It’s a little surreal after reading so much twentieth century psycholinguistic theory over the past six months, to come to an ancient writer struggling with essentially the same problems and suggesting eerily similar solutions!  Augustine describes ‘words’ as ‘signs which point to real things’.  Jacques Lacan would say language is a system of Symbols, referring to the Real, through the interpretive framework of the Imagery.  There are differences, of course, and it would be a mistake to conflate such fundamentally different social and philosophical cultures into one.  Besides, it is Augustine that concerns me in this moment.

In book 1, Augustine explores ‘things’ (res in Latin).  Things can be ‘used’ or ‘enjoyed’, but Augustine urges the Christian to use things to enjoy God, and enjoy God alone, for enjoying things of the created order – be they self, another human, an aspect of nature or a human-man thing – is always idolatry.  It’s a description of reality that borrows heavy from Plato and betrays Augustine’s characteristically pessimistic anthropology.

In book 2, Augustine explains what he means by ‘signs’, with a particular focus on words, which he describes as ‘signs’ that point to ‘things’.  Some words are clear or ‘natural’ signs with a direct relationship to the thing, such as smoke is a sign of fire.  Other words are ‘given’ a meaning to their sign, by human beings who are desiring to communicate something of a ‘thing’ which has no material representation which can be plainly known to all by the use of their five senses.  This includes the whole task of theology, love, beauty and pretty much everything else I am interested in communicating about on reddresstheology!  Augustine argues that there is a connection between an actual ‘thing’ and a given ‘sign’, but the meaning of the sign is necessarily constructed through human mediation and hence the opportunity for miscommunication abounds.  Interestingly, he says that because true knowledge of God is held internally in the human person, the scripture is only a tool that God uses to stir up that truth within individual human beings and scripture is, therefore, theoretically unnecessary if God decides to reveal Godself directly to a person’s ‘heart’.

Book 3 suggests strategies for interpreting ambiguous passages in scripture: it’s not rocket science really, but it’s surprising how much we need to be reminded of these simple strategies when we encounter confusion in our understanding of the bible.  First and foremost, Augustine argues, we must work out what is figurative and what is literal.  Common sense says that if the text is nonsense when taken literally, then it must be figurative.  The rule of faith suggests that if all knowledge helps us to love God and our neighbour – if a text taken literally cannot lead us into love, then it must be figurative!  If the text still doesn’t make sense, then we look at context, including the immediate context of the passage within it’s text, the whole canonical context, and the context of ourselves as reader.  Ultimately, there is nothing in scripture which does not lead towards the double love of God and neighbour, so that is the ultimate standard by which all interpretations must abide, for love is the telos, the goal of scripture, just as love is the goal of everything God does, is and communicates to God’s creation!

The final book is about preaching, or the presentation of scripture to a learning community.

I could summarise the whole thing myself, but there’s a new book out from Matthew Levering, offering introductions to his most important works, which is so well written that I’m going to cheat and give you his two succinct paragraph summary of instead.

    In the Prologue of On Christian Doctrine, Augustine responds to “Christians who rejoice to know the Sacred Scriptures without human instruction.”  God could have revealed things directly to each individual human, and in some cases God has revealed himself directly.  But in almost every case, God has required that we learn from others.  Even in speaking to us directly in Jesus Christ, God ensured that we would learn Jesus’ words and deeds from others, who would have to interpret them.  The divinity of Jesus Christ is mediated to us through his humanity, and the biblical signs that testify to him are mediated to us through Israel and the Church.  The guidance of the Holy Spirit does not take away from the profound presence of human mediation and interpretation at the heart of God’s work of salvation.  Why did God choose this way to reveal himself?
Augustine’s answer is that given the needs and capacities of fallen human nature, God reveals himself through signs so as to train us in love.  Since we must learn about God through signs that have been given in history, we can come to God only within the community of wisdom and love built up by Christ and the Holy Spirit.  To learn from Christ in the Church means to learn how to move from sign to thing, so as to cleave in love to the unseen God who is revealed through signs.  those whose task it is to interpret Scripture for others must employ its signs for the purpose of leading others to love of God and neighbor.  This purpose does not mean abandoning the liberal arts or the methods of persuasive public speaking.  But it does mean redirecting such learning towards the goal of Christian wisdom.  If such a redirection is to succeed, Christian interpreters must not become puffed up by their learning and must practice what they preach.  In the school that is the Church, the labor of learning and teaching is at the service of the love of God and neighbor.

