Deleted sex scenes from Living in Love and Faith (2)

Posted on November 10, 2020 by fluff35

I’ve explained what these pieces represent, in the first post of the series. So here is another. This one summarises something I have in the ‘online library’ of working papers we wrote during the three years of LLF. That was originally written for a meeting of the College of Bishops. I had chosen the topic because in LLF there isn’t much of a sense of the sexuality of those who identify as women, and also because it meant I could discuss the support of the late nineteenth-century Church of England for a maverick surgeon who was carrying out clitoridectomies in London on girls and women who didn’t fit social expectations of their behaviour. I’ve written a short piece on him for The Conversation. I was trying both to put female sexuality on the agenda, and to illustrate the rather dodgy enthusiasm of the church for what they thought was ‘science’.

The clitoris

Much of what has been written about sexuality seems to start from assuming that the heterosexual man is the norm. This makes the clitoris a problem: is it a version of the penis, or does the penis correspond more to the vagina, something suggested by the word ‘vagina’ itself, which means the scabbard into which a sword is placed? Freud argued that healthy female sexuality was all about transferring the seat of pleasure from the clitoris to the vagina, but for most people with vaginas it is on the clitoris that sexual pleasure usually relies. 

One medical claim to have ‘discovered’ the clitoris was made by Realdus Columbus in 1559. His book, De re anatomica, described a small oblong area which, if touched, caused great pleasure. He gave it a name: “since no one has discerned these projections and their workings, if it is permissible to give names to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus.” It was seen as a worrying organ because it suggested that women had no need of men to give them pleasure. In the late 1990s research by the Australian urologist Helen O’Connell demonstrated not only that current medical textbooks gave very little information on this organ, but also that it is far larger than the illustrations suggested; rather than a small oblong, it includes erectile tissue which extends up to 9 cm from the external section.

It is often described as the only organ in the body solely devoted to pleasure, although a study published in 2019 argued that orgasm improves lubrication and vaginal blood flow, and alters the position of the cervix in a way that encourages the motility of sperm. The view that female orgasm somehow improves fertility is not new. In 1671 Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book suggested that the clitoris stimulated a woman’s imagination, which then sent a message to the woman’s ‘spermatic vessels’ to produce ‘seed’. This suggested female orgasm was necessary for conception, but the idea that women have ‘spermatic vessels’ and seed was discredited by the discovery of the ovaries.

Posted in Church of England and gender, Living in Love and Faith | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Deleted sex scenes from Living in Love and Faith (1)

Posted on November 9, 2020 by fluff35

When I met the man I went on to marry, I was less than impressed with his bookshelves. However, I observed that he had a copy of Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen. At first I was mildly alarmed, but once I realised the book carried the imprimatur of the President of the Jane Austen Society, I relaxed.

I can’t claim any similar imprimatur but, Reader, I offer you these short pieces. They were written on request for Living in Love and Faith. The rationale was the ongoing lack of history in the book, despite having had a History Thematic Working Group, to which I belonged. I happen to believe that history is important, and that many of the themes of LLF were described in ways that implied that they only emerged in the 1960s or later; that was also true in the facilitated discussions called the ‘Shared Conversations’, in which I took part. I also think that a short, accessible historical example or two can be a good way of engaging people in a discussion. Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I, because I’m a historian.

I shall be writing a longer piece about history elsewhere and will link to that when it is published (update: it’s here). Meanwhile, though… I wrote these pieces but for various reasons, including ‘Comms’, they were not included.

I wrote this first one because it seemed to me that it would be useful to point out that ‘pornography’ isn’t a new phenomenon, but that some features of the modern form are particularly pernicious.

Pornography and history

Defining ‘pornography’ is very difficult, although today it often implies inequity between partners and the objectification of people. There is often no way of knowing whether images from the ancient world which today seem ‘pornographic’ were viewed in the same way at their own time. Sex manuals existed in ancient Greece, among them one attributed to a woman of the fourth century BCE, Philaenis, written ‘for those who wish to lead their life with knowledge gained scientifically’. It included advice on chat-up lines. But is a sex manual ‘pornography”? The Roman poet Ovid’s Art of Love ends by guaranteeing success at love-making to anyone who reads it; he was banished from Rome and the work banned from public libraries, but it survived and was printed in the fifteenth century. 

In both pagan and Christian moralists, only one sexual position – frontal – was seen as ‘natural’, so texts describing anything else, among them the works of Philaenis and Ovid, were denounced as licentious. In 1527 appeared an edition of a book of engravings entitled I modi, in which the poet and satirist Pietro Aretino presented poems to illustrate sixteen images of various sexual positions, modelled by mythical couples from the ancient world such as Venus and Mars. Although the Roman Catholic church destroyed all copies of I Modi, ‘Aretino’s Positions’ became a byword for eroticism, mentioned in many publications from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. However, the message was often a political or satirical one, suggesting that the Italians were morally depraved and ‘we’ weren’t. The pattern of dressing up sexually explicit material by making it look ‘classical’ continued in an eighteenth-century publication from the art dealer Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville in which erotic scenes from Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars were illustrated; in one of them, the Roman emperor Tiberius is shown admiring a painting of a sexual scene from Greek myth. 

What changed in the nineteenth century was partly the medium – photography made it possible for images to be shared beyond the literate elite – but also the people involved. A photograph of a real individual, who could be someone you know, is very different from using scenes from myth and history as vehicles for explicit imagery.

So there you have it: an attempt to condense this into the right number of words for a text box. I have written at more length on some of this in a piece I published in a collection of essays edited by Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality.

