Reblogging a thoughtful Jewish reflection that I think is good to read.

Justice, justice shall you pursue

They say you can never escape the Catholic church- that even if you “lapse” in terms of turning up every Sunday, you can never really stop being a Catholic. The first reading tells us to bind loyalty and faithfulness around our necks, and I guess we must have done so, to keep coming back and back and back into a church that often-times rejects and harms some of us. But I keep asking loyalty to what? Faithfulness to whom?

Anna Hickey-Moody writes:

               ” Having faith can increase, or alternatively decrease, a body’s capacity to act. Faith can stop a person from connecting with another, can cause judgement, rejection, and create a “sharp edge” (Barad 2003: 803). Faith can also provide the capacity to reach out to others, to be there for others, to keep people going. Many people in my interfaith research tell stories of moving across worlds, living through wars, surviving change and separation from family, and their stories make clear the fact that faith can sustain people through very difficult times. Faith can give bodies the capacity to keep going. Faith can also generate embodied limits. For example, I was told I was going to hell for believing that all religions are equal by an angry Christian minister’s secretary in the conservative outer Western suburbs of Sydney. As such, faith can be thought of as (in)capacity, as enabling and disabling. ” (Hickey-Moody 2020)

Hickey-Moody has found that there is something constitutive of the human person in faith communities, faith cultures; both positive and negative experiences of them. She has found that people tend to keep affects and traces of their faith even after abandoning a formal belief system. She was speaking as a sociologist, not a theologian but it made me wonder if the part of faith that sticks to people is the sacrament not the dogma?

With that beginning, I wish to approach the readings not as a matter of weighing up facts or laws but as stories that give life, a way of living sacramentally, or as Elizabeth Adams St Pierre would say, something to “think with” (St Pierre 2021). I thought I knew Zacchaeus, but after spending far too much of the week angrily pondering that Mrs Zacchaeus probably had all the headache of preparing food and cleaning for the spontaneous Jesus-party, I realised that this view of Zacchaeus was based on a picture book. And that the other main source of “knowing” this story that I had, was a primary school song. So I had to go looking for what the adults were saying about Zacchaeus.

It is a problem that the Mrs Zacchaeuses and the servants don’t get their own story, however it turns out we can’t so blithely take for granted that there was a Mrs Zacchaeus. There is a controversy about Zacchaeus, and I’m going consider both Zacchaeuses side by side to see if we can find something productive in the story even without resolving the debate. This desire to entertain the multiple is probably a part of my queerness.

Zacchaeus the first, has been read as “traitorous, small-minded, and greedy” (Parsons 2001) his non-normative body (disability) a trope, indicating moral badness (Solevåg 2020). The second Zacchaeus differs in that his abject position- a figure of fun, an emasculated man who hangs around in a tree instead of confidently approaching others – is recognised by Jesus in a reversal of the trope at the end of the story. I was initially drawn to this reading, because it seems more complex and because playing with tropes is the sort of literary work I love.

James Panthalanickel (2019), however takes the first Zacchaeus, the one who is dishonest and exploitative in his dealings with others and has “sold out” to an oppressive system, and reads it in the context of corruption, poverty and global injustice in Africa. To read Zacchaeus, the sinner in this way (from our privileged place in a wealthy country) seems to me to have equal subversive potential to the other. So I am not willing at this stage to let go of either reading.

When I assume that a good reading of the gospel is always already subversive, I am making a statement about who I believe Godde is and what I believe the call and the kindom are. I don’t see in the person of Jesus, son of Mary, an empire builder, but rather a thorn in the side of empires. Panthalanickel would seem to agree, and invites us to recognise a “normativity of the future” in how we experience the story of Zacchaeus.

A normativity of the future, assumes that the project of God’s reign is never finished in our world, always imminent. The future is the place where Godde breaks into our ways of being to lead us to better inclusivity and justice. This idea may be problematic. The orientation in this view is to becoming not to being, this seems to me to not encompass everything that we need to thrive. On the other hand, the beauty of this idea is it encourages an activist theology, a theology of teaching and learning, a theology of being intentional and acting to bring God’s reign nearer.

In this reading of Zacchaeus, Panthalanickel insists that in Luke the rich can only be saved if they give up everything, but acknowledges that Zacchaeus bucks the trend as he is not asked to give up everything, nor does he depart in confusion or grief. Instead, Zacchaeus proclaims a just stewardship. He will not cheat anyone, he will not hoard. Far from business as usual, the new praxis is the oikonomia of Godde. Am I naughty if I speculate that there are no tax breaks for the rich in this oikonomia?  Jesus shows and demands a way of being grounded in inclusivity, a flow of abundance outward to the poor and the defrauded.