If you’ve been reading reddresstheology for a while and know something about my PhD topic – Love as Revelation – you will probably have seen the connections with that project: love is not just the what of Christian teaching, it is also the how, why, when and where.  However, what has struck me even more reading On Christian Doctrine at this time, is it’s relevance to Christians engaged in a conversation about the scriptural teaching on diverge gender and sexualities.

A productive conversation about sex and scripture fundamentally relies on a prior conversation about the conversation.  How do we read scripture in the midst of this difficult conversation with multiple commitments, complex emotions and shifting philosophical foundations for reasoning from texts?  Each individual in the conversation has an interpretive framework – whether they acknowledge it or not – which may or may not be a compatible with the interpretive framework of their conversation partner.  In stable societies and cultures individuals can assume a certain level of functional similarities across members of the same community, but his ceases to be the case during times of epoch transition that we are currently living through.

Why does Augustine help in this context?  Because he reminds us to focus on what is clear, before we focus on what is ambiguous.  What is crystal clear in scripture is the dual commandment to love God and neighbour.

“So anyone who thinks that he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding them.” (1.36.40)

This is a pretty indisputable starting point for Christians in disagreement as to how to read scripture:  can we agree that any interpretation we propose must pass a simple test?  It must be shown to have an outcome in reason and experience that can be described as loving.  It must promote love of God and love of neighbour.  If we agree to this hermeneutical principle, we can discuss how different interpretations of the text might best promote this higher, clearer goal of double love.

I was pleased to have this article published in the June edition of The Melbourne Anglican newspaper this week.

“Mindfulness means paying attention, in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment non judgmentally.”

~Jon Kabat-Zinn

It is easy for Christians to bemoan the secularization of Western culture, but is the unshackling of spiritual practice from religion always such a bad thing?  Since the 1970s, there have been a number of health professionals exploring the benefits of ancient meditation practices for physical and psychological wellbeing.  I recently took an opportunity to attend a five day mindfulness retreat in the mode of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) – an eight week course which is now run in many and varied contexts across the globe – which was an opportunity to explore this question.

The aim of this silent retreat was to maintain five continuous days of mindfulness drawing upon ‘sitting meditation’; walking meditation; mindful eating, drinking, listening and all other -ings involved in living.  As a non-religious meditation tradition it focused on the resources of the body for slowing down the conscious mind and accessing more of the sub- and un-conscious resources of the brain and body.

By focusing on the breath, or some other single point (a candle flame, a mouthful of food, a movement) the ‘thinking’ part of your brain is invited to ‘rest’ and let other parts of your brain’s capacity come to the fore.  By allowing the body to ‘speak’, or perhaps better said, setting aside time to ‘listen’, I became aware of desires and hurts that I’d not realized I’d been carrying, weighing down my body and tiring my mind.

The brain controls more than just limbs and ligaments: it is the command centre for the body’s emotions, instincts, memories and it translates all the information coming into the body from the senses – sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.  Mindfulness is a strategy to move our conscious attention from physical sensations of the body to the feelings more difficult to categorise: a strategy that is acknowledged by the contemplative traditions within all world religions.

When the Cistercian monk Thomas Keating introduces ‘centering prayer’ in his book Open Mind, Open Heart (2002), the first thing he says is that silent prayer is not the same as relaxation.  Prayer is always relational; it is an intentional opening of oneself to the divine, which for Christians is known through the person of Jesus Christ.

 “When we say, ‘Let us pray’, we mean, ‘Let us enter into relationship with God’, or ‘Let us deepen the relationships we have’, or ‘Let us exercise our relationship with God’.”

In meditation I seek to make conscious my deeper, fuller self in relation to the universe, which I can then in turn, convert to prayer.  This is ‘offering your body as a living sacrifice’ at the same time as ‘renewing your mind’ (Romans 12:1-2).

It takes a lot of concentration and a certain amount of determination, to gently lay aside rational (and irrational) thought in order to give room for sensation to arise without judgment.  MBSR instructors will tell you that you need to ‘practice’ mindfulness for at least an hour every day in order to develop the habits that sustain these kind of physical and emotional benefits in everyday life.

This might include a half hour of sitting/lying meditation morning and night, in addition to brief exercises of mindfulness through-out the day: taking the time to notice the process of eating your lunch for example; or pausing at your desk for two minutes to notice what is happening with your posture; or slowing down to wash your hands in the bathroom, noticing the feel of the water on your skin, the movement of the muscles and ligaments in your fingers, the change in sensation from dry to wet to dry hands.

