Pausanias and Agathon: a ‘same sex relationship’?

Posted on July 4, 2016 by fluff35

Thinking Anglicans notes that the Evangelical Group of the General Synod, EGGS, has issued this briefing document to its members and friends ahead of General Synod’s shared conversations, scheduled to start on 10 July. The document proposes that “The ideas/opinions/statements expressed (in bold) are amongst those that members might hear articulated and which we believe can (and need) to be responded to. The thoughts/responses offered are a resource from the (elected members of) the Committee to help reflection on the likely issues and questions.”

Like other commentators on this document, I’m not sure the ‘if you hear that, respond like this’ format is very helpful; if you’re listening out for the trigger words of a particular dodgy statement, will you really hear what someone is saying to you? But I’ve a deeper concern, and that regards something I’ve commented on already in this blog: the use of the ancient Greeks without any sense of historical context. This, I think, reflects a wider issue about the casual use of history by some Christians, and it contributes to a rejection of Christianity, as something requiring believers to leave their brains outside the church door.

The section of the document I have in mind is a potential response to someone expressing the view that ‘Scripture isn’t clear on a number of issues regarding human sexuality’ and it goes like this: “Some have suggested that faithful same sex relationships were not known in (pre) biblical times and therefore the bible is silent on this matter. This is not true: such relationships are acknowledged by Plato and others, and it is likely that Alexander the Great was in a same sex relationship with Hephaestion, as was Pausanius with poet Agathon.” Continue reading →

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Gender at the Shared Conversations

Posted on June 10, 2016 by fluff35

There’s been quite a lot of reflection on sexuality on this blog already, but here I want to turn to gender and to focus on my experience in the Regional Shared Conversations, as a woman. My thanks to the various friends whose questions about it all have helped me to think this aspect through!

Gender: what’s changed?

When we think about our church’s response to the varieties of human sexuality, I do think it’s useful to keep in mind today the debates around the ordination of women. I was involved in those as a lay woman, as a member of the Movement for the Ordination of Women, and as a member of the C of E’s decision-making body, the General Synod. Two aspects of my experience stand out for me: first, the need to overcome a view of myself as somehow inferior just by being embodied as a woman, and second, the need to make it clear that my commitment to the ordination of women was not motivated by any personal ambition. Ambition, of course, is a Bad Word in the church, to be denied at all costs.

Historically, and even now, women’s bodies have been represented as impure and carrying taint. During the time when the ordination of women question was live, a debate was broadcast on television from All Souls, Langham Place. I’ve tried and failed to find any reference to it beyond my own memory, which includes hearing a speaker propose that women could never be priests, because they menstruate. Continue reading →

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The Greeks didn’t have a word for it

Posted on June 3, 2016 by fluff35

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A lot of statements about the ancient Greeks, the Romans, and sexuality can be found on Christian websites. They give the impression that there’s complete certainty surrounding their comments, for example on the Greeks ‘tolerating homosexuality’, phrasing which implies a historically-consistent ‘thing’. But in fact there’s still plenty of debate in the scholarly community, where the statements that travel round the web originate. As part of the Day Job, earlier this week I attended the launch event for a re-issue of one of the most influential books from my student days: Sir Kenneth Dover’s Greek Homosexuality, first published in 1978. The cover of the re-issue, shown here, uses the same image as the original, Ganymede with a hoop (and a cock – yes – it’s a gift from Zeus), but zooms in on it; the hoop invites the viewer through to look at the boy’s genitals, but this new edition conveniently covers them with an ‘O’. That in itself is an interesting comment on what we can, and can’t, ‘see’ in the past.

In terms of whether the Greeks ‘had a word for it’, they had a lot of words for whichever ‘it’ we have in mind. Continue reading →

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Behind closed doors

Posted on May 16, 2016 by fluff35

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This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

So, next stop for the Shared Conversations: General Synod in July, as discussed at the last meeting of GS. This will be the third stage, following the conversations in the House of Bishops and then the Regional conversations, in one of which I took part. Last week’s Church Times announced the imminent General Synod ones with the snappy headline “York Synod will close its doors to talk about sex”. What this seems to mean is simply that the campus will be closed; no press, no visitors observing proceedings. Simon Butler, the Prolocutor of the Lower House of the Convocation of Canterbury, expressed the hope that “people will talk together over meals and in the bar, which is why the shared conversations worked so well regionally, as we had the time to engage with one another as people rather than as representatives of a particular party line.”