Posted in Living in Love and Faith, Shared Conversations | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Waiting for publication: the week before Living in Love and Faith

Posted on November 3, 2020 by fluff35

Well, there’s quite enough to think about without this. New lockdown for England, all the uncertainties about jobs and furloughs and church buildings to get our heads around, plus awaiting the election results in the US.

But next week, on 9 November, something I’ve been engaged with for a long time now finally gets to be released: Living in Love and Faith (LLF). Publication day has, like so much else, been delayed by the pandemic, but the Church of England as a whole has spent a lot on getting to this point. The cost of the preliminaries, the Shared Conversations, between September 2014 and August 2016, was announced in 2017 as £384,525. The cost of LLF, up to February 2020, was estimated as being £600,000, taken – to quote the response to a General Synod question – from “the diocesan apportionment, an Archbishops’ Council restricted fund, the Church Commissioners, and a grant from a charitable trust. These financial figures do not take into account the very substantial ‘in kind’ contributions of over 40 people to the production of the resources.” 

As one of the “over 40 people”, and one who has blogged here about various aspects of the events in General Synod which led to the LLF process, how am I feeling right now?

Pretty tired, actually. I’ve never been involved in producing an official document of the Church of England before. I suspect this will be my only experience of it. It was far more onerous in terms of time, and far more exhausting in personal terms, than I’d expected. And all this for a series of ‘resources’ which in themselves bring the church no nearer to accepting its LGBTQI+ members on equal terms: able to marry in church, to take on the same roles in congregations as anyone else, and to offer themselves for ordained ministry without having to give assurances of ‘celibacy’. The current state of play blithely ignores the usual understanding of celibacy as a vocation for some (regardless of their sexual orientation) and makes it into the only way of life acceptable for those who are lesbian or gay.

I was invited to take part in the History working group. It wasn’t clear at that point whether we’d be writing sections of the final book – and the target audience for that book shifted around between being one of two (popular/scholarly) or one for a wide audience or one to educate the bishops and other leaders – or whether someone else would summarise our materials and do the writing at the end of the time allocated.

I knew there would be meetings, but not how many: there were meetings of the group, and then full meetings of everyone involved. All were face to face although in our group we’d been very keen to meet online for some of the time. From being part of the initial small group where we had come to know each other, as the months went by I felt the project spinning away from me; in the full-day and residential meetings when we all came together, it was impossible to get a sense of what everyone else in the 40 or so people involved was doing, or why. Papers from other groups were shared on Dropbox but it was impossible for me to read everything, not just because of the amount of material but also because the material kept changing. At formal meetings, “Not everyone has seen this yet” was a common comment. There were even more meetings which meant a significant investment of time in preparation and travel; I spoke to the College of Bishops – the same talk three times, with question time – while other members of the project ran events at General Synod.

Throughout, the seven drafts which LLF passed through were circulated for comment, usually with a week, or even less, of reading time. As the final document is 468 pages, you can imagine how many hours were spent on all these drafts. In comments on one draft, I see that I wrote for one section “I feel I have read so many versions of this that I can’t face another.” At one point, a factual historical error which I’d pointed out wasn’t corrected, so I had to ask for it to be corrected on the next draft (remember, 468 pages – that’s a lot to read). I hope it will not have drifted back to the error version in the final product…

But I haven’t seen the final version of the book: nothing was sent to me after Draft 7, but I was approached for some additional ‘text boxes’. My understanding is that, in fact, these are not being used. More on that when I find out whether or not that’s the case. At the last meeting we had, we saw some of the other resources – the videos of people with a range of sexualities and gender identities – but I’ve not seen any more than that initial batch. There’s a study guide which I was sent for the first time in proof, with only 24 hours to go until its deadline for submission. 

At an initial meeting back in 2017, we’d done the dreaded post-it notes exercise, and had to write down things like “how we’d hope to feel when the document is published”. My personal notes from that day say that people were using words like authentic, honest and kindly, and I was expressing the hope that “everyone can hear their voice” in the final product. It would be interesting now to revisit that exercise, but like all such exercises it was never mentioned again. At the last meeting of the full LLF group, we were instead asked to reflect on what we had learned from being part of LLF. I suppose the post-2017 entries on this blog represent my response to that.

What would I add now on my ‘learning’? This is very personal, but that’s what this blog is about. So… 

  • That some people really like meetings and others don’t.
  • That adding on a time of worship to a meeting doesn’t make you feel better about it all.
  • That it’s very difficult to feel part of things when you’re a lay person not employed by the church: when this started, I knew only a handful of the 40 or so people and some of those were from being on General Synod a very long time ago: I left in 1993. I’ve met some people with whom I’ve made good connections, but often felt I wasn’t part of the general chatter and bonhomie. 
  • That my own feelings of exclusion and not being heard were nothing compared to the way all this could feel to those who are LGBTQI+; required to be the object of discussion at the same time as allegedly being full members of the group doing the discussing.

When I’ve seen the final products of those years of work, I’ll write more.

(updated 5 November to correct the number of pages, when the final version reached me, and 9 November, to show my collapsing copy: no, it isn’t supposed to be loose-leaf)

Posted in Episcopal Teaching Document, Living in Love and Faith, Shared Conversations | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Dislocation

Posted on August 23, 2020 by fluff35

Here we are in late August at the point in The Time of Covid-19 which may come to be known as The Stopping and Starting. I’m finding it difficult; despite evidence of lower numbers of deaths here from The Thing, the last two weeks have felt more worrying than the previous months. Any illusion of a slow but steady easing of rules as we progress towards a resumption of the Old Normal is slipping away as local lockdowns become more common and quarantine periods are imposed with only a day or so given as notice. Even New Zealand, once proudly free of The Thing, now has cases again. Plus there’s the weather; it makes me realise that what has been manageable in warm dry conditions is going to feel very different when it’s cold, dark and dismal out there. When I’ve aired these feelings in conversation, many have agreed, and have even been grateful that I’ve voiced this so that they know it’s not just them.