In this reading Zacchaeus’ words have a future orientation. Before the influence of Jesus , he is a small-minded, greedy man and after his encounter he becomes generous. This can be a useful way to view the story in a world where the economy of Godde, the ecology of Goode has not yet been ratified in human affairs. Like Zacchaeus in this reading, we live as best as we can, entangled with unjust leaders and systems and corporations in an oppressive economy. When we thrive, someone else is suffering. Like Zacchaeus we yearn for something more than a niche in the market, we are fascinated by Christ’s ambitious vision of kindom, triggering our loyal, faithful, perhaps stubborn insistence on finding better ways to be human, better ways to be kin.

Solevag (2020), sees Zacchaeus slightly differently. She explores how Zacchaeus is presented as dwarfish, disfigured, comical and unmanly. That word “unmanly” yields both feminist and queer possibilities. Climbing a tree is not the action of a “real man”. Zacchaeus in this reading is abject, scorned by his neighbours and seen as tainted by the job he does, collecting taxes. This would fit with last week’s gospel reading where the tax-collector was a symbol of the abject. Jesus drew attention to him only to turn the expectation of the listener on its head:- better the honest reaching for God of one rejected by society, than the sanctimony of holy men. As a queer person, rejected from ordained ministry by default, having a body that is unmanly and therefore seen as lesser by the church this reading also seems valuable.

Whether Zacchaeus needs most of all to repent and be changed, or to be recognised for the good he already is, Jesus stops and looks into the tree. Here Jesus is choosing to minimise the social distance between himself and Zacchaeus. Panthalanickel views Zacchaeus giving away the bulk of his wealth as a similar action, choosing a side- decreasing his social distance from the poor (and perhaps increasing his distance from other rich men). Zacchaeus here is presented as a contrast to the Pharisees in Luke 11 who rob the poor. It’s important to remember here that we shouldn’t other the Pharisees as if the criticism is only for the Jewish religious leaders of Jesus’ time. Jesus struggled with the hegemony of the church, the tendency for rules to be used to serve the self-interest of the clergy and unjust relations. They were for Jesus the “proper church” and his point of departure was not to bring in a new unjust hegemony but to liberate us from unnecessary and unjust laws.

Metzger ( 2007) has shown, that the grammar of Zacchaeus’ declaration emphasises not the giving, or the money but the poor. The agenda here is kinship, kindom.  Writing from a perspective of the poverty in Africa, Panthalanickel finds in this gospel pericope a theology that calls for excessive giving, “rehabilitation of the oppressor and a subversion of those socio-economic and political structures which may be exclusive and exploitative.” (Panthalanickel 2019). Solevåg (2020) shows that the dwarfish, disfigured, comical, unmanly Zacchaeus is presented as a role-model of Kindom attitudes in his generosity and hospitality and Jesus’ table is populated by such outcast and abject folks that the church may dismiss. Both readings seem not only productive, but needed in a world where both economic injustices and social exclusions abound.

Whether we read Zacchaeus as a rich man in need of redemption or a grotesque, abject figure finding in the loving gaze of Jesus a dignity that gives light to others, the call of todays gospel remains constant. If we put generous giving and just recognition of the other at the heart of our life together, then we will prioritise sacrament over systems. Perhaps it is that after all which anchors us, and draws us back again and again, sharing our journeys with each other, seeking healing, offering belonging.

Hickey-Moody, A. (2020). “Faith.” Philosophy Today.

Metzger, J. A. (2007). Consumption and wealth in Luke’s travel narrative, Brill.

Panthalanickel, J. (2019). “Towards an Inclusive and Just Community: A Reading of the Story of Zacchaeus (Lk: 19.1-10) in the Context of Sub-Saharan Africa.” African Christian Studies 32(1): 86-106.

Parsons, M. C. (2001). “‘Short in Stature’: Luke’s Physical Description of Zacchaeus.” New Testament Studies 47(1): 50-57.

Solevåg, A. R. (2020). “Zacchaeus in the Gospel of Luke: Comic Figure, Sinner, and Included” Other”.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 14(2): 225-240.

St. Pierre, E. A. (2021). Post qualitative inquiry, the refusal of method, and the risk of the new. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(1), 3-9.

Mothers, wives and “prostitutes” – the trivialising of women in our tradition

For Mary Magdalene 24.7.22 

 There are so many patriarchal traps when attempting to talk about Mary Magdalene, and given the short space of time I have now, it will be hard to unpack that with any degree of nuance. Being a non-binary person however, I am willing to avoiding the extremes and binaries involved. We need to recentre what saints like Mary Magdalene can teach us, back into the heart of our faith, acknowledging all our sisters, all the women within and outside of the church.

Mary Magdalene has been mostly constructed for us through a male lens. She is marginalised in the gospel stories which is bad enough, the twelve didn’t listen to her which is absolutely shameful but it has only gone downhill from there. How do I quarrel with the people who have circulated unhelpful stories and stereotypes around the great apostle (and rebel) Mary, without casting shade in turn on women even more vulnerable? Well, I have to attempt it!