Everyone can benefit from knowing themselves better and stress management is now a health priority for many.  MBSR has been shown to be an effective pain management technique when incorporated into an overall treatment plan for chronic illness; for example, it is proving to be a successful therapy for suffers of fibromyalgia (chronic, undiagnosable pain).  How could the world’s religious object to such great health outcomes, even as they themselves are sidelined by the secularization of mindfulness as a tool for human flourishing?

However, Christians lose something precious if completely buy into the secularization of our spiritual practices.  Christ reveals something beyond the mysterious depths of human wisdom; God is beyond the vast limits of human knowing.  The mindfulness movement is an invitation to recover our own contemplative traditions and practices geared towards the contemporary world.

As a precursor for prayer, mindfulness illustrates that our relationship with God has at least two distinct movements – opening to ourselves and opening towards God – both of which are critical before a further dynamic opening ourselves up to the world.  Taking the time to connect with oneself in such a deep way before turning towards God invites God into the deepest recesses of our hearts, mind, body and soul.  It is consciously choosing to relinquish autonomy and alienation from the divine.

Towards the end of the mindfulness retreat I found myself convinced that every fiber of my being was Love, by no means an unfamiliar concept to me as a student of theology.  However, this was knowledge I discovered held in my flesh, not just the pages of Scripture; and it is knowledge that directs my every move as the brain directs the actions of the body.

It may seem out of order to write about Readings from the Book of Exile after promoting events with Pádraig in Melbourne for the last month, but Pádraig is best as a performance poet, so listening to the poems brings them to life in a way that reading perhaps cannot and I now have more to say! Having said that, I still think you should go out and buy this little book, together with a new release of poems which is due out in August called Sorry for your Troubles, which is birthed out of his reconciliation work.

One of my favourite poems of all times is in this collection: ‘Dominic and Jenny’s Sex Life’.  When I first heard it, I felt like I’d been hit by a hot wind.  When I last heard it, I cried from longing to become one with the poem.  Dominic and Jenny are dancing together at a party: not slow dancing, but fun, romp-a-stomp, full-of-life dancing!  The rhythm of the words pulsates under my skin like the loud thud-thud of way-too-loud party music.  Here’s a snippet from the middle of the poem:

With rhythm in his tender boots

and she exulting in the love that she is living

the life that she is loving.

Oh, I give you all my rage and my affection

my love and resurrection dreams.

I fling my hands up in the air

I have no cares upon me now

I dance around your body

and we are made here in this space,

born again to our own worlds,

hurled upon this

Dance Floor Centre Stage.

I recently heard Les Murry suggest that there were three elements to poetic communication: daylight consciousness, dreaming, and the body (it’s breath, rhythm and dance).  If this is the case, then I can say about myself that I receive a poet’s message through the body first; it is my particular starting point with words.  Perhaps that is why I love Pádraig’s words: they have a vibrant rhythm to them that carries me up into the story of the words where I can know whatever it is the story has to teach me with a deep, sensory knowing.

The older I get, the more I value reading theology through the poetic form: somehow it is better able to capture the subtlety of things – the fact that we can know God without ever really knowing God.  There is a freedom in speaking about God this way, a freedom from the expectation that our words are capable of containment, that God will always be bigger, better and beyond our wildest dreams.  With gratitude then, do I read seven ‘readings from the book of exile’ which form the structure of the book’s corpus, and the many other poems which address faith and the human spirit.  I am thankful for my Irish brother Pádraig, for living the life he has been given in order to write these words which now accompany me in mine.

(There are a number of youtube clips, etc where you can see/hear Pádraig speak but he’s a poet – he needs us to buy his books so he can eat!)

click here to download the brochure:  The Spirituality of Children May 2013

click here to book via The Carmelite Centre website:   childrens-sprituality-seminar

the book of common poems

An evening exploring the power, problem and prayer of poetry:  Pádraig will host an exploration of prayer through the lens of poetry, reflection on the power of words, meditative silence and sharing in a beautiful, sacred space.

7:30pm.  $22.  Champagne refreshments served upon arrival.