Dislocation, in physical terms, is when the ends of your bones are forced out of their normal positions, and your joint is immobilised. And it hurts. I think there’s a mental equivalent, and I had a moment of it last week. We went for tea and cake at a familiar local venue which doesn’t require bookings. Social media had suggested that this venue – which has lots of open-air seating, some of it under a canopy – is well-run and safe. And it is: you have to sanitise and then to give your details to a visored staff member before they’ll lift up the rope and let you in. Ordering is online or you can go in and take a look, using the one-way system. Outside there are arrows and new boundaries between seating areas. It was great: but as I started my cake I had a moment of dislocation. I’ve been to this place so many times, with family and friends. On the surface, it is very, very familiar. Yet so much of it was unfamiliar, and it felt like the remembered place was trying to break through the current reality. I’ve had this feeling before; for example, in going to an academic library where they completely refurbished the familiar reading room and added on a modern extension, and where my many years of knowing the old system kept coming to the surface as I negotiated the new building.

Let’s just dwell for a moment on the booking system, from which that café is mercifully free. One of the aspects of The Time of Covid-19 which I’ve found particularly challenging is the need to plan. Book a table for a meal (for the record, I have eaten out precisely 6 times since March). Book a slot for an English Heritage or National Trust visit (I’ve done more than 6 of those). Book to go to church (so far, not done that). Today on Church Coffee Zoom someone with family members who were shielding was saying how the life of bookings doesn’t work for her, because she never knows if it’s a good day until the day itself. This conversation reminded me of Kathy Charmaz’s book Good Days, Bad Days (1991) which looks at the way perceptions both of time and of the self change as a result of chronic illness.

After several conversations last week, I’m wondering if Charmaz’s work applies to all of us in The Time of Covid-19. Plenty of people are suffering a different kind of ‘dislocation’ as their homes become their offices while they live on Zoom and Teams; their weeks still have structure but what they do is still very different. But many of us have lost our grip on time; the regular commitments which punctuated our weeks have gone and our calendars are empty. The middle days of the week seem particularly difficult to grasp. As for the year, in my town the end of summer is usually marked by a huge, free, music festival on the weekend after the August Bank Holiday. This conveniently happened at the end of our garden. It was an occasion for friends and family to descend on us to join in, and for festival food to replace normal meals for three days. No more.

Time, both week by week and across the annual cycle, has other meanings now. What about Charmaz’s other focus: the self? In another conversation last week, someone said that what she most disliked was that she felt she had become a different person. Specifically, this applied to shopping. From buying bits and pieces as needed, she has been transformed into someone who secures her supermarket delivery or click ‘n’ collect slot and then decides well in advance what she needs and, as soon as one ‘shop’ is complete, she then plans the next one. I identified strongly with what she said. Again, it’s that lack of spontaneity. I know we are very fortunate here in that we aren’t particularly restricted by our incomes in terms of what we can afford; we aren’t relying on food banks. We have a garden and can invite a few people into it. But just because there are other ways that the self can be threatened doesn’t make this one less significant to those who experience it.

One of the punctuating points of my week used to be attending church on Sundays. I’ve posted elsewhere about how I took my mother on a lockdown tour of churches she knew, to see what they were all up to. My mother has since died. At my church, things have now moved; from pre-recorded in people’s homes, to live streaming from the church building. I haven’t been back yet. I thought that my faith needed the Eucharist, and before The Time of Covid-19 I regarded non-eucharistic services as somehow ‘not really worship’. Clearly for some in our congregation this is still their position as, despite the lack of congregational singing (we have organ + cantor + invitation to hum along) and despite the oddity of communion in one kind delivered to your hand by a masked and visored celebrant using gloves and tweezers, they want to go every Sunday.

In terms of time, yes, Sunday is still when I (virtually) go to church, although it may be a service other than the one at ‘my’ church. Last week I went to the church I used to attend in Vienna, because it came up on my Facebook page at breakfast time. I have less sense of the church’s year, because I’m not seeing the liturgical colours every week and Easter wasn’t anything like it usually is, and I may be peeling vegetables while ‘being at church’. I normally go to the Church Coffee Zoom, because although the full screen of people can feel very falsely positive about everything, when we are sent to breakout rooms of 4 or 5 people there may be deeper conversation. Sometimes I go to several online services, maybe fast-forwarding through the hymns. I usually stick around for the sermon, which is how a couple of weeks ago I found the most helpful piece I’ve heard since all this started, by the Bishop of Reading, Olivia Graham.

+Olivia acknowledged the disruption we are feeling and linked the current stage of the pandemic to ordinary time and to the hard work of dying. Her sermon acknowledged instability and looked at how we’ve shifted from the drama of the ‘acute’ stage of this pandemic to the long haul of what she called the ‘dull ordinariness’ of the ‘chronic’. She reminded me that I need to stay as far as I can in the present moment. At some point, I suppose I will be back in the building doing what someone at Church Coffee Zoom referred to as ‘real church’, a label I’d resist. I suspect that here, too, the remembered place will try to break through the current reality, and I’ll feel disoriented and it will hurt. But that is ‘then’, and this is ‘now’, and what matters is what’s important ‘now’.