The patriarchs and mansplainers of the early centuries of the church, tended to portray Mary Magdalene as a prostitute or adulteress. More recently I have heard male preachers, who consider themselves “pro-feminist” extoll her as Jesus’ girlfriend and claim that is a liberative reading because it is “sex positive”. Ok it’s an attractive idea, and like many heterosexual men I enjoyed the portrayal of her in Jesus Christ superstar. A beautiful woman lights candles and gets out the oils to tell you “everything’s alright”, to reassure you, yeah that’s pretty cool for the person she is seducing! But I have questions.

It’s less clear how that is a liberative message for anyone who identifies with Mary Magdalene. There are people who are burdened with all the emotional labour, caring labour, even the sexual labour that holds other people and families together. These people are almost always women. On the other hand the minute the same woman who is making other people’s life bearable has any agency or pleasure of her own within these roles she is judged for that as immoral. Reducing women to WAGs (wives and girlfriends) for heroes is not a wholesome version of “sex positive” it’s merely patriarchy positive. At the same time if I get my grumpy middle-aged prude on and dismiss the sexualised and caring components of this picture, I risk heaping even more erasure and contempt on women who do bear those aspects of the fully human. The fully human includes caring labour!

Now; without going off on a tangent about sex-work, it’s worth nothing that portraying women who have sex for money or rent as either as malicious temptresses or as victims is not a fair or adequate response to their realities. We need to move away from “slut-shaming”; to understand the complexities of the economic system we have and the way it is grounded in the gender order. We need to recognise the right and need of to exercise whatever agency they have within that. People seek survival for themselves and their children, but dignity is also a human need and depends on being able to choose some of your own terms. There’s a big conversation to be had here, but perhaps it’s mostly outside the scope of today’s celebration.

Similarly, women who do make their main identity in life being the partner of someone or the nurturer of children, who don’t have the mental energy, capacity or access to another role deserve out sisterhood not our contempt. Wives are valid, girlfriends are valid, messy emotional humans who just want to connect are at least as valid as hardened individuals, if not more so. For this reason I stuck to that lovely, romantic reading from the Song of Songs. We don’t need to dismiss the romantic and the affectionate in people’s experiences or desires.

I am left wanting to talk back to these men who have decided she was a sinner, or a sex-worker, or a wife; And while rolling my eyes that good women always have to be mothers or wives and bad women are always sexualised; I don’t want to close off these meanings for Mary Magdalene either. I find the texts that comprise the gospels imperfect and full of human error but they have one really great strength in my opinion and that is the slipperiness of categories, the vagueness of labels within them. Was Mary the same woman who anointed Jesus’ feet? Probably not but let’s talk about both these women! Was Mary the beloved disciple or was that John? Which reading is liberating, probably either can be depending what you need liberating from!

If we look at the apocryphal gospels where Jesus turned Mary Magdalene into a trans-man and commissioned him to lead, that also can be liberative (or it can be used to reify painful stereotypes that only men can lead…but we should not use it that way). So the very gaps and silences in the gospel lead me to question, lead me to find many possible Marys. The mis-readings by a patriarchal tradition demand two layers of answer. Firstly, if you are going to label her, I will argue that she is not necessarily who and what you say she is. Secondly, even if she fits any of these categories, that does not diminish her worthiness or her importance. I am left with a multiplicity of Marys a proliferation of Marys and since Mary means rebel, the rebels are proliferating.

I return with this idea to today’s gospel and immediately it bears fruit. “The twelve” here are the tip of the iceberg. Some women were there too (on some level we knew that). Now we go back and reread other stories where women are not mentioned and wonder them back into the frame, what were they doing when they were ignored? Mary. Joanna. Susanna and many others!

The many others remind me of my favourite interpretation of the “beloved disciple” in the gospel of John (I don’t remember where I heard this interpretation)”  It was proposed that the name was intentionally left blank to draw the reader in to the story. The beloved was you. It was me. All the disciples. All the women. Mary, Joanna, Susanna and all our mothers, all our sisters and all the women who had a vocation but were passed over by the patriarchal church. They broke bread with Jesus- fed him, homed him, listened to him, debated with him and cried over him at the crucifixion. To reclaim Mary we should reclaim every disinherited, erased or demonised woman. And regardless of gender, each of us could also reclaim our own capacity to be emotionally present in the ups and downs of life, to connect with affection and loyalty to another human being, to express appropriate emotion.

With the feminist biblical scholars who have gleaned what we have for us, we reclaim our sister Grief, her daughter Anger. We welcome our mothers Joy and Laughter and acknowledge in ourselves the need to be seen and listened to. Let us sit for a moment with the emotions and contradictions of Mary Magdalene and other women disciples. Let us find such contradictions, tangles and loyalty also in our own selves and each other.

Corpus Christi

Remember when I used to blog about the readings every single week? I haven’t psoted since April, because I got the feeling that my very few readers were just catching my work as it happened in real time. Today someone reminded me I have a blog so I will post the three reflections I have done this year (and soon I will post this Sunday’s too). This was back in June for the feast of Corpus Christi.

