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Tag: love

  • The Whole of Who We Are

    by Susannah Clark; she belongs to the Fellowship of the Love of God (Oxford)

    It was Augustine who wrote ‘You were within me, but I was outside’.

    How many people find themselves living, at least in part, outside themselves: performing to colleagues to fit in and meet their approval; or conforming with others around us – at work or at church – to feel part of the group and accepted? Even sadder, when we lose contact with ourselves. You may know the feeling, when you work and work, until you finally stop and ask, ‘Yes, but where am I in all this? In the life I lead?’ and you feel out of touch with yourself.

    We so easily do this to ourselves, and drift away from who we really are, uniquely made and cherished by God. We can feel fragmented, with countless loose ends, but haunted by a kind of inauthenticity. ‘How are you, Susannah?’ ‘Oh I’m fine,’ when you’re not. In our ‘outside’ lives when we’re fronting up ourselves to others like that, it is all too easy to become alienated from the God who dwells within us, always longing and calling us to get back in touch, to open and grow… to resume the journey and vocation to become the whole of who we are.

    In the Carmelite practice of contemplation, that re-connecting with the God who knows and loves us is called ‘recollection’… collecting yourself together again, and recalling the core reality of who we are in relationship with God… God who knows us tenderly, calls us into our being and becoming, loves us to the point of no turning back… and beckons us to know ourselves in opening up and devotion of our souls.

    That opening up can be – oh – so raw, and we may well fear it: because so many of us have closed doors in our souls that we’d rather not open… old hurts, old shames, and the anxiety of what it might cost if we do: what we might unleash! And yet, there is a gentleness and healing in the love of God, and opening up to the flow of God’s love is the beginning of becoming. It’s opening up, often in trembling steps, to the whole of who we are. Most of us know on paper that love is the great commandment, the first imperative, if we are to give ourselves to God and be authentic. But truly opening up means more than just being loved.

    The flow of God’s love in our being and lives is like a stream of compassion: as Jesus described it, streams of living water that would flow from within us. It is not simply a static pool that we can wallow in for our own enjoyment alone. Yes, God does water our soul like a garden, and wants us to receive and to flourish. But the fulfilment of our being is more than self alone. The Love of God is a flowing stream, the Spirit of God, longing to reach through us to others… because that’s what love does: it flows and enlivens us in the act of opening up our hearts to others round about us. When we give ourselves like that, as channels of mercy, we start to know the best of who we are. We recollect and encounter the authenticity we can have in God.

    For decades I self-harmed, and ‘who’ people saw did not match who I was, how I felt, inside. I policed and defended and locked down that person for fear of discovery. I tried to project and act out a congruent manhood to meet their expectations and presuppositions, and yet… how I was inside my ‘gestalt’, what I felt, how I longed to become, was painfully incongruent with my physical body. So I tried to shut all the doors, put my integral person in a box, tape down the lid, and hide it away. But repression can be like a dam that increases and increases in pressure, until it erupts in negative ways: in my case in terrible self-harm. That was the cost of ‘performance’ outside my true self. Not waving but drowning.

    Then sometimes the dam finally breaks – I’m not just talking about trans experience, it happens to many people. In my own case I think it broke because I ached for God so much. I ached to be true. And once the dam was broken I could not put it all back. I transitioned. It was not a casual ‘life style choice’. I lost friends who ghosted me. I was told by my employers that I must leave. I lost my home. For a while I even lost my children. People at my church told me I was wrecking my life. And yet, God did not abandon me. On the contrary, I felt held and comforted and spiritually alive. I commenced hormones, and within weeks the self-harm of decades just ceased. I underwent surgery. An amazing Anglican community of sisters (in fact the community that was later featured in ‘Call the Midwife’) took me in, loved me, and nursed me for ten weeks after surgery. ‘Yours is just like ours’ they gently assured me as they tended the wounds. Christian inclusion.