Posted in Shared Conversations | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Stopping: and starting?

Posted on April 30, 2020 by fluff35

After several years in which it has played a major part in my life, as of 29 April the ‘Living in Love and Faith process’ (LLF) has now officially been put on hold. Those of us on the various working groups were sent the press release when it went live, although the official website has yet to be updated and as of today is still saying ‘The goal is to complete the Living in Love and Faith resources by early 2020.’ We had been told just before Easter that the plan was to pause the project; until then, we had understood that the book would be finished in April with just a little more work to be done on the online resources, such as podcasts and videos of people describing their own faith and experience, some of which we watched at our last meeting in February.

Why the delay? Originally the publication date was focused on the Lambeth Conference – it was to be ‘a gift to Lambeth’, an odd image which to me evoked wrapping paper, bows, and disappointment – but when Lambeth was postponed until Summer 2021, doubts immediately arose about whether it was worth getting the present ready.  Yet despite it being made abundantly clear to us that the whole timetable was being driven by this desire to ‘gift’ LLF to the Anglican Communion, the press release utterly fails to mention the Lambeth Conference, but instead observes that

the Church’s focus is now on ministering to people who are experiencing so many challenges – of bereavement, sickness, isolation, uncertainty about livelihood and fear for what the future holds. That is why we have decided to delay the publication of the resources.

That feels rather odd to me. Yes, that is the focus of the Church of England as well as of other faith communities and of many, many people who would not associate themselves with a faith.

But … while some aspects of Church of England life have been put on hold because of COVID-19, others have not. We imminently expect an announcement about whether the July 2020 General Synod will go ahead (surely not), and about the elections to the next GS which are supposedly in our minds even now as we elect reps for deanery synod at our Annual Parochial Church Meetings. Except we aren’t holding those meetings, and in my diocese the Bishop has extended the deadline for them to the end of October 2020. On hold, but with what for the moment is a firm end date.

Other aspects are not on hold. One of the first comments I saw on the delay to LLF asked whether the bishops had heard of working from home. Indeed, and if all that is needing to be completed are the podcasts then there shouldn’t be any problem in producing these without a physical meeting. The Church of England is clearly managing to maintain other activities by using online methods. Jobs are being advertised and posts filled. Webinars are replacing face-to-face training. BAPs – selection conferences for potential priests – are going ahead by Zoom. PCCs are meeting online. Books are being published, podcasts released, and book discussion groups are happening in parishes. Yes, there’s the problem of inequality of access to internet resources, but also an online discussion can bring in those who have the internet but are housebound or don’t like to go out in the evenings.

So when should we expect the LLF resources? What surprises me in the press release is the absence of any provisional revised timetable. Instead we have

we will monitor the situation to discern when might be the earliest appropriate time to publish the long-awaited LLF resources and thereby launch the process of whole-church engagement

and a comment about the resources coming out

when the time is right.

Am I the only one who feels uneasy about that phrase? Having lived through the debate about ordaining women to the priesthood, in the 1980-90s, it feels worryingly familiar. Who will discern the kairos, the moment of opportunity and rightness, for the rest of us?

The absence of any hoped-for timings contrasts with another delay announced in the last few days, for the review into the serial abuser John Smyth which has been delayed ‘into 2021’. But for this, COVID-19 is not being held responsible; instead, it’s because of the ‘wider than anticipated’ amount of evidence received by the reviewers and the complexity of having several different reviews by different organisations happening at around the same time. Yes, the press release mentions ‘any impact the COVID-19 restrictions may have’, but that is not given as the main reason.

The absence of any movement on LLF is painful, because those of us who will be most affected by the resources’ discussion of the ‘way forward for the Church in relation to questions of human identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage’ are also being affected by the ‘so many challenges’ of yesterday’s press release, and in a very specific way. On 17 April the UN Human Rights Office published guidance on their concerns about the impact of the current crisis on LGBTI people. In the UK, the LGBT Foundation has also looked at the impact COVID-19 has on the community and has observed a 30% increase in calls about domestic abuse or violence to its helpline. And then there are the specifically ‘Church of England’ aspects. I know at the moment nobody can get married, in church or elsewhere, but for straight people that’s temporary: what if you are someone who longs to marry your partner in church but can’t because of their sex? What if you are in a marriage which the state supports but your church does not? What if you would simply like your church to bless your civil marriage? What if you are exploring a call to ordination but can’t take it any further without lying about your sexuality? No Zoom selection conference for you…

I really, really want to believe that this is just going to be a short delay and we’ll all get the opportunity in a few months’ time to read and engage with the LLF resources, and to start moving towards testing the mind of the Church of England and then of General Synod for possible change. But I’m not sure I can believe it, not without some intended release date. The ‘challenges’ which some people live with are being seen as more important than those facing others. Something here doesn’t add up: or, it adds up to institutional abuse.

 

UPDATE: in June it was announced that the resources will be released in November 2020

Posted in Episcopal Teaching Document, Living in Love and Faith | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Bishops to show us the way

Posted on February 7, 2020 by fluff35

Today, the story trending on Twitter is that Phillip Schofield has come out as gay, at the age of 57. He has spoken movingly and passionately about the damage that concealment was doing to him and said that ‘all you can be in your life is honest with yourself’. He insisted that the timing was his decision; in other words, that he wasn’t doing this to preempt some sort of outing. This made me think once more about the current House of Bishops.

