This blog has its origin and inspiration firstly by a video meeting on Monday evening with the members of the Changing Attitude England steering group and secondly in two articles from Monday’s Guardian ‘Life and Arts’ section. Let’s start with the Guardian articles.
John Donne
The first article is about Katherine Blundell, the youngest ever winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for her biography of the poet John Donne – ‘No man is an island….’ Donne is famously difficult, she says, but “his difficulty has its own power and joy. He offers us a mode of living. He offers us a sense of what we might do with our minds. He offers a model of burning originality.” He is “the greatest writer of desire in the English language…. who wrote about sex in a way that nobody has, before or since.” “But the thing that he can tell us rings true now, quite urgently, about the need to see urgently the fact of death. The need to embrace the body and the mind together.” The greatest motto to take from Donne, says Blundell, is: “Pay attention.” All these ideas relate directly to what occupies my attention now in relation to the Church of England’s Living in Love and Faith.
Black queer and trans in South Africa
The second article, by Katy Hessel, is about Zanele Muholi, whose mission is to “re-write a Black queer and trans visual history of South Africa, for the world to know of our resistance and existence.” Using photography, capturing people in their communities, Muholi tells the marginalised stories of people who have often been subjected to violence because of their sexuality. Her work is resonant as the World Cup kicks off in Qatar and protests about the treatment of LGBTQIA+ people are being suppressed. “One prominent activist claimed that gay Qataris have been promised safety from torture in return for helping the authorities to track down other LGBTQ+ people in the country.” Echoing the response to the South African culture of suppression and the refusal of LGBTQ representation by the South African culture minister, James Cleverly, the British foreign secretary, was criticised for urging fans to be “respectful” of Qatar’s culture. I note that LGBTQIA+ people and our allies are called to be respectful of the views held by those Christians who oppose equality and our full inclusion in Church of England. Hessel asks, “Does Cleverly really want an idle acceptance of something so deeply unjust? This keeps the issue out of sight and such invisibility is damaging.” “One can only imagine what effect it would have on young queer people in Qatar to see brave, defiant faces proudly asserting their identities and telling the world their stories.” In the CofE, LGBTQIA+ people are visible and are being heard. We are free to tell our stories, but we do so against a well-organised and vocal opposition to our equal presence in the church.
Jesus said nothing about homosexuality
The article about John Donne says he offers a model of burning originality, names the urgency of the need to face death and embrace the body and mind together and demands that we “Pay attention.” Donne fuels my conviction that radical change is urgently required in Christian attitudes to sex, gender, intimacy, love and human bodies. The South African article describes the all too familiar culture of anxiety, insecurity, fear and repression that characterises the Anglican inability to confront the truth about human sexual desire and intimacy at one end of the spectrum and at the other the mystical essence of God whom we name so easily as creator.
Meanwhile, Jesus said nothing about homosexuality or sex in general. He said a lot about human life and relationships. None of the people who were associates of Jesus on his peripatetic ministry nor those who were among the crowds who caught a glimpse of him or struggled to hear him speak wrote down, at the time, verbatim, what Jesus said. Three and more decades after his death, the writers of the gospels each composed their own distinctive narrative of his life, adding their own details, constructing the sayings and parables of Jesus from the oral memories that were being told and retold. Jesus’ unique, profound wisdom shines through their accounts, despite their distance from him.
We read the Biblical accounts not only forgetting that these are not immediately contemporary records of what Jesus said and did, but also that our understanding and interpretation of his wisdom is heavily influenced by our contemporary culture, secular and Christian and geographical. We are not conscious of and do not pay attention to the powerful ways in which our minds are constrained by conformity to the partisan, tribal, siloed readings of Scripture current today. Today’s ideas about God and the teaching of Jesus are selective, used to reinforce partisan ideas and prejudices, inadequate because often underpinned by an infantile awareness of scholarship, theological evolution and tradition, and a superficial understanding of the reality we glibly name God, the Mystery of love.