TWO DATES – TWO VENUES

Friday 10th May

St Marys Anglican Church North Melbourne

430 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne

purchase tickets at eventbrite here

Friday 17th May

Mt Eliza Anglican Church

105 Koetong Parade, Mt Eliza

purchase tickets on line at eventbrite  here

for more information email chelle@reddresstheology.com or phone 0408511397.

click here to download or print a book of common poems flyer

www.padraiginmelbourne.wordpress.com

stories about stories

The Universe is made of stories, not atoms, Rukeyser said. But it also true that there is not one single story – there are many stories. Stories that overlap each other, stories that contradict each other, stories in harmony and stories in disharmony. This afternoon and evening will explore the power of storytelling for the heart, for faith, for protest and for living. We will tell true stories with each other, as well as reflect on the primal need to story ourselves and to story our identities in order to make sense of our disordered word.

Pádraig Ó Tuama works as a poet, theologian and community peace worker in the north of Ireland. In particular, he uses poetry and storytelling to help groups of people with different experiences of politics, religion and identity to create a space of understanding, sharing and creative diversity.

Wednesday 15th May

2pm workshop  ($30)

5:30pm shared meal  ($10)

6:45 pm performance  ($20)

* the workshop, meal and performance might all be attended separately or at a discount rate of $48 for the whole program from 2 till 9pm

* registration for the workshop and the meal are essential

click here to buy tickets

click here to download a brochure

http://www.padraiginmelbourne.wordpress.com

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a delightful Irish poet in Melbourne for three months doing a stint as poet-in-residence for the Uniting Church.  I am involved in promoting a couple of public events which promise to be very special.  Pádraig is a poet, justice activist and theologian from Belfast.  He has a beautiful way of seeing the world, and an even more beautiful way of speaking about it.

I’ve set up a wordpress site as a conduit for a number of his public events that are being organised by various groups around Melbourne, which he is squeezing into an already full program working with various Uniting Church staff and volunteers.  Go check it out and get along to whatever you can!

www.padraiginmelbourne.wordpress.com

]]> http://reddresstheology.com/2013/04/16/padraig-in-melbourne/feed/ 0 chelletrebilcock Pádraig Ó Tuama http://reddresstheology.com/2013/03/27/balthasar-a-very-critical-introduction-by-karen-kilby/ http://reddresstheology.com/2013/03/27/balthasar-a-very-critical-introduction-by-karen-kilby/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 08:08:03 +0000 Chelle http://reddresstheology.com/?p=1441 ]]> (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; Grand Rapids, Michigan/ Cambridge, U.K.; 2012)

This is easily the best introduction to von Balthasar that I’ve read.  Even better, there are two, 20 minute youtube clips with Karen talking through much of the key elements of the book!

part one

part two

The first thing to note is the very reassuring assertion that von Balthasar is a difficult theologian to get one’s head around: phew!  I wasn’t going crazy after all!  It’s not that his work is difficult to read, but rather there is so much of it, laid out primarily as persuasive writing rather than systematics, so it takes a lot of work to get a sense of the whole accurate enough to commence critical reflection.  Hence, many readers of von Balthasar tend to be uncritically embracing or uncompromisingly rejecting of him as a theologian.

Kilby starts her introductory navigation of von Balthasar by offering a context for reading his work which, I concur, is critical because there is much that is unique about his life underwritten in his theology.  First, he embraces the challenges of post-war Europe, with its wave of new thinking and being.  It is an era negotiating the collapse of Enlightenment optimism and the emergence of existentialism together with the global economy.  It is also an era of massive institutional change – both secular and sacred.

Second, he was undoubtedly a brilliant man – a concert standard pianist with a brilliant memory; he devoured music, literature and theology in German, French and Latin, translating and publishing many of his favourite works.  Not only this, was a creative, entrepreneurial man and a free thinker: he created ‘new’ pathways of theology and philosophy by synthesising the extensive resources he had at his disposal.  Like any genius, I suggest that von Balthasar begins an epoch changing work rather than handing over a completed thesis, because such significant work can never to achieved in isolation.

Third, Kilby draws our attention to three relationships von Balthasar had which exerted a significant impact on his writing: with Henri de Lubac, Karl Barth and Adrienne von Speyer.  De Lubac situates von Balthasar as part of the ‘new theology’ (nouveau theologie) movement of the second half of the twentieth century which focussed on returning to early church fathers (ressourcement). His relationship with Barth draws our attention to von Balthasar’s engagement with theology and philosophy beyond his own Catholic house.  Von Speyer, whom von Balthasar spoke of as his equal partner in the theological task, reminds us of his deep commitment to theology as spiritual experience.  This relationship with von Speyer however, was exceedingly complex and justifiably controversial.