The previous day, I’d happened to hear again Flanders’ and Swann’s A Song of Patriotic Prejudice (1963). If you haven’t heard it, or just haven’t heard it for a long time, it’s worth a listen in the aftermath of the first stage of Brexit, not least for the the ‘Scotsman’ who ‘hasn’t got bishops to show him the way’. In his introduction, Michael Flanders presented it as an attempt to write a national song for England. He said

in the old days, you know the good old days when I was a boy, people didn’t, we didn’t bother in England about nationalism. I mean, nationalism was on its way out. We’d got pretty well everything we wanted. And we didn’t go around saying how marvelous we were – everybody knew that – any more than we bothered to put our names on our stamps. I mean, there’s only two kinds of stamps: English stamps, in sets at the beginning of the album, and foreign stamps all mixed at the other end.

When listening to the song now, its original humour and satire don’t really work. Is it funny, or do the national stereotypes feel so uncomfortable that a laugh isn’t the right response?

That line about bishops feels particularly odd in the fallout after the House of Bishops (un)Pastoral Statement and the minimalist apology from the archbishops, about which I’ve co-written a blog post for Via Media. Is this ‘showing us the way’? It does seem very odd to me that a statement like that could come out of a group who’ve been having sessions on the process of LLF for years now. That word ‘pastoral’ in particular: there have been attempts to suggest that we silly people didn’t understand that ‘pastoral’ has a special technical meaning here and that this somehow exempts the statement from its absence of any sense of understanding the flock to which it is apparently addressed. Well, in that case, how come LLF includes a Pastoral Advisory Group (PAG)? I’ve met them as part of LLF. One of them was a complete star when I had a tearful meltdown during a residential meeting; I say ‘star’ because they made the point that I could just withdraw from the whole process and everyone would fully understand and would thank me for what I had been able to contribute. Hearing that ‘permission’ helped me to stay on.

So, were they involved in issuing something that claimed to be ‘Pastoral’? PAG issued their ‘pastoral principles‘ last year. They are

  • acknowledge prejudice
  • speak into silence
  • address ignorance
  • cast out fear
  • admit hypocrisy
  • pay attention to power

Excellent stuff. These principles have been commended to parishes. ‘Admit hypocrisy’ includes ‘We do not commend intrusive questioning’ – yet the (un)Pastoral Statement states

Members of the clergy and candidates for ordination who decide to enter into civil partnerships must expect to be asked for assurances that their relationship will be consistent with the teaching set out in Issues in Human Sexuality.

Issues in Human Sexuality, 1991: the document which states that the laity can, but the clergy can’t, ‘claim the liberty to enter into sexually active homophile relationships’ (p.45). The report rejected the proposal ‘that bishops should be more rigorous in searching out and exposing clergy who may be in sexually active homophile relationships’ (pp.45-6), mentioned clergy ‘who feel it is their duty to come out, that is, to make known publicly either their orientation or their practice’ (p.46), but had a problem with those ‘who are themselves in active homophile partnerships, and who come out as a matter of personal integrity’ (p.46). So how ‘rigorous’ is that ‘searching out and exposing’ to be? Diocesan Directors of Ordinands currently have to check that those recommended for training will ‘live within the guidelines’ of Issues, shorthand for ‘it’s OK to be gay but only if you’re not “sexually active”‘. With its expectation of ‘asking for assurances’, this new (un)Pastoral Statement is continuing that tradition of asking questions about what goes on in the bedroom. Yet the pastoral principles include ‘We do not commend intrusive questioning’…

And as for bishops showing us the way, the only ‘out’ bishop remains Nicholas Chamberlain, Bishop of Grantham, who is on PAG. When he came out and announced that he was in a relationship, he received hundreds of letters, overwhelmingly supportive. Many people in the Church of England know that he is not the only gay in our village. Outing bishops, as practised just this week in Private Eye, is wrong: the timing must be their decision. But hypocrisy is also wrong. That PAG pastoral principles list, again under ‘Admit hypocrisy’, asked parishes the question

Can it be right that there are situations where people who might wish to be open about their sexual orientation feel forced to dissemble, or when parishes find themselves evading issues of sexuality?

A House and a College of Bishops containing people who conceal their sexuality and yet endorse statements which condemn their own relationships: how does that help us to trust them? Is this the only ‘way’ they will show us?

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How not to be pastoral: the bishops’ new statement on civil partnerships

Posted on January 25, 2020 by fluff35

Once again, it’s all about sex. Whatever we mean by that. A recent article in The Independent headlined The sex-obsessed Church of England is digging its own grave included the comment that the Church is ‘intent not just on digging its own grave but also pausing on the way there to smack itself in the face with the spade’. This was one response to the statement the House of Bishops issued this week giving the official view on civil partnerships and their extension to heterosexual couples. As Ann Reddecliffe has noticed in a thread on Thinking Anglicans, and a fuller blog post discusses, this new document just copies sections of the 2005 guidance on civil partnerships. That too was called a ‘pastoral statement’. Doing a ‘compare and contrast’ between the 2005 and 2020 documents is instructive, and they feel less and less ‘pastoral’ the more one looks at them.

Procreation or the possibility of procreation is very important in the 2020 document. With apparently no recognition that things ever change in the Church of England, as in 2005 the bishops use the 1662 Prayer Book for its summary of what it teaches on marriage; this list puts ‘the procreation of children’ in top place, with ‘a remedy against sin’ and ‘mutual society, help and comfort’ in third place. I am assuming bishops go to weddings, where they would have seen from the 1970s ‘mutual society’ being mentioned first. 

