In the nearly five decades since I arrived at Westcott House as an ordinand I’ve read several hundred books on theology, spirituality, sexuality, gender, psychotherapy and history. I still have all these books and they now present a problem since I’m likely to be moving to an apartment able to accommodate less than half this number; what to keep, which ones to abandon? The breadth of my reading has expanded my knowledge, understanding and self-awareness. I’m not alone in exploring avidly through books. I am at the moment very aware of how books have changed me and my relationship with myself, my sexuality, the Church of England, Christianity, and God.
At the moment I’m half-way though Diarmaid MacCulloch’s recently published Lower than the Angels; A History of Sex and Christianity. Chapters 11, The Latin West: A Landscape of Monasteries (500-1000) and 12, Gregory VII and a First Sexual Revolution (1000-1200) were a bit of a slog but things are getting more exciting in Chapter 13, Western Christendom Established (1100-1500) featuring the emergence, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, of a literature of same-sex love, moving on to monasteries as a safe space for extravagant outpourings of same-sex expression. Featured personalities include Aelred, Abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Rievaulx, Bernard of Clairvaux and his agonies over the death of fellow monk Gerard the cellarer and on to Hildegard, Benedictine Abbess of Rupertsberg near Bingen, the nunnery at Lacock, not far from where I live, where the nuns ‘understand well . . . the vulgar French that is now used’, glancing at Geoffrey Chaucer and moving on to the preponderance of female mystics in this period. Diarmaid notes the influence of Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, one burnt as a heretic, the second dying during inquisition proceedings against him. Diarmaid says “women mystics were far more ready than men to seize on themes of marriage and motherhood in articulating what they felt about the divine relationship; it was an audacious transformation of the dependency to which medieval society assigned women.”
The divine relationship, an audacious transformation
It was the phrase “the divine relationship, an audacious transformation” that unlocked the door to an idea I’ve been struggling to develop for several weeks. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries Diarmaid identifies a period when female mystics in the Church developed a remarkable freedom to imagine and write about sexual energies and intimacies, a freedom that shocked men and resulted in the women’s persecution. The feast of the Circumcision of the infant Jesus attracted special devotion. Catherine of Sienna, a Dominican, was celebrated for envisioning her own mystical marriage to Christ, using the sacred prepuce as a wedding ring. Were these women deliberately testing the embarrassment thresholds of senior male clergy, Diarmaid asks?
I wonder whether today the powerful movement opposed to the full and equal inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people in the Church including the acceptance of same-sex marriage, love, intimacy and sexual desire is driven by the powerful, unacknowledged fears and anxieties of senior male clergy and bishops (among others)? Is this part of a possible explanation to the visceral strength of opposition among conservative male evangelicals in particular, almost a terror in themselves, a disgust, to the idea that approving male same-sex desire, love and marriage is a betrayal of, a contamination of their God? That leads me to the question that has been haunting me for weeks - how do people in the Church of England imagine God? In the seven decades since the Church of England began to explore homosexuality in the 1950s in parallel with wider society, the resistance to change, to overcoming the taboo against homosexual equality, has grown in intensity, leading to today’s insistence that conservatives need protection by the creation of a parallel uncontaminated schismatic space in the Church of England.
How are they imagining God compared with my imagining of God and my friends’ and compatriots’ imagining of God. There seems to be an entity, a being, whose pure essence as protected by the Canons and teaching of the Church is going to be fouled and desecrated by accepting gay equality. The existence of their God needs to be defended and protected from the corrupting contamination of men (and women) who dare to marry and have sex with same-gender partners and lovers, husbands and wives.
Incompatible ideas of God
“My” God has significantly different characteristics and qualities. The God of my experience is not disgusted by my same-sex intimacies and loves, by equal marriage and the ordination of married gay men and lesbians. The question haunting me is, how do we open, expand, release, defuse the rigidly held ideas about God, ideas that inhibit progress towards a comfortably and fully inclusive awareness of God. “My” God has no problem with contemporary human neuroses and theological concerns about gender and sexuality; this is just how people are, with the same desires and longings and integrities as heterosexuals despite the way in which the Bible and Christian teachings have misunderstood the nature of God.
The Living in Love and Faith process, the debates in Synod, the current groups meeting and attempting to resolve differences are going nowhere not very fast, because the awareness of mindsets held by conservatives and progressives alike is so limited. The same narrow range of conflicts and arguments are being chased around in an echo chamber with predictable results – endless, unresolved, tedious, frustrating conflict, in which people like me and many of my friends have one by one (and two by two in the case of married, civil partnered and co-habiting couples), given up and abandoned the Church for healthier spiritual paths and practices.
Reading can broaden the mind!
Back to Lower than the Angels; I wonder how many of my conservative contemporaries in the Church of England, lay and ordained, have read expansively over the last five decades. The evidence of the LLF process suggests that conservatives have allowed themselves access to a very limited range of reference. To buy Diarmaid’s book (and my friend Helen King’s similarly thoughtful and provocative book, "Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the History of Women's Bodies") is to invest money, time and brain power, all three of which may be in short supply today. I have invested heavily in books over the years, read them and re-read many. How else does the Christian Church expand and develop its imagination, its vision of God, its experience of the spiritual, sacred, holy dimensions of life, in parallel with changing human awareness, overcoming prejudices and preconceptions? How otherwise do we expand the consciousness and awareness of bishops and archbishops and members of General Synod? Success in elections to Synod does not guarantee the formation of a Synod with liberated members and an expansive vision.
Audacious transformation
All this is by way of writing yet again about my personal awareness of God, a God who is not a being and does not “exist” in time and space. How do we help the Christian Church and ourselves as individuals develop a relationship with the divine that leads to an audacious transformation? How do we develop the capacity to reflect consciously on our prejudices, emotions, fears, desires, sexual energies and drives, frustrations and anxieties, and in parallel develop a Christian awareness of God that opens us to our bodies and souls, hearts and minds, our inner, innate awareness of the sacred, holy, divine presence that is core to our being from birth?
Spiritual life
I value for myself a healthy, grounded, body-centred spiritual and emotional and conceptual relationship with the divine rooted in forty-five years of contemplative Christian practice. I deem my daily practice to be essential, the most fundamental element of my life-giving resources – Jesus-centric, cosmic-God aware, Holy Spirit mystically enriched, body-centred, grounded in a holistic awareness of creation and rooted in wide-ranging reading and conversation, checking out my ideas frequently and repeatedly with friends and colleagues – changing attitude people – and, when safe, with those holding alternative ideas about God and sexuality.
I share this blog on Facebook not only with Changing Attitude England, Australia, Kenya and Nigeria but with the Campaign for Equal Marriage, the Clergy Consultation and Christians for LGBTQI+ Equality; and Thinking Anglicans offers a much greater exposure to a wide range of readers. All of us are engaged in one way or another in opening ourselves and our organisations and churches to a vision of God that is inclusive, expansive, enriching, evolving, reflective, embodied and cosmic, rooted in Jesus’ life and teachings, opening and nurturing ourselves, our hearts and souls and bodies to unconditional, infinite, intimate love, goodness, wisdom, truth, justice, hope and joy.