In the next two chapters, Kilby offers us central images which permeate von Balthasar’s writings.  They are not a ‘key’ as such, like ‘the Word’ might be spoken of as the key to Barth’s writings, but they are ways of conceiving and articulating reality which von Balthasar returns to again and again.  The first of these chapters explores the complementary images of ‘The Picture and The Play’; seen most clearly in his conception of a theological aesthetics and theo-drama.

Secondly, ‘Fulfilment and the Circle’ are images not quite so straightforward to identify but no less significant.  Kilby is referring to von Balthasar’s habit of arguing: on the one hand this, on the other hand that, but now this.  I think this is more of a Hegelian indebtedness than Kilby emphasises in this volume, but that does not discount the truth of her claim, that this is a way in which von Balthasar’s supreme intellectual arrogance – something most brilliant thinkers seem to share – gets the better of him.  It ends up reading like: ‘at first theologians thought this, then they thought this, but now I’ll tell you the whole picture: this is how it really works!’

Similarly, von Balthasar’s confidence is expressed in the declaration of a ‘kernel’ of truth, a centre, the core from which many other insights and truths radiate out of or in towards.  Kilby describes this as like a child’s drawing of a sun; a circle with lines of sun-rays drawn outwards at various angles and extensions.  Aspects of ‘truth’ point towards a whole (because they emanate out from the whole) and very often we know only the individual lines.  But if we follow them we eventually arrive at the kernel, that which is wholly true.  This is an image which reflects something of my own emerging theological method, if the centre piece is left free and untameable.  However, Kilby convincingly argues that von Balthasar fails to refrain from naming the unnamable.  That is, he claims to know too much, even though his very own theological model directs him to do otherwise.

Von Balthasar’s inflated ego ends up infiltrating the content of his theology.  Hence, as Kilby presents von Balthasar’s ideas on the Trinity and on Nuptual Theology in the fifth and sixth chapters of this introduction, we begin to see there there is an element of over-reaching in his theological conceptualisions.  For example, the cross is a Trinitarian event – von Balthasar articulates the relational nature of the godhead beautifully, but when he starts to explain how that makes The Father (in this instance) feminine in relation to Christ, we really do need to suggest he has overcooked the dish! Unfortunately, if we are to follow in the footsteps of von Balthasar, it needs to be a case of taking from what he says, when it comes to theological method, rather than what he does.

For those of you who want to engage deeply with von Balthasar, I highly recommend Karen Kilby as a starting point.  She is both succinct and balanced, making her very easy to read, which this excerpt – the final three paragraphs of Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction demonstrate.  I agree with her up till the last point: I do think that von Balthasar has something to teach us about how to be a theologian, but not as a guru.  Rather, we can learn from him as a supreme example of doing theology in a particular way, (integrating spiritual experience, rational thought and faithfully reading and referring to the Tradition, both scripture and church from the centuries) but like all of us, he is flawed and his insights are partial.

     Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology has over the past few decades attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, and he has come more and more to be presented as a major theological guide for our time.  If the argument of this book is correct, then one must conclude, first, that the attention he has been given has indeed been justified, but second, that the notion that he might be a great guide, something like a Church Father for our age, has not.

The scholarly interest that Balthasar’s writings have provoked is amply justified by the rich creativity of his thought.  His writings break in many ways with our familiar theological categories; often he points towards fascinating new possibilities.  We have not come to the end of exploring what his work makes possible, of receiving what he has to give, of thinking through where the lines of thought he begins should lead.  Attention to Balthasar needs to continue.  But, if I am right, it should be combined with a certain wariness, a readiness to question him, to wonder how he knows what he seems to know, to ask where he stands so that he can tell us what he wants to tell us.

A recurring theme in Balthasar’s work, as we have seen, is the relation of the whole to the part, the whole to the fragment.  In essence what I am proposing in this book is that Balthasar in fragments is important and worth pursuing, for there is much to learn from, to borrow, to think about, to develop.  But when one tries to follow Balthasar as a whole, to treat him as one’s theological guide, as a contemporary Church Father, then he in fact becomes dangerous.  If there is much to learn from Balthasar, the one thing in my view one ought not to learn from him is how to be a theologian.