Before saying anything more about the new document, let’s just explore one section where a change has been made from the previous one. I don’t think this change has previously been discussed. In the 2005 version, it occurs in section 2: marriage ‘continues to provide the best context for the raising of children’. In 2020 (section 7) this has become: ‘We believe that [marriage] continues to provide the best context for the raising of children, although it is not the only context that can be of benefit to children, especially where the alternative may be long periods in institutional care.’ Spot the difference?

To me, this change reads like a desperate attempt to insert the ‘pastoral’. But it fails miserably. It reads like somebody has said, at a late stage of drafting, ‘Oh dear, we don’t want this to sound like we think children of an unmarried couple should be taken into care’ and then this was added on. This comes across not as inclusive (a ‘radical new inclusion’ as promised?) but as an insult to those assumed to be ‘second-best’ parents. Unmarried parents; a divorced person raising a child alone; relatives raising a niece, a nephew, a grandchild; a lesbian couple raising the children from a previous marriage which one partner brought to their relationship; a gay couple with a much-wanted, much-loved child conceived by surrogate… and so it goes on. This mealy-mouthed ‘pastoral’ statement tells them that their selfless love ‘can be of benefit’. Well, thanks very much, Church of England. While we’re at it, I think the phrasing here is also pretty insulting to those who work in providing institutional care.

There is much else that is wrong with this Unpastoral Statement. The timing: issued just after we’ve been able to watch the TV summaries of the Church of England hierarchy’s failure to respond appropriately to terrible examples of sexual abuse, and just before the long process of Living in Love and Faith (LLF) publishes its resources for discussion of equal marriage, the nature of sexuality and gender identity. The prurience: the continued assumption that clergy need to pry, so that faced with a couple asking for ‘prayer in relation to entering into a civil partnership’ they need to consider this in ‘the light of the circumstances of each case’; is this CP a sexually abstinent ‘friendship’ or something else?

Part of LLF is a Pastoral Advisory Group. Last year it established its ‘pastoral principles‘, stating that these ‘are about encouraging churches to offer a welcome that is Christ-centred, that sees difference as a gift rather than a problem, and that builds trust and models generosity’. Trust? Generosity? Where are these in the Unpastoral Statement?

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Fight the good fight(s): the ordination of women and the human sexuality debate

Posted on August 15, 2019 by fluff35

I was struck recently by how all the celebratory pieces I was reading about the 25th anniversary of women priests were written from the point of view of those women whose vocations to priesthood were doubted (for many centuries) but then eventually recognised. While I could obviously understand why they were celebrating, the ordination of women was not just for women who felt called to ordination! So I offered WATCH (Women and the Church, the group that monitors what has happened since) a piece on how it felt from the point of view of a lay woman and this is the result. It turned out they’d tried to get a lay perspective but hadn’t managed it, so that worked out very well.

I think much of what I wrote is equally applicable to the current debates on human sexuality. For example, in my WATCH piece I wrote: “Yet the assumption of many people, in the church and beyond, was always that I was fighting this fight for myself. And, much as I deplore the language of victory and defeat, of us and them, it was a fight. I remember a televised debate from All Souls, Langham Place in which one speaker argued that women could not be ordained because of menstruation; this sort of approach made it very clear to me that there was far more at stake here than the role of priest.”

Menstruation: now there’s an area where I can contribute personal experience but also a different kind of ‘expertise’, as I wrote my PhD on ancient Greek menstruation. And why was I interested in the topic historically? Because of my particularly bad experiences of my own body, with surgeries for endometriosis… Yes, it’s circular, even if at the time I submitted the PhD thesis (1985) the ‘personal voice’ wasn’t a thing in classical scholarship so at that point I wasn’t going to say just how personal this subject was to me. Looking back, it was never any stirrings of a vocation to priesthood which made me campaign for the ordination of women; it was the theological moment of realising that it was Jesus’ humanity not his maleness that mattered, meshed with the awareness of how women’s embodiment has been systematically trashed throughout western history.

Personal experience comes in many different forms. As a lay woman who didn’t feel any call to priesthood I had a role in the discussion of the ordination of women, and as a cis-het woman I believe I have a role in the discussion of equality for lgbtiq+ people in our churches. In both situations, there has been a long history of exclusion, and even of doubting the full humanity of some people. In both situations, some of us are invested because of who we are: others are allies. But both are needed. Whether we fight for ourselves or for our sisters and our brothers, we fight on. Ah, that language again: I wonder why we are so scared of it? ‘Living in Love and Faith’: let’s lay hold on the ‘life’ part of that title.

Fight the good fight with all thy might;
Christ is thy strength, and Christ thy right;
Lay hold on life, and it shall be
Thy joy and crown eternally.

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Intersex in history

Posted on May 26, 2019 by fluff35

Anyone who writes will know that feeling when something you worked on ends up not being used. I was asked to write 500 words on this topic and of course that was nowhere near enough – but I did what I was asked, listened to and welcomed feedback, and then was cut. So here it is, in a slightly expanded form (the advantage of blogging on one’s own!).

Genesis 1:27, in the NRSV translation:

So God created humankind in his image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

It’s a verse which turns up in many discussions of gender and sexuality. But ‘male and female he created them’ may work fine for the powerful, indeed foundational, myth of Adam and Eve, but in the real world it comes up against the realities of the body: not every body fits neatly into the ‘male’ or ‘female’ category. Some would argue that clear sexual distinctions were intended in Creation and that anything else results from ‘the Fall’, while others would point to the Biblical category of the ‘eunuch’ as being neither male nor female. I hadn’t met anyone in the former group until I took part in the Shared Conversations – a bit of an eye-opener for me, not least because there were clearly people there who talked about ‘the Fall’ like it was an actual historical event. At the other end of the spectrum, it was interesting some years after that experience to write a sermon on Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch and to reflect that, whatever we understand by being a eunuch, what matters here is that Philip accepts the invitation to join the eunuch in his ‘personal space’, the chariot, and does not reject him in any way.