After some very spiritually focused big Sundays- Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, we are reminded to come back to the material and every day, the stuff of real human life. Bread. Sharing food book-ends the passion of Christ. The events of Good Friday and Easter occur between the “Last Supper” and post-resurrection meals shared.

In a society where we have overabundance, I struggle with a tendency to overeat, to make every meeting up with friends centre on coffee or wine or a meal…but this is because psychologically and physically food is so central to life. We need food to live and it needs to be more than fuel for us. I would not see it as progress if we could simply swallow a nutrition pill each day, for all the hassle of growing or buying food, deciding, preparing, cleaning up, our senses blossom into joy at the scents, tastes, textures and colours of food, the sound of sizzling, the satisfying crunch of celery, the pounding together of spices with a mortar and pestle. Some people manage to make lifestyles where they escape ever working with food- such people are missing out.

Even ineptly and resentfully throwing together two-minute noodles is sacramental. Making food is providing self or others with life. Growing food is the same, the blush of tomatoes ripening or the full bushy greenness that shows the carrots underground are almost ready. The birds collecting nectar or fruit noisily from the trees know sacrament just as surely as my cat licking dew from the grass knows that water is life.

Melchizedek in the first reading knows that more than words are needed for blessing. Food seals the connection between people, invokes God’s everyday orientation toward blessing the world. Food speaks of earth and air and water, the fire of quickening, the elements and our own connectedness and dependency to the broader sweep of creation. Extinction Rebellion when they stop traffic sometimes give out cupcakes or bickies, treats for the drivers as an apology for the inconvenience, but also because if we want to keep enjoying cupcakes and breathing and having somewhere to go we need to cut out our dependency to fossil fuels.

We were wrong to let ourselves believe we could get mastery over creation. Jesus did not say “I am the plough or I am the goldmine” he said “I am bread”. Elsewhere he talked about grains of wheat- dying to give birth to many, falling on fertile ground, the wheat becomes bread, becomes more than the instrumental basics of life (hence wine too) but becomes connection and sharing and the Word that is more than words.

Sometimes there are people whose words or even more so whose listening to us is like bread, we walk away satisfied and hopeful and ready to be our best self. In the darkest hour Jesus doesn’t say “I will be your guilt trip, I will be your judge” he comes as servant, he comes as bread. Washing, feeding, making the quiet warm moment that allows us to go on, into the dark and shocking moments where his disciples will be ripped apart from everything they know. They would have been traumatised when he was seized but did they remember that he was bread, that he was wine?

After the resurrection he proved his real presence by eating, by preparing food for them. We celebrate this real presence by the way we celebrate Eucharist, by waiting for each other to eat together, by allowing some peace around our eating but also by having coffee and morning tea at Sophia every month. We bring Eucharist back out into our worlds of families we need to feed, work colleagues we share food with, friends we make time to have a glass of wine with. “I haven’t seen you for too long, let’s do coffee” is a way of saying “you are alive to me, I want to be alive to you”.

When we share food and friendship, when we listen to the wisdom of friend or neighbour, when we meet together to make the world a little bit better; may we be proclaiming the Risen One, the Wisdom who is Bread, the one who calls us to feed all bellies and comfort all hearts.

I invite you to take a moment in silence to reflect on where the Bread that feeds you comes from, then we will break the bread of our thoughts together, before moving on to breaking the bread of the Eucharist.

Palm Sunday and the failure of celebrity

“In general, celebrities are highly visible, well-known individuals who are widely recognised at either a national or international level. Although individuals such as Judi Dench, David Beckham, Mick Jagger, Lady Gaga or Princess Mary of Denmark may be instantly recognised, they do not know or recognise us. This is a one-dimensional relationship in which our consumption of celebrity news provides a level of one-sided intimacy and knowledge of their lives (Ferris 2004). Bauman (2007) has described this phenomenon as consuming life; when individuals appear closer because ordinary details of their lives are known, yet these lives are better than those observing. Put another way, the consumption of the lives and activities of celebrities provide a way for ordinary people to cope with the monotony of the everyday (Rojek 2001).” (Fitzgerald and Savage, 2014)

Audiences are notoriously fickle. We tend to have a love/hate relationship with celebrities which is grounded no doubt in envy and the one-sidedness of the relationship. It’s not even a relationshop really, it’s idolatry, fetishization. Nevertheless we insist on having celebrities and many people are weak enough to be sucked into that construction of themselves- to their downfall.

Can we understand the Palm Sunday Jesus in this way? I would hope not from his side, but certainly from the perspective of the crowd (which next week will condemn him with equal enthusiasm).

Greta Thunberg is perhaps a similar character. She’s been both praised and adulated, and condemned and criticised. Those who praise her want to use her as a “feel good” story, a license to be saved by her and not to do more. Those who condemn her point to any way in which she is not pure of ideology or lifestyle, her perceived attention seeking, her youth.