    My contemplative life deepened and came alive, and I was guided and helped by another Anglican community: the Sisters of the Love of God in Oxford. They were wonderful, and encouraged me along my contemplative path. I learnt the practice of trust in the God who is there, even through the cloud of unknowing. I dared to open doors long closed, I confronted myself, I opened my being to God. My life became congruent and no longer racked by dysphoria. Instead… deep psychological ease and a more practical, productive day-to-day, week-to-week journey. It has now been fifteen years. I re-trained as a nurse, and it was the best thing I could have done: in looking outwards to others I found myself healed from within. My life – and the journey to become the whole of who I am – expanded, opened up, found release in little practical acts on the hospital wards. Contemplative life is not just internal: it permeates and colonises our practical lives as well.

    Friends at church had warned, ‘It will end badly’ and some Christians still say ‘Transition is wrong. It’s against the will of God.’ They call my vagina a ‘mutilation’ and my womanhood a fake. Politicians and sadly some Christians go further, politicising my quiet life and who I am, and framing people like me as ‘threats’ and ‘predators’. It is hurtful and in some cases hateful. They talk about an ‘ideology’ but in truth they have an ideology themselves. Their language endangers trans lives on the street, massaging the ‘culture wars rhetoric’ and providing a kind of mandate for hatred in the eyes and sick minds of those who spit, or threaten, or shout abuse: ‘you’re a pervert and a bloke in a frock’. It is sad and a bit shameful, weaponising who we are for political gain. In truth, for most trans people our lives are as mundane as anyone else’s: getting up, going to work, shopping, washing, ironing, making supper. It’s the same ‘lifestyle’ as yours I am sure: it’s called being a human being.

    My children – all three are committed Christians – have returned to love me tenderly. I am so proud of them and their devoted lives. I’m not jubilant about the impact on them and others, but we are loving and close now, which I find really humbling. One of my last jobs before retirement in 2022 was as a school nurse caring for 1200 teenagers in a large secondary. There I witnessed – but did not proselytise – four trans teenagers who were trying to explore the whole of who they were. The school had a great ethos: to afford them time, space, and respect. The same respect given to young gay or lesbian teens there. They, and all the students, would come to me for care, for cuts, inhalers, migraines, allergic reactions, or sometimes just to talk. And within the first week, I was just ‘the nurse’. Teens are great like that.

    It’s not just individuals though, is it? It’s not only about me, me, me. I’m incredibly insignificant in the great scheme of things. Thank goodness. The whole point about transition is just to get on with your life, only with greater psychological ease, more congruity, more in touch with who you are and can become. It’s the same for the Church as a whole: the call of God to open up to the whole of who we are and can become. Not excluding people, or insisting everyone conforms to a single dominant dogma, but learning that when a church welcomes the neuro-diverse, the foreigner, the gay, the bi-, the disabled, the trans, the precious individual beset with mental health issues… every one of them has been uniquely created by God and brings gift to God’s community… which would be impoverished without them.

    Yes, as a Church, we should pray that in opening up to the flow of God’s love we open more and more to the whole of who we are.

     

     

  • You Are Already Blessed: A Letter to the Church of England

    **published in conjunction with the Campaign for Equal Marriage**

    by Anna Lawrence, a writer, editor and educator based in Birmingham. She blogs at Five by Three

    Dear Church of England,

    While you decide whether or not you can bring yourself to bless me and the woman that I love, I just wanted to reassure you.

    We are already blessed.

    I have tried to do things your way, ever since I was a child. I tried to pray away the gay. I locked up Gay Me in the attic and married a man. (And guess what? He was gay too, but that’s another story.) I tried giving what I coded as “TGT” – The Gay Thing – a little back room in my head where I allowed myself to go for restricted visits and tried to imagine it being ok to be me. I tried repressing it entirely, banning books and songs and thoughts and people and places – anything that made me feel expansive and alive and open to the possibility of being my full self. I decided I must live like an anchoress within my marriage, choosing to be walled in, throwing myself at Church God in the confines of a cell, hoping that the pressure would squeeze something good and wise out of me. Guess what? It didn’t work. Church told me I was not ok and I believed it, and Church held the door wide open for shame, self loathing and depression. They corroded me and told me that my children would be better off without this mad mother who threw herself at walls and begged for inspiration. Better dead than gay. Church did not come and sit with me and light a candle in that darkness. Church was too busy bickering about the likes of me to notice.

    Still.