Just looking around us today, we can see that as well as some women being taller and stronger than some men, there are less obvious parts of the body which can vary considerably between individuals. At birth, the most obvious sign is the genitalia, but how large does a penis have to be to lead to the announcement ‘It’s a boy’? Because binaries rule, the tape measure has been brought in here; so, under 1.9 cm currently brings the diagnosis of ‘micropenis’, leading to some children being given hormones and others, surgery. Nor is this only about the visible body. The tissue of the gonads is also relevant, and it is possible to have both an ovary and a testis. A person may appear female but not have a womb. As well as hormone levels varying, so do chromosomes. We may be XX-female or XY-male, but it’s possible for a body which appears female to have XY chromosomes or even for one individual to have some XX and some XY cells.

Historically, people who had some characteristics of each sex were called ‘hermaphrodites’, and before the ‘Age of Gonads’ began in the nineteenth century the focus was on the external organs, alongside some interest in body hair and in preferred activities. The person to read on the shift to gonads – testicles and ovaries – is Alice Domurat Dreger, whose work is briefly summarised here. Before this, however, in the eighteenth century some claimed that all such individuals were ‘really’ male but with a small penis, while others thought they were ‘really’ female but with an enlarged clitoris; I’ve written about this elsewhere. I see this as reflecting the strength of people’s desire to fit everyone into one of just two categories. Today, the most likely label is that a person has ‘variations in sex characteristics’ (VSC). This is a biological category and it’s important to realise that it has nothing to do with whether the person identifies as male or female, or with their sexuality. ‘Disorders of sexual development’ (DSD) was also used but this has shifted in favour of the more neutral ‘Differences of sexual development’.

The risk of saying anything about people with VSC is that, not being one of them, I may have no right to comment. But I’m a historian, and there’s a history here, and perhaps my role is to inform people of that. I think it’s important to acknowledge that even in relatively modern times there’s a disturbing history of how ‘hermaphrodites’ – the term that was then used – were put on public display as curiosities for close inspection, as well as being the object of scientific discussion; in 1714 the poet Alexander Pope wrote of his pleasure in seeing a hermaphrodite displayed for a charge of one shilling. This person was the child of ‘a Kentish Parson and his Spouse’, the advertising handbills announcing the display of ‘her personal curiosities’. Pope visited with a priest and a physician who, like him, both inspected and touched the person’s genitals; he writes of ‘the surest method of believing, seeing and feeling’. The priest decided this was a man, while the physician concluded that this was a woman. Does the use of ‘her’ in the advertisements suggest that this was the person’s own gender identity?

The fascination shown in this story is only one part of the history of VSC: the other part is revulsion or fear. The divine being Hermaphroditus combined external features of both sexes, but at the same time real people with anomalous bodies of various kinds were seen by the ancient Romans as signs of the gods’ displeasure. As with other attempts to use the past, you could focus on the divine aspect of uniting two things in one body, or on the appalling treatment of those who don’t fit the categories. Moving to modern times, until very recently, as a result of the now-controversial protocols of the psychologist John Money, medicine responded by removing or reshaping tissue. What was lacking here was any sense that an individual may want their body to remain indeterminate in its sexual features. While much of the medical and legal literature concerns attempts to force individuals into categories, those individuals could also actively resist categorisation, but historically their sense of their own identity has rarely been taken into account.

Binaries rule, OK? But do they have to?

 

 

 

 

 

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The indecent Virgin

Posted on March 28, 2019 by fluff35

I’m continuing to broaden my theological reading around the issues which Living in Love and Faith was originally set up to explore. I’m very aware that the approach of those on the various groups is basically ‘systematic theology’, which feels like it’s written from a great height looking down at the Bible, to produce a unified, orderly, coherent whole that incorporates all the different books of the Bible and the texts of the tradition. That feels alienating to me, not least because I think we read – and always have read – the Bible in different ways according to our own perspectives, but also because disruptive challenges from the excluded need to be taken seriously, and ‘reading against the grain’ can be productive. As one critic comments,

The problem with systematic theologies, is that they are systematic. God’s revelation to us in the Bible is not systematic. It’s messy, it’s complicated, it tells the story of people who mess up, of God who gets involved in the life of his creation and redeems it. The Bible narrative is compelling; sometimes exciting, sometimes complicated but it is not systematic. God did not give us a system, he gave us a story.

Following a chat on Twitter around one of the topics on which I’ve written for the project – the clitoris, the church’s dubious 19th-century history with regard to this part of the body, and whether we have a theology that can cope with an organ the sole purpose of which is pleasure – I was directed to Marcella Althaus-Reid’s book, Indecent Theology (2000). This is most definitely not an easy read; it is positioned as both developing and disrupting Liberation Theology and its examples come from the author’s experience of poor urban women in Latin America in contexts where ‘Exchanging money for sex was not that unusual; many women just married in order to eat regularly’ (p.66). Latin American history is not part of the average UK school curriculum, and I first came across Latin-American feminism only when I was working at Gustavus Adolphus College last year because the reading group I joined was studying the work of Cherríe Moraga prior to her visit to the campus. Moraga is another challenging writer and I was pleased to have this introduction to her work, not least because one of my professional areas is classical reception and Moraga wrote her own Mexican take on Medea. However, add theology into the Chicana mix and it becomes even more difficult (if, like me a year ago, you need to know what is meant by Chicana, here is a useful undergraduate-level website).