We also have a similar attitude to politicians. Jacinta Adern, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, AOC, perhaps for some Anthony Albanese. Who will be our idol? Who will save their people? How can we rest on our ordinariness, giving worship in exchange for permission to do less and worry less? Arguments over whether they are as good as they are portrayed or whether they are actually flawed- selfish or dupes of other powers abound. Either side of this misses the point. They are human. It’s not healthy for individuals OR the communities they represent to be singled out and held up in this way (for all that as far as we know it has been done in Western history in all times).

Is there greater wisdom in First Nations cultures, or in other cultures that have not colonised the globe? I’m a boring white-person so I can only speculate but if anyone from any culture that DOESN’T do this celebrity thing would like to comment feel free- only if it is your culture though, no co-speculating please.

What I can say is that the story of Jesus would undermine this way of viewing the world. Pyramid shaped power-structures are for Herods and Caesars and Pharisees, not for the Bread of Life, not for the Mother Hen who would rescue us if they could, not for the mustard seed which takes root everywhere and anywhere and is as tenacious as it is common. Jesus’ celebrity status at Palm Sunday is at least ironic (on a donkey) he comes to threaten not support the status quo and he is always/already condemned to death by those who would use his celebrity power to increase their own privilege. The sad fact is if the crowds had stopped demanding miracles and holding up a celebrity, instead they could have built a movement to eliminate the oppression they hoped he would single-handedly dismantle.

If Jesus is God, then God does not work that way. God is not an influencer, God is a mentor. God is not a “role model”, God is a parent (sort of, allowing for how problematic that metaphor is too). God is not an obstetrician, God is a midwife. God is not the one who stands over us in Lordship and glory (despite the way the Constantinian church/es has misused his message), God is the one who works with us- a God of mustard seeds and donkeys not hothouse blooms and warhorses. The difficult part of the message here is if God works WITH us not OVER us then we ar expected to do some of the work ourselves, and that includes the intellectual and emotional work. We don’t get to beg and obey and be saved, we get to be scaffolded and supported and encouraged (and perhaps sometimes debated or critiqued).

Instead of “Hosanna to our King…crucify him” we need to shift to “welcome to one of our own…nurture him”. But we didn’t, and generally we don’t, and now the planet is dying like Christ and we talk about how much we love it and make up all sorts of hippie narratives about it but we haven’t made the connection to NURTURING it and respecting its boundaries.

The crowds in Jesus’ day chose Barrabas. We in the days of the earth, kiss her with green-washed consciences and then choose economy. We are no better than they.

But please, please, prove me wrong on that. Let’s stop idolising people and things and start working with any good movement- seeing both what needs to be amplified and what needs to be constructively criticised. How do we get in amongst it all, not as spectacle but as connection?

Zoecentric

Readings can be found here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/062721.cfm

What I read for work affects how I read my faith, just as the faith I try to live informs my ethics and beliefs about the purposes of my work. I’m reading post-humanists at work and I found many crossovers between what they say, and this week’s readings.

I tend to find binaries problematic. I don’t fit comfortably into the supposed binary between male and female. I’m not allowed to be a male because of my body and I don’t manage to convince myself I am a female because that’s just not ever been an identity that’s worked for me- politically, sexually or in terms of how I can live with myself. I find the body-soul or body-mind or matter-spirit binary less than helpful which I have outlined before.

So when I am reading that the life-death binary stems from patriarchal philosophy and politics (and church) I am open to trying to understand this. Braidotti and others point out that the preoccupation to define exactly what counts as “human” and what counts as a “life” is ironically necrocentric- obsessed with death and loss.

They’d argue that much of the politics that has destroyed this planet comes out of necrocentrism- militarism, greed, the othering of humans who are different, the othering and exploitation of anything non-human. A necrocentric view of the world sees not what I would call an “image of Godde” but sees only resources and the need to cling to power, security, rights and compensations.

If instead we embrace a zoe-centred way of being, one than accepts our individual life-death as a small component of the larger dance of life we open ourselves radically to other people, animals, things, and ways of standing beside not triumphing over the other. Life proliferates around us but Barbara Bolt reminds us that we are charged with a responsibility to respond ethically.

How could I read all this without thinking of the first reading?

God our zoe-centric God is not about the power of death to define or delimit us. The world has beginnings and endings, cycles of renewal and love, capacity for life to continue or change after death. The molecules that make us up are intimately ours but close to timeless and will go out into otherness after our own cycle of being. These molecules will still be in the air, earth and water, embodying other beings after we are not the phallocentric, egocentric “I” anymore.

Another binary gets challenged in the second reading. Being rich or poor are constructions of a necro-centric society. Instead there are only ever 2 things. The need for a body’s bodily and emotional needs to be met, and our capacity to relationally respond to the needs of the other. Who are we consuming and who are we feeding? Regardless of our status and luxury we will not live forever. How do we embrace the life that we have today, and the rivers and rains which flow through our fluid bodies that supply our abundance without holding us accountable?