From my point of view, though, as someone who served on General Synod and who took part in the Regional Shared Conversations, it’s not easy here to apply ‘why the shared conversations worked so well regionally’. Continue reading →

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Meanwhile, back in the toilet…

Posted on March 28, 2016 by fluff35

This is the third in a series of reflections after the Shared Conversations (edited 31 March)

In a previous post, I’ve commented on how wonderful it was to get to the loo and sit alone in a space where nobody was talking and where the walls were plain, rather than being covered with posters of questions and answers. And now I’m back to that topic again – but from a rather different angle.

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Yes, this is a gents’ toilet: well spotted.

In the central part of the three days of the Regional Shared Conversations format, we were asked to go away into the grounds of the conference centre, or find a spot in one of the lounges, and reflect on our lives in terms of sexuality, preparing to tell our stories in the groups of three. For many of us, we already had experience of thinking back and reconstructing our story in different ways; I’ve certainly done it as part of the discernment process of my own vocation, where the focus was on identifying those times when I’d felt most alive, most confident that I was where I should be. But this theme gave it all a different spin. Continue reading →

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How we communicate

Posted on March 14, 2016 by fluff35

This is the second in a series of reflections after the Shared Conversations

Following my experience of the Oxford/St Albans Regional Shared Conversations, I’m going to reflect here on one of the sessions on the first day. The facilitators explained to us that the three-day process forms an hourglass structure, narrowing in on the second day to personal stories and then expanding out on day 3 to the wider church again.

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While I knew the focus was on conversation – and as I’ve noted elsewhere there were a lot of words, not just spoken ones but all the words our ‘table groups’ wrote on posters and giant post-it notes which went up around the walls –  I’d somehow imagined that the very first session, on using language, would be more like a lecture on the import of different words. For example, in an earlier report, the CofE used the term ‘homophile’, which doesn’t get used today but which I suppose implies orientation Continue reading →

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Come and have breakfast

Posted on March 8, 2016 by fluff35

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This is the first in a series of reflections after the Shared Conversations

Now that they’re over, there will be several posts here on the Shared Conversations as I process what happened. Let’s start with something that only occurred to me after the event.

At one point we were asked to share our favourite verse from the Bible with a small group, before discussing how the Bible affects our views on human sexuality issues. Only since I came home have I realised something I’d not previously considered about my chosen verse, which was John 21:12, ‘Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast”‘. I chose that, as I explained at the time, because of the generous simplicity of the invitation. Food: a basic human need. Fresh-caught fish, cooked on the beach. As I say or write those words, their sensory power is such that I can almost smell the fish! The invitation is directed at the disciples, but was soon to be extended to all of us. The meal echoes the Last Supper, which in turn was prefigured in the feeding of the 5000, the account of which echoes the miraculous feedings in the Hebrew Bible. Continue reading →

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Self-care: recovering from so many words

Posted on March 7, 2016 by fluff35

So, I’m back from the Regional Shared Conversations. And it was every bit as demanding as expected (maybe, more so), not least because there were so many words over those three days. I do words, all the time, so if I respond like this, how on earth must others be feeling? Not just intense and personal revelation in groups of 3, feedback to a trusted group of 9, working in different groups round tables, talking during meals and tea breaks, ‘open space’ events in the evening after dinner, and plenary sessions, but also posters and giant post-it notes building up all round the walls of the plenary room, covered in groups’ key points, thought showers and questions. Words, words, words. On the final morning, in a loo break between sessions, it struck me just how lovely it is to spend time alone in a toilet cubicle: no people, no words, no speech, no reading.

In the final session, it was made very clear to us that our ‘re-entry’ into our normal lives could be difficult, and not just a matter of recovering from physical exhaustion. So I’m going to leave it a few days before I try to process all that happened. And when I do, obviously I’ll be working under the St Michael’s House Protocols, so it can’t be too specific. I’ll focus on my own reactions – which, at this stage, could be summed up as ‘wow, what a privilege’; ‘oh dear, how are we going to manage the levels of disagreement?’ and ‘how early can I go to bed tonight?’

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Luggage and baggage

Posted on March 3, 2016 by fluff35

image Continue reading →

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Rediscovering “Good Disagreement”

Posted on March 2, 2016 by fluff35

The Right Revd David Walker, Bishop of Manchester, blogging on Good Disagreement: and see the comments for the issue of whether good disagreement is impossible, being inherently biased towards the powerful.

Source: Rediscovering “Good Disagreement”

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