    When Church did not look for me, I went looking for what Church calls “God” in other places. I tried out other names that didn’t set off tripwires: my Knowing, my Unknowing, my Beloved, Source, Loving Presence. This Love – huge as everything and intimate as breath inside my lungs – did not wait for me to step over your threshold. Love met me at Greenbelt, in feminist theology, in poetry, in friends who brought me brownies when I was bereaved. Love met me in meditation, lying under soft blue blankets at the Buddhist Centre, noticing the feelings in my toes. Love met me in podcasts – Tara Brach, Kristin Neff and Cynthia Bourgeault – where women (knowing we live first and last and only in our bodies and not as talking heads in committee rooms) invited me to practise Loving Kindness, Self Compassion, Centering Prayer.

    Love works with and through the therapist who asks me to place a hand over my heart, to hum low and long to calm this frightened, fragile animal.

    The Beloved does not forget me. Again, again, again, She re-members me, remakes me from the parts Church tried to split apart, as if sexuality were something to be cut out and dropped into a jar, like an inflamed appendix.

    This Love is Chrysalis, holding the gloop of me that had been caterpillar but doesn’t yet have wings: the what-was and what’s-here and what’s-not-yet.

    The thing – The Gay Thing – I thought so long a curse has turned out to be a Blessing. Church equivocation – “nah, I’m sorry, we’re not sure ALL of you belongs”- sent me looking elsewhere. It turns out that I was already found.

    Love lives in our home – our ordinary life of lunch boxes and putting bins out and making whole what has been badly broken. We are learning – slowly, imperfectly – to be hospitable to all the spiked defences in ourselves and in each other, and to welcome back the parts we sent away. Love is here in rift and in repair.

    I’m not sure yet if I’ll give Church another go. I keep trying, and have been welcomed by warm and lovely people who have conducted “illegal” ceremonies for people like me. They know that Church has got it badly wrong. I begin to put my weight through Church again. And then Church says out loud that you’re not sure about blessing me and you need to discuss it. And I think about the woman who I love and I’m not sure why I’m putting myself through this once again.

    I have realised I do not want your blessing.

    Instead I find it in a mychorrizal network of people who pay kind attention, who are rooted in Source, whose nourishment moves through nodes of connection. I throw myself into the dirt and mess, resting in the dark where things grow best, and call on Love – this fierce, wild Presence – to meet us where we’re wounded,  where we wound, to meet us where we make and think and play.

    And here’s the thing: after everything you’ve done and said, and left undone, unsaid, I can’t bring myself to give you my blessing. But whether I decide to welcome you or not – each of you who makes up Synod, deciding what to do with all the tricky ones like me – each of you is already welcomed, regardless. You, like me, are loved from the inside out.

    You are already blessed.

  • Two Things Which Really Matter

    by the Very Revd Dr David Ison, former member of General Synod, who next month retires as Dean of St Paul’s 

    This is my last blog as Dean of St Paul’s. After 43 years of stipendiary ordained ministry, it’s time to let go of doing in order to do more being. I’m glad to make space for a younger generation of Christians to have the opportunity and responsibility to lead Christ’s church into the future. And I’m hopeful for them, and even for the Church of England, because there are many wonderful lay and ordained Christians committed to following Jesus, and that’s what Christian churches need in order to face the many challenges and crises coming to a head for this country and for humanity across the globe as capitalism and imperialism reap what they’ve sown.

    Over the last four decades there are two key things which I’ve learned which I think are at the heart of what Christian faith, mission and ministry are about.

    The first is how to do church and mission in an increasingly pluralist and contested public space, where the narrative of ‘scientism’ (that the universe, however amazing, is meaningless) undermines spiritual as well as mental health and reasonable faith, leading to superstition and extremism. The Church has lost plausibility, made worse by its failures of safeguarding and its moral divergence from what many people regard as reasonable. The Church’s temptation is either to take refuge in dogma and draw hard boundaries around itself as ‘counter-cultural’, or to become just one interest group alongside others competing in the market-place for people and resources. The ‘Save the Parish’ movement is a belated response to a crisis which was known to be coming long before I trained for ministry in the 1970s, as the inability of many parishes to maintain numbers of laity and clergy and financial viability in the face of heritage building costs and other challenges has been predicted for over 50 years.