God the Mystery
God is not a being or entity with discernible human characteristics, thought processes and presence in creation with whom we are able to communicate verbally. The Church of England communicates such an anthropomorphic awareness of God today because the individuals that make up the church and its leadership do not easily see, let alone describe, a vision of God sufficient to our imagination; a fearless, visionary, prophetic, personal, experiential awareness, conscious of the essential mystery that draws us so deeply from within and beyond. God is the mystical, spiritual reality of love and energy, core elements of the universe in creation and evolution, seamlessly present within a universe that exploded into being some 13.7 million years ago, evolutionary in essence, resulting in the most recent miniscule fragment of time in the evolution of the human species, Homo sapiens, a species capable of consciousness, self-reflection and vision. Tragically, we remain incapable of sufficient awareness and wisdom to be able to organise personal, religious, political, economic, climate or global affairs with any ability to draw on Jesus’ experience of God with his compassion and realism. Jesus lived with the subtle, creative energies that are present in every dimension of creation, in every atom and particle of matter, in every dimension of the universe and our planet earth, in ‘creation’ as we name it, because we feel, intuit, experience in our bodies and minds, that some “thing” is behind and within this life, a Mystery responsible because we are held in a dynamic relationship with the Other, whose essence can be found in Jesus – and can totally escape us in our missed and mislaid reading of Jesus in the Gospels and the inheritance of the institutional church. We miss the seamless energy of universal, unconditional, infinite, intimate love, always present, always drawing the church to explore the implications of a radical new Christian inclusion.
Living in Love and Faith
The Living in Love and Faith process has achieved more than I anticipated, but one failure is that of the Archbishops and bishops and pretty much everyone else to describe the content of the potentially transformative, rich, creative, life-giving, visionary phrase “radical new Christian inclusion.” Changing Attitude England has repeatedly asked the bishops to do this, but to no avail.
Meanwhile, as was evident from the conversation of the CAE steering group yesterday, thoughts are turning to the outcome of the General Synod meeting in February 2023. A whole variety of people are proposing various scenarios that might secure a future in a united Church of England for people with beliefs in God, Jesus and the Bible that are seemingly irreconcilable. Is it possible to create a system that enables everyone to feel the integrity of their particular belief system can be maintained?
Can we pay attention, integrating body and mind, finding a way to resolve dramatically different understandings of sexuality and gender “in a way that nobody has, before or since?” The Church of England is attempting to do this for a deeply conflicted body in the context of a deeply conflicted Anglican Communion that is just one of many varieties of Christian church to be found across impossibly diverse global variety of beliefs and churches. Christianity is today a fragmented religion with wildly disparate manifestations and understandings of what it means to be Christian.
The Bishop of Oxford together with the three other bishops in the diocese and the Bishop of Worcester with his suffragan bishop have made proposals. The Bishop of Chelmsford is exploring a new plan for her diocese and the new Bishop of Liverpool will arrive with a vision for the church that has quietly and effectively inspired his ministry as Bishop of Bradwell. The hitherto secret St Hugh’s Conversation has been exploring the structural differentiation conservatives would insist upon if we were to allow equal marriage. Many, many people and groups have posted reactions to all this activity.
For several decades, energy and activity in the Church of England has been increasingly dominated by attempts to protect or advance or resolve disparate visions of the church, God and Jesus in a culture inhabited by various tribal groups. One half of the human race, women, have achieved a degree of emancipation and equality in the Church of England, but full equality is still some way off. Equality for LGBTQIA+ people remains a dream that isn’t going to be fulfilled in February. How long will it take for us to be fully heard, valued, welcomed and included? It will never be achieved, is the answer from some organisations and leaders.
Where is the consciousness in today’s church of the cosmic experience of the divine mystery and energy we name as God and encounter in the human vison of the kingdom of God manifested in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus?