names grows long and curls up on the floor.

This is why Luke's gospel arrives every third year into the church cycle like a breath of fresh air. Of the four gospel writers, Luke most frequently names the women of salvation history and shows great concern for telling their story. Some scholars speculate that Luke wrote his gospel for a female patron, a Greek woman rich enough and independent enough to expect that Jesus had something liberating to say about women. Whether or not this is the case, Luke certainly has more to say about the women around Jesus than the other three writers combined.

Compare the stories about the circumstances of Jesus' birth in Matthew and Luke, the two gospels that contain infancy narratives. Matthew tells the story from the perspective of Joseph, whose dreams about angels shape the action, from his decision to stay true to Mary to his flight to Egypt and return to settle in Nazareth. But when Luke tells the story, Mary is the one to whom the angel appears, and it's Mary's acceptance of the plan that makes salvation history pass through her like a river. Matthew tells stories of three wise men and a treacherous king. Luke weaves stories about a kindly elder cousin having a baby in her old age and includes a prophetess named Anna who first proclaims the baby's significance to all in the Temple. Is this the same story? Yes--but perhaps as it was told in the company of women.

When we listen to the stories of salvation history, the litany of names can sound a lot like the bulk of my education in the English department: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, and assorted prophets--all male actors on the stage of eternity. When a rare woman does emerge, she's not exactly a heroine. Think Eve, Delilah, Jezebel. We can only be amazed and relieved when Mary shows up and finally redeems the biblical portrait of women. Or is this, too, a matter of the way the story is generally told?

Consider for a moment the five amazing women behind the story of Moses. The first two, Shiprah and Puah, are practically unknown, yet their role in the exodus from Egypt is enormous. They are the Hebrew midwives ordered by Pharaoh to put to death any boychild born to Israel. They choose instead to lie to Pharaoh and spare the children, putting their lives on the line in the process. Their courage allows the mother of Moses to come up with a plan to buy time for her son. Conspiring with her daughter Miriam to hide the baby among the reeds, both mother and daughter know this is hardly a permanent solution.

When Pharaoh's own daughter shows up and finds the child, it is clear to her that the baby in the basket is one of the doomed Hebrew children. And isn't it astonishing--just the sort of crazy twist you expect in salvation history--that Pharaoh's own house will provide the best hiding place for the son of a Hebrew? Moses was certainly one of the greatest figures of the Old Testament, but five brave women risked their lives to make his great career possible.

What about Rahab of Jericho in the book of Joshua? She is called a harlot, though translators admit that word also means innkeeper. Because she is a woman who kept strangers overnight, translators default to the notion that she is a prostitute. But without Rahab--innkeeper or harlot--the spies of the tribe of Jacob would not have made it into and out of the city alive, nor would they have been victorious in bringing the city down. Her belief as a foreigner in Israel's God paved the way for the regaining of the Promised Land.

Consider Hannah in 1 Kings, so anxious to have a child with the husband she loves that she prays and weeps and bargains before the shrine of the Lord until the priest presumes she must be drunk and tries to throw her out. How many women have had to justify the strength of their emotions to gain acceptance? She is able to persuade the priest that she is quite "rational," and returns a year later with the child she prayed for. To fulfill her pledge to God, she hands the boy over to the priest. And out of the strength of her prayer and her pledge, Hannah's boy Samuel grows up to be one of the great prophets and judges of Israel.

The story of Ruth contains one of the most tender passages about love in all the Bible. It is read at nearly every wedding: "Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you live, so will I live.... "How many of us realize that those soft words were first spoken between a woman and her mother-in-law? Because Ruth loved Naomi so fiercely, she accompanied her mother-in-law back to a country she had never seen and to a people she did not know. The chances of Ruth, a childless widow, finding anything but poverty in her new circumstances was slight. But her faithfulness was rewarded, and she became the great-great-grandmother of King David and therefore shared in the lineage of Jesus.

The Book of Judith is seldom read in our assembly, perhaps because it's a rather gory tale. But the relationship between Judith and her maid is delightful. These two women save all Israel from destruction at the hands of the enemy general Holofernes. The story begins as the men of Israel, knowing their goose is cooked, go to the widow Judith's house to personally request her intervention on their behalf. First, she prays. Then, she gets dressed to kill. And when the deed is done, and Holofernes' plan is as decapitated as he is, the maid opens her purse, Judith drops the general's head therein, and the two stroll off like Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains at the end of Casablanca. The start of a beautiful friendship.

QUEEN ESTHER, OF THE BOOK OF ESTHER, IS A KIND OF ANTI-Judith. Where Judith is pious and dignified, Esther is fairly ignorant of her faith tradition and nervous in a giggly sort of way. In other words, she's not an unusual adolescent. Whereas Judith is a born heroine, off to destroy the enemy with a suave and clinical detachment, Esther is a reluctant savior, finding herself compromised by birth and chance and giving in to her role only when she's sure the rest of her options are foreclosing. Judith wines and dines with her enemy, then whacks off his head right after dinner.

But when Esther confronts the person responsible for the planned destruction of her people--who happens to be her husband--she's so frightened of the confrontation that she faints dead away, just like in the movies. Despite her apparent weaknesses, she manages to deliver Israel from harm.

But one of my favorite females in scripture is a little Hebrew girl who was kidnapped as a trophy of war in the Second Book of Kings. She consigns herself to the service of her new master, Naaman, who suffers from leprosy. And this girl, enslaved by an enemy, feels compassion for him! In her pity for Naaman's condition--he, who showed no pity for her youth at all--she tells his wife that the prophet Elisha of Israel could cure his condition, if only he would seek him out. And she is right, of course, and Naaman is cured. We never hear whether the little girl's compassion won her freedom for her.

DID WOMEN PLAY SIGNIFICANT ROLES IN SALVATION HISTORY? Absolutely. Mary becomes the Mother of God precisely because she was a daughter of Zion first. The women of the Bible are gutsy, creative people willing to take risks, break laws, or exercise whatever chutzpah is necessary to get the job done.

If Luke peoples his gospel with lots of women, it's not because he's making them up. Chances are he was simply able to see them, more willing to acknowledge them, less concerned with the ramifications of giving a little of the credit to the actions of women. Elizabeth and Mary kick-start Christianity through their great cooperation with the will of God in Luke 1. They are only the beginning. We'll hear more about the women of Luke as this new church year unfolds.

When we look back at our own stories, there they are again: the women of salvation history. I see my mother, with her never-failing love for the exhausting eight of us. I see my sister Sue, championing me through an anemic girlhood when the kids on the street got tough. I remember my Aunt Helen, feeding me the classics to expand my love of reading. And there's Sister Constance, who first told me that God's love is greater than all my dreams of love.

And Rita, who wanted to run away to the convent with me in high school; and Nadine, whose friendship kept heart and soul together through those mad, mad college years. It is no surprise that a woman named Erin is the keeper of most of my secrets today, or that the holiest person I've ever met answers to the name Joanna.

We have no priests or popes with names like that, but we do have Hildegard of Bingen, Clare of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Nazareth. These are good names for our daughters. In this season of the Bethlehem star, they remind us that women, too, are bearers of the light.

By ALICE CAMILLE, author of God's Word Is Alive! and the scripture series "Exploring the Sunday Readings," both available from Twenty-Third Publications.