    My experience of what works in mission is fairly simple. It is to pray – to love God; to love our neighbours by serving them inside and especially outside the church; to love one another as a diverse group of disciples; and to do these things together, building a shared vision for a loving and serving church. Being people of spiritual integrity, living in the truth, welcoming other people without judgement (see Matthew chapter 7), meeting them in their personal and community needs – that’s what attracts people to the Christian gospel. In an incarnational faith, it’s Christian lives, not doctrines or techniques, that build the kingdom of God.

    I’ve never understood the emphasis in the Church of England’s ordination services on ‘proclaiming’ the gospel, as if it were passed on by megaphone. The third-century Christian writer Tertullian pointed out that the Christian community attracted people, even though it could mean persecution and death, because they could see the love which Christians had for one another and for others, and they wanted to be part of it. Proclaiming isn’t of value in itself: it’s drawing people into following Jesus (‘making disciples’) that matters, and love in action, not words, is at the heart of it. And thanks be to God that many churches and Christians do it!

    Jesus says to his would-be disciples, ‘you will know the truth and the truth will make you free’ (John 8.32). It’s that living in integrity that people respond to; and the heart of the Church’s problem is that it hasn’t been living in love and integrity. The inability of heterosexual men to cope with their own sexualities has led to the projection of those inner conflicts on to others including in the Church, impacting women and children in safeguarding cases, sexual and domestic violence, and ongoing legal and cultural discrimination against women and LGBTQ+ people. The Church’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture of official disapproval but covert acceptance of sexuality has had a huge impact on the lives and mental health of LGBTQ ordained and lay ministers, and has perpetuated a culture of dishonesty and lack of accountability which has allowed other abuses to occur, as seen for example in the surfacing of safeguarding cases over the last decade and the recent news around fraud in the Diocese of London. Whatever the outcome of the Living in Love and Faith process and debates in General Synod, the Church must end up with real love, truth and honesty at its heart, lest it continue to be seen by the rest of the world as hypocritically less moral than the majority of our society.

    The second main thing I’ve learned in ministry is that it’s about following Jesus. That sounds obvious! But it relates to the question of integrity. Years ago I wrote an article entitled ‘The Pharisees will always get you in the end’, making the point that the Pharisees are there in the gospels to show us what we as religious people can be like when our religion becomes more important than God and people. In his encounters with the Pharisees, Jesus subverts the dogmas of his day: healing on the sabbath, being unconcerned with purity laws, forgiving sinners without due process – he is focused on the person and their motivation and relationship with God, rather than on the expectations of others. Jesus is still challenging, but he gets to the heart while the Pharisees look at the outside; Jesus is concerned with holiness rather than purity, while Pharisees then and now confuse the two.

    The Diocese of London has for a number of years had as a unifying statement the concept of ‘Generous Orthodoxy’. It’s akin to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ in that it allows Christians with very different views to agree on a slogan while not engaging with their real differences, with people putting differing emphases on the level of generosity and the content of what orthodoxy is. My experience of church politics in London and on General Synod has been of increasing power games over the last several years, based on churchmanship and dogma rather than on the reality of people’s lived Christian experience, with less powerful groups (including LGBTQ, Global Majority Heritage, disabled, women) being pushed to the margins, and a lack of integrity between what’s said and what is actually done in practice.
    There’s a tendency in the Church, following after the world’s culture, for extremism and division which does not reflect the love of God, and which is unbecoming to followers of Jesus and unattractive to Christians and non-Christians alike.

    My hope in Christ is that everyone matters equally in the Church, and that’s what the LLF process has been trying to pursue. I pray for the outcome to be love and to be really truthful, centred on people not dogma. The irony about so many of the arguments in church circles is that much of the language about judgement in the New Testament is about our actions and their outcomes, not concerned with our beliefs and doctrines: ‘by their fruits you shall know them’. I do wonder whether some who describe themselves as ‘biblical’ have really taken on board St Paul’s words on love in 1 Corinthians 13…

    When finally, in the words of a key fob my children gave me, I ‘get called to head office’, I don’t expect to be examined on my understanding of penal substitution, but on whether I truly loved God, and my neighbours as myself. That’s what really matters.