I met Tina Beattie recently, when attending the annual conference of the Mystical Theology UK Network in Dublin.  She is my kind of woman, complete with red patent leather heels to present a kick-arse paper on Aquinas!  Mind you, even with the heels she can’t be much taller than the average hobbit; but with some women, their small physical stature comes across as an ironic defiance of their overall personal stature and Tina Beattie certainly has a commanding presence both in the flesh and in her writing.

Tina made headlines in the Northern Hemisphere last year after she was ‘uninvited’ to speak at a university having signed a public statement in favour of (secular) same-sax marriage legislation for the UK.  Her media release in response to the scandal is an eloquent exercise in grace and generosity and displays the strength of her personal character.  She is an academic theologian who is a practicing Roman Catholic, committed to open and honest conversations about God, the church and the world.  You can follow all this and much more on her blog Marginal Musings.

New Catholic Feminism is a polemical work engaging a post-Vatlcan II conservative movement in the Roman church, which has branded itself as a new kind of feminism.  Theologically it is grounded in the gendered theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, then Pope John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict).  Pope Francis’s ‘theology of the body’ is yet unclear to me: that he retains the same conservative markers on gender and sexuality doesn’t actually tell the theological thinking behind them.

The ‘new catholic feminism’ is a movement that has much in common with the Anglican and Protestant movements towards gendered theology, most strongly known in my world through the influence of conservative Sydney Anglicanism under the banner of ‘complementarianism’.  Men lead and women follow; men run the world (and therefore the church) and women run the home; it is feared that any slip in these boundaries destabilises not only the created order but also the order of salvation.  If you want to check whether or not I’ve given you a biased perspective, you can check out this interview with Michelle Schumacher, one of it’s proponents.

I’ve taken months to digest this book, so a blog post is hardly going to do it justice: it would make a great core text for a masters unit on feminist theology!  Beattie critiques contemporary feminism with theological insights and contemporary theology with feminist insights, developing an argument for a ‘sacramental feminist theology’.  That is, “a feminist theology of grace informed by a sense of the sacramentality of creation and by an awareness of the significance of prayer, revelation and faith for Christian ways of knowing, through a critical feminist refiguration of contemporary Catholic theology.” (p.4)  It’s an exploration of the symbolic structures of language in relation to male, female and God who is beyond gender.

Beattie argues that “[w]hen psycholinguistics and neo-orthodox theology are brought into intimate dialogue with one another, the confusion which surrounds the place of the female body in Catholic symbolism and sacramentality begins to burn with a dark intensity.  This illuminates an unexplored space -virgin territory perhaps – which is at one and the same time charged with the most profound and threatening irrationality, but also with a sacramental and sexual potency that might yet bring about the transformation of the Catholic vision.” (p.5)

I guess the question is, why does the church have so much difficulty with sex?  And why is this difficulty so often projected onto women?

It is not just a matter of official policy, doctrine and practise: what is not said and what is not considered possible is just as important as what is.  Why have women’s voices been so long excluded or marginalised in Western theology and liturgy?

Beattie offers some suggestions:
Following Irigaray, when complexity and multivocality are denied in a patriarchal context, what is lost is the feminine.
Following Butler (and several others – Jantzen, Clack, Coakley), the body is lost in the Christian preoccupation with death.
Following Kristeva (and others), the symbolic rejection of the mother’s body, as per psychoanalytic theory, destroys the proper developmental context for human sexuality and gender construction.

A disclaimer – it is entirely possible that I have not grasped all this accurately or have reduced it dishonourably in this three line summary: it really was a crash course in psycholinguistic philosophy and post-postmodern feminist theory!  But these are the things in my mind as I place the book back into my bookshelf.

I am left with the conviction that sex and gender in the church, particularly in theology, are even more complex than I realised.  It is impossible for me to think outside of being a woman, a mother, a sister and daughter, a sexual person and all those other things that have gone into constructing my identity.  I cannot do theology outside of these constructs and when I pray, I quite purposefully embrace them all as I open my whole self before God!  So, if this is the case, theology needs to slow down!  We need to feel what is being said (and not said); leaving time and space to notice the source of our reactions, deeply within out body and spirit.  Further, sexuality and gender are such essentially human constructs that we have to understand their limitation an analogies for the Being of God.  Specific memories are evoked in us whenever we invoke the notions of femininity and masculinity – their definitions are intuitively grounded in our experience way more powerfully than they are in the abstract definitional constructs we can read and review in a dictionary.

This is why Tina Beattie argues Christian feminism must be sacramental – embodied, lived, devotional, humble before our God – and I whole heartedly agree.