But back to Indecent Theology (great title, btw). It’s highly relevant to a writing project on which I am currently working, for publication rather than for Living in Love and Faith, looking at religion and medicine as ways of regulating people’s views of the female body across Western history and beyond. From this perspective, I’m thinking a lot about Althaus-Reid’s comment on patriarchy that ‘The womb has been appropriated but not the vulva’ (p.63). Something that resonated with me was when she contrasts the different ways in which characters from the Bible are held up as examples to boys and men, or girls and women: while a boy could ‘be expected to grow faithful as Abraham or repentant as King David … No young girl thinks “perhaps if I am humble enough God will have sex with me”‘ (p.54). She examines the particular ways in which Mary is used as role model in Latin America, where being advised to ‘go and pray to the Virgin Mary’ – something the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo were told to do when standing up for human rights in the Argentinian dictatorship – is a way of trying to domesticate women, to ‘make them decent mothers who would educate daughters into decency and not political subversion’ (p.51). She also offers a cutting analysis of the appearances of the Virgin in Latin America, where she always asks for a chapel to be built or for medals with her image to be made and sold, but never asks for a free school or a hospital to be set up in her name (pp.60-1).

One of many things which has struck me in my engagement with the book so far is when Althaus-Reid mentions those images of the Virgin Mary where she is essentially an elaborate dress with head and hands attached (‘the Virgin is just her skirts’, p.61). In my teens I was very familiar with an image of this kind from Brompton Oratory. The hands are convenient for holding the infant Jesus, but not much else.

Image result for brompton oratory mary

Althaus-Reid characterises Mary in these representations as ‘a rich, white, woman who does not walk’ (p.53). The passivity, the immobility, the lack of legs, is striking. I wonder how these images play out with people who physically share the immobility? And I’m not at my most mobile myself this week, due to my first ever attack of vertigo. Perhaps my mind is spinning from Brexit, or from Living in Love and Faith, but my current experience is definitely making me think about the static and the moving in a different way. With Mary, Althaus-Reid picks up the reference to historical models of generation in which the womb is static (and the woman’s contribution to the process is to offer a place in which the seed can take root and grow) while only the male semen is active (p.55). I could add there the ancient belief in the ‘wandering womb’, in which any movement in the female reproductive system – other than the mouth of the womb closing to retain the seed – is emphatically a Bad Thing. Living in Love and Faith includes a group working on what science now has to say on human sexuality, so in that spirit I’d add the point that these older models miss out what we now know about the movement of the Fallopian tubes to pick up an egg, and the journey of those eggs themselves, as described here:

Following ovulation, the fimbriated, or finger-like, end of the fallopian tube sweeps over the ovary. Adhesive sites on the cilia, which are located on the surface of the fimbriae, are responsible for egg pickup and movement into the tube. The cilia within the tube, and muscular contractions resulting from the movement of the egg, create a forward motion. Transport through the tube takes about 30 hours.

While discussing this traditional image of Mary as static, Althaus-Reid draws attention to some paintings I’d met back in that reading group at Gustavus: Yolanda López’s Virgin of Guadalupe sequence, discussed here by Joanna Garcia in a blog post from 2016. López, a Chicana artist, represents herself in her self-portrait as the Virgin of Guadalupe with legs unencumbered by layers of fabric, and running shoes.

Related image

Althaus-Reid’s focus here is on the ‘gigantic vulva’ which surrounds the Virgin of Guadalupe and from which López shows herself emerging. This shape is the mandorla (literally, ‘almond’), something which has been used as a frame for Mary or for Christ himself in Western art from an early period; it represents glory. How far should we read it as a vulva? Well, Althaus-Reid is far from being the only person to notice the resemblance and, as a reminder that the Word only becomes flesh by being born of a woman, the vulval imagery really can’t be ignored.

Indecent Theology introduces the reader to a range of other images of Mary which work at the intersection of the Virgin and Christ (pp.80-1); for example, Santa Librada, who in what Althaus-Reid calls ‘the transvestite theology of the poor’ is a version of the saint I know as Wilgefortis (or ‘Uncumber’). In Western representations she’s often shown with the beard she grew in answer to a prayer that she should be saved from marriage. In this 18th-century representation from Bogotá, however, she is shown as a young woman, with no facial hair. Why? To me, this is so much less shocking than the bearded images, but the position of the saint as the crucified one – prefiguring Edwina Sandys’ Christa (1975)? – may alarm other viewers.

Image result for santa librada

 

But back to the static womb. Reading Althaus-Reid reminded me of another Madonna in Western art: Salisbury Cathedral’s 1981 Walking Madonna by Elisabeth Frink. Interviewing Frink in 1981, Norman St John-Stevas commented on her female figures, ‘I wonder whether they actually would carry a child; they don’t look to me like childbearing ladies’. I suspect that tells us more about him than about Frink. At Salisbury, Mary is older; tired; post-Resurrection; and at the level of the viewer. When I first saw this bronze statue, what struck me was the obvious point that she has her back to the Cathedral, moving out into the world with her purposeful stride. I know that staying in the church is often painful, and walking away is often appealing; is thinking about turning my back on the church a fair response to a piece of art created by a woman brought up in the Roman Catholic church who, in that interview with Norman St John-Stevas, remarked that she had been left with ‘very strong views on Catholicism and what it does and doesn’t do with relation to human beings’?

Reading Althaus-Reid, however, perhaps the most radical aspect of all is simply that Frink’s Madonna is not static, but on the move!

Image result for walking madonna frink wikimedia commons

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