It’s not wrong of us to wish to prolong our life and be comfortable, but it is wrong to hollow out the other in serving the self. Instead we should acknowledge the way we are entangled with the other and relationally flow into and around the planet and all species including our own.

So we come to the gospel and the zoe-centric flows around Jesus as an important man comes to him to ask for healing for his daughter.

Mark’s gospel is full of sudden twists and turns so typically this life-and-death situation must be interrupted.

I’m bleeding currently as I do every month so I read this woman’s situation with horror.  Imagine 12 years of uncomfortable, wearying flow, always worrying about how you stand or how you sit, always dealing with the rawness and the smell and leaving embarrassing traces of yourself on your clothing and perhaps elsewhere. Imagine the laundry of those 12 years! The painful and despair inducing failed attempts to be cured.

 She touches Jesus and is instantly healed.

Unlike the failed doctors, Jesus does not take control of her body or her situation. He is a healer without agency, he is used and perhaps depleted like a river. His openness leads to her healing, there is a moment of connection and flow that he is not consciously the author of.

What can this mean about the nature of God? We are so used to centring the self-determining individual in our discussions of morality. Goodness we think consists of making ethical choices, virtue is cultivated through agency- that is what separates humans from other species.

What if God’s goodness is otherwise, a goodness-by-nature not a goodness-by-choice? What if God is good like a river or a dragonfly or wet soil? If no amount of WORK will ever PRODUCE a value for us or make us more or less the image of God that we already are. Perhaps then also plants, animals and the earth itself cannot be known according to instrumental measures such as somebody’s profit or quality of life.

But even this binary is flawed because the next minute Jesus seizes back his agency and calls out this non-consensual encounter. This human can’t just drain Jesus-as-other but must witness publically that something happened. If sacrament is encounter with God, then she has celebrated a sacrament in first touching Christ, then using her transformation for witness and as a nexus for us also to be called to touch and draw healing power.

I wouldn’t identify as “female” but I am woman enough to be rejected for ordination and I experience this call by Jesus as revolutionary.

He is saying “here she is, this rejected woman, deemed filthy and contaminating. She has drawn my power into herself and now must witness to it publicly.”

No bishops were consulted in the making of this vocation. Her faith has saved her (says Jesus). She is cured of her affliction (says Jesus). Which affliction? Just the bleeding or also the patriarchal framing of her body as unworthy and unimportant? As a disabled student reminded me this week- exclusion hurts more than the disability itself.

Meanwhile the little girl has died. It’s not Jesus’ fault but it’s too late. Jesus shows a naivety about this and is ridiculed for hoping when it’s too late. Binaries are important. Boundaries are important. Nothing can be done.

Boundary-transgressing Jesus calls the little girl back to life, touches and calls her. She responds to the call and is given something to eat. She becomes a foreshadowing image of a later scene in our faith-story, where the risen Jesus eats to show he is alive. She experiences the flow of molecules into her body, to live is to take in and release other.

This little girl, another SHE, becomes a witness to the zoe-centric power of Christ. She’s only a girl, in patriarchal terms not worth much. Jesus in reconfiguring social rules, is good news for those of us who have ever found ourselves on the wrong side of a boundary or trying to navigate a liminal position.

If the power of God is the life of the whole world and not just humans, how do we centre ourselves on that life without fearing death?

How do we open ourselves to ethical relationality and responsibility as mortal but zoe-centric beings?

What is the value of a body and a self or other? What is the life we are called back to today?

Åsberg, C., & Braidotti, R. (Eds.). (2018). A feminist companion to the posthumanities. Springer.

God as a food producer- it’s not as simple as we thought

I’ve been reading Deleuze and Guattari in an attempt to find an epistemology that is coherent to peer reviewers and fits the way I think. Perhaps having got to Deleuze and Guattari shows a level of desperation I was hoping to avoid- I was hoping to settle for something I could understand better, something that would help me classify and systemise my thoughts and this does the opposite. I suspect that as with my spirituality/theology the fault is mine for being a feminist.

If you’ve been reading my blog over the years you were probably not expecting confusing philosophers. Aren’t I meant to be discussing the weekly readings? But that was the thing, in my very confusing book about how (not) to think Deleuze and Guattari argue that ideas are rhizomatic not tree-like, they are connected in multiple and twisted ways in several dimension, not hierarchical or emanating from a single source. In doing this they deliberately trouble what they see as a Western idea of a transcendent God. We are only ever connected to the hierarchical step above us so that as a woman I need a husband or at least a priest to mediate the tradition which mediates the mediator who mediates God the Father. But if you’ve read me you will know that I fail to operate that way.