  • It’s Not Just About the Bible

    by Mark Chapman, Professor of the History of Modern Theology at the University of Oxford and Vice-Principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon. Mark is currently writing a book on the history of the Church of England and homosexuality.

    When the LLF process was announced, four ‘working groups’ were set up, looking at the Bible, theology, history and the social and biological sciences. Looking at the LLF book now, though, it’s striking just how little history it contains. We worked hard during the long drawn-out process to produce some solid resources, but these were scarcely used. At the first or second meeting our convening bishop – not himself a historian and now retired – asked us if we would like to disclose our views about same-sex marriage. We politely refused. Most historians, perhaps rather naively, still like to believe in something like objective truth. We all got on very well and left others to have their fights.

    And it was the biblical group that seemed to be most inclined towards belligerence. Of course, good Anglicans will want to see the Bible as containing all things necessary to salvation through faith in Jesus Christ but that says nothing about how to use the Bible in ethical debate. As a historian, I was rather keen to point out to people who were wound up about the few passages of scripture apparently outlawing male sexual activity that, aside from a few general principles about love, the Bible was hardly ever used by Anglicans in discussions about sexual morality until the 1970s.

    Before then, sexual ethics was all about natural law. The arguments were very simple: the natural order of the universe was for there to be men and women. Their sexual organs fitted together and every other form of sexual activity was therefore disordered. Furthermore, the point of sex was to procreate, which required the institution of marriage, which for most of history was a set of financial transactions between families rather than anything particularly Christian.

    The problem with natural law, however, is that it changes as the understanding of nature changes. As soon as there is a recognition that some people are naturally attracted to people of the same sex, what the early sexologists called ‘inversion’, then the whole natural law defence comes tumbling down. And by the 1940s a substantial number of people accepted this – even in the church. As a young ordinand wrote in a letter to the journal Theology in 1952:

    Is homosexual concubinage to be treated purely and simply as an unio illicita like fornication and those who practise it to be judged as ‘living in sin’ and to be deprived of the sacraments of the Church? If so, what are we to say to those who profess to be congenitally homosexual?

    This letter led directly to the commissioning of work from the Church’s Moral Welfare Council on the ‘problem of homosexuality’. The report clearly identifies homosexuality as a natural condition, meaning that it was wrong to punish people for ‘doing what comes naturally’. Homosexuality could not be cured like some sort of physical disease.

    This work led to the Church of England being the principal agent behind the momentum that led to the Wolfenden Report and the subsequent decriminalization. Writing in 1970, one commentator observed:

    there would be truth – especially political truth – in the claim that the established Church is the putative father of ‘the permissive society’.

    Similarly, Peter Wildeblood, the Daily Mail journalist jailed in 1954 for committing acts of indecency could write:

    I had always thought of the Church as the last stronghold of prejudice and had never found an occasion for praising it for its courage in controversial matters; yet here, from Church House, came an attack on the law which was as broad-minded, clear-headed and brilliantly argued as one could wish.

    That said, in the 1950s the Church expressed no desire to adapt its own teachings: ‘Homosexual acts are sins against God, whether or not they are crimes against the State’. The argument was again based on the ‘unnatural use of non-complementary organs within a relationship which is not that of a man and woman’. Christian ‘inverts’ should consequently seek to ‘accept their condition, and by seeking to sublimate their sexual lives in socially useful ways achieve personal fulfilment’. That, of course, is no surprise for the early 1950s, but celibacy and sublimation for all now seem both ludicrous and potentially dangerous.

    And that’s presumably why, from the 1970s, people started replacing a discredited natural law theory with the even flimsier method of resorting to proof texting Scriptural passages ripped out of context. It is clear that the Church was way ahead of much of the wider society in the 1950s and 60s. But it then stalled and forgot what Kenneth Ingram, one of its more forward-thinking authors wrote in 1940, as he envisaged Sex Morality Tomorrow. His words even seem remarkably biblical:

    the love-motive is the only legitimate basis on which a positive sexual morality is likely to be built. Wherever there is love, wherever the desire is genuinely mutual, there can be no immorality in sex. … Love is the test of sexual morality. Sex divorced from love, whether it occurs in a union which is officially designated as lawful marriage or not, belongs to an altogether lower level.