D and G offer instead what they see as an Eastern (I accidentally typed “Easter” to begin with, perhaps a fortuitous mistake), rhizomatic model of immanence, covering both sexuality and music as earthier, more liberated expressions of something more than just reproduction or even genitality. As the lone and superior tree is to grass(roots) or weeds so the transcendent God is to the immanent Godde. The transcendent God according to D and G sows and reaps, whereas the transcendent Godde feeds us with tubers rather than grains and unearths and replants (a student’s assignment I just marked told me we should be uncovering knowledge not covering curriculum).

Did that make sense? Perhaps it needs to be expressed as a picture or a poem or a dance rather than a logical argument.

God as immanent, as intimate

like a piece of music- earthy braking free of rhythms, syncopated as life

the heart beat that should not continue and yet does,

the beloved gone like the tuber buried but there is life somehow in the covering and uncovering,

in the confusing sexual identity of the plant which is both in one organism, or it would not reproduce

in the refusal to live for reproduction only (which is perhaps the essence of beauty).

The uncomfortable, the unproductive, the unprofitable, the least of my brethren

but the gospel told us that the seed that fell among weeds was choked to death (was it though?)

My sweet potatoes are dying off but I hope that means I can dig them up and make patties

which is productive and even materialist again contradicting what I thought I had hold of

the theology which undoes itself (you can see why this appeals to me).

Undoing can mean messy meltdowns- bad mental health

but also undoing the clothing can mean intimacy.

When they let me “preach” for a couple of minutes I try to be raw-ly honest, but there is always that feeling that I am getting away with something, that I have taken some giant liberty. I feel like an impostor in any “faith” community and yet I don’t quite manage to make a convincing atheist (and can’t seem to want to).

God to me is like the owl I glimpsed in shadow for almost half a minute before my eyes realised what i was seeing at which it rose and flew off silently and seeming cross with me for having seen it. Then I hear sounds in the night and tell myself it is the “owl” but with my rational mind I know how unlikely that is.

So what do you end up believing? Does God(de) sow seeds all too easily picked off by birds? Or does she replant tubers in the dank, dark? What is her relationship to weeds and why do I care?

Will I ever be “smart enough” to be here and will the species survive long enough for it to matter? I quoted the Beatles in church 3 weeks ago to make my son happy:

“All you need is love, love love”

He keeps referring to that, as if it’s the only theology I ever preached.

Agency, choice, science.Being sentient.

Dear Creator,

You made us like this. You gave us the capacity to think, to reason, to debate, to examine evidence.

You gave us the deep desire to love, to connect, to communicate, to share ideas and feelings. You instilled in us a potential to build our empathy, to understand complexity and contradiction, to examine standpoints, to listen and to learn.

As far as we know we are the only species who can do this.

As far as we know.

So why…

are we the species who plunder and loot, who exploit and overuse, who use escapism and denial to hide from our responsibility to be that “higher life form” our art and philosophy used to tell us we were?

are we the species who fear our neighbour and lock up CHILDREN to feed our own fear?

has human history consistently been full of war, abuse, terror, greed and squabbling over things that are not ours?

Creator was this inevitable? Did you know we would be like this? Why did you not know? Why did you make us? Have we ever been better?

Can we be better?

Can these dry bones live? Is there a hope that is not just denial? Is there a joy that is not just excess? Is there a love? Any real love? Not desire or neurosis or need or charity but just that pure and redeeming thing…love?

At church today we talked about Dominic asking us to contemplate the good, the beautiful and the true. Help me to find that in my species. Help me to find it in myself.

The good. The beautiful. The true.

Life

Love

Amen

Where is God when our labour is invisible?

In case you need something less “over it” I will drop a link to what I wrote last time it was this gospel story…

Let’s talk about invisible labour. Let’s talk about pink collar jobs. Let’s talk about gaslighting, because it kind of feels like Martha gets gaslighted by Jesus in the gospel of the week and the lectionary does not help by it’s treatment of Sarah. We’ll start with Sarah, since that reading is the first.

So…three men visit Abraham. Because, you know our tradition is incapable of showing even the multiplicity and trinitarian nature of Godde without the masculine gender (rolls eyes). This is how we know that important things are happening in the public sphere

1. It gets written down (logocentrism)
2. The participants are men
3. Women have to support this in ways that are trivialised or outright made invisible (eg preparing food, childcare)

“Let some water be brought” orders Abraham, claiming credit for the work of an ungendered, invisible servant. Class and gender privilege…there really is nothing like it! Abraham is happy to exploit the people of his household to gain blessings for himself (which will trickle-down to them supposedly too).

“Let me bring you a little food” says Abraham. “Me”, first person singular. The three men agree and he runs to Sarah and orders her to start baking.

We tend not to spot that in the reading, partly because we have grown up with a reluctance to really interrogate “holy” things, but also because this is such a common-place story that we forget to be angry or sad about it. Men achieve their self-interested networking by ordering women and lower-status men to do the shit-work for them. Whoever bakes the bread, only the male hands of the ordained priest is allowed to performatively break it.

Guess I am losing my faith again (don’t worry it’s behind the sofa or something, gathering lint).

So Abraham brings out the labour of Sarah’s hands, and finally this three-fold God (or is it just a bunch of men?) speaks.

“Where is your wife?” a liberative moment? A challenge to be reflexive? A call to examine the patriarchal/kyriarchal conscience?

Nah. Tucking my awkward feminist hopes back in where they won’t embarrass me…

The men are there to talk about Sarah not to her. They comment on her reproductive capacity and leave. The lectionary cuts it there so we won’t hear her give a little feminist snigger at their mansplaining (I am sure she knows about her own ovaries better than they do). Sarah laughs, but the patriarchal church is not keen to even give her that much voice. We will move on to see who else can be exploited, trivialised or dismissed…

The psalm extols the virtues of “he who does no wrong to his fellow man”. Bad translation? Maybe…we feminist certainly put in a lot of unpaid and underappreciated time trying to translate it better, dust it off, reclaim it and still love it unconditionally but today I am going to move right along…

The second reading is one of those sections that would make more sense with some context. I could probably labour to try to bring something liberative out of it but it’s not exactly jumping out is it? I probably get more useful theology from a feminist poem or a sunset. This by itself, is not going to keep me in the church.

So now the gospel. It has women in it, few gospel pericopes have that so I sort of feel excited…until I look closer. Do you know what? I will tell you how the gospel would look if it was not so gaslighty about women’s work.

Jesus and his disciples went and stayed at the house of Martha and Mary. Martha and Mary already had a very busy life, but were always happy to see their good friend Jesus and had asked him to take that liberty, nevertheless he was always conscious of the need to be a good guest, especially when bringing in 12 more mouths to feed.

Jesus was lounging around with his mates talking to Mary who was one of the smartest people he knew and always asked the right questions without making him feel dumb. Martha called from the kitchen, “Jesus can you get Mary to give me a hand?”

Jesus realised that Martha was not really even complaining about how hard she was working, she took pride in making the best food and in her wonderfully clean home but she felt like she was being taken for granted and was missing out on time with guests. He walked into the kitchen “what can I give you a hand with?” he asked.

Mary came in too as did a couple of the disciples. This way the meal still got made, but Martha was able to be part of the conversation as well!

This would actually be gospel, this would actually be good news. Instead of what we have here and the way the church has chosen to present it.

This is more than just whinging because I don’t like housework (although I REALLY don’t). This is about the fact that while women are unacknowledgedly and underpaidly (I don’t care autocorrect I will invent new adverbs if I want) doing all the caring and healing and feeding work and not getting fairly represented in the “public sphere” men are making an Icarus out of the human race. You think I am exaggerating? For the sake of macho things like GDP and military might we are all flying too close to the sun and conveniently forgetting that our wings are held together by wax. Already the wax is softened, even dripping and the buggers are refusing to turn back.

We will all die as a species if men are allowed to keep leading unchallenged and if only women who emulate them are allowed into the conversational spaces!

Please note, I am not claiming that all men are bad or that all women are innocent. This is far from being truth. But patriarchal ways of being and how casually we accept them are definitely part of the problem! If faith is at the centre of our lives, then how we perform faith will affect how we live. Many of my feminist friends are atheist (not all) but for me that is not the answer because I know a lot of CEOs and world-leaders are either atheists or have a “lip-service” faith that does not touch their eyes or their deeds.

We need more from church than the routine dismissing of women and everything women’s lives are burdened with, than the abuse and silencing of children, than ignoring the most underprivileged or lukewarm “thoughts and prayers” at best. We need to confront the climate catastrophe. Sarah, Martha and all the other silenced women are capable of so much. When will we actually take their concerns and their work more seriously. The “better part” is not sitting at the feet of a man, when there are children (or disciples) to be fed.

We know from experience that being kind and patient and just laughing quietly behind the lectionary won’t transform the church or politics. It might be time to be louder, less conventient, less compliant and call out patriarchy...even when inconveniently God seems complicit in it (but who got to present Godde to us?).

 

 

 

“Prayer” of the once faithful

I wrote this almost a decade ago. I didn’t post it anywhere. It’s not properly speaking a “prayer” since it addresses and idol once held up as God and not Godde, Godself. Perhaps the idol is the church or perhaps it is the version of God/de I was given by the church. Anyway the thing I am addressing here is no Godde of mine.

When I was a child, I thought like a child

and you were always right,

while my role was to follow,

to punish myself with secret insults, self-harm, microaggressions.

I punished myself

for seeing your flaws.

 

Like a child I was powerless

and accepted that the fault was always mine

ever since the sin of Eve

the first (bar Lilith) to get above herself.

 

When I was a child I would have

jumped off even more cliffs than were on offer

to prove my faithfulness,

to deserve your protection,

and love.

 

When I was a child

so before I knew your history

or how you have always treated

little ones.