Revisiting BISFT Summer School 1994,Durham University,‘Changing Perceptions’

Introduction

In her paper ‘Sexuality and Salvation, Transforming the Pain’ delivered in Durham in 1994 Elizabeth Stuart addressed the situation of the lesbian and gay community with regard to its relationship with Church, Community and with Feminism. Stuart suggests that the disenchantment of lesbians with Feminism lies with feminism’s failure to deal with the tragedy and failure and pain of relationality between people of all sexualities not just heterosexuality. Stuart critiques Carter Heyward’s interpretation of Lorde’s understanding of the erotic as an internal force within women which manifests the power of the divine, arguing that Lorde uses the language of a dualistic understanding of the self. Rather Stuart puts forward the view that this force/power is not found within the self but is created in the interaction between persons in the positive loving relationships that empower growth and change. Referring to Brock’s work she points out that if these loving relationships are not experienced in childhood we are left broken-hearted and in need of healing. This can be brought about by being loved through personal encounter, the friendship of animals, through love mediated through the pages of a book, or art, and thus the divine is incarnated. However, relationships are not always positive and so what results is what Stuart calls the tragedy of relating or the broken- heartedness which we all carry with us into our encounters.

In addressing this need it is recognized as necessary to have some protection from the effects of mutual broken-heartedness whilst working to dismantle its societal causes. Stuart suggests using the term ‘the erotic’ carries too many phallocentric meanings and offers the word ‘passion’ as an alternative that could better reflect women’s understanding and experience of what constitutes ‘sex’. She argues that the Churches need an expanded view of sex beyond the narrowness of the past and points to examples of erotic friendships written into its own history in the Bible and in Church documents that support an alternative paradigm that is not exclusively heterosexual. Stuart posits that these examples show more acceptance of the fluid nature of socially constructed sexual norms than at the present time. All manner of physical touch, seen as relating, is important and should not be limited to male/female sexual, genital intimacy. Stuart cites the Hite report findings of 1987 to support her argument that the Church needs to take note of the changes in the idea of what constitutes sex in order to theologically and pastorally support people in making sense of their most important relationships. Marriage she claims may not be the only means of supporting a relationship and may not be capable of sustaining it.

Stuart then claims the Christian tradition continues because it is profoundly subversive of heterosexuality, monogamy and family life, finding sexual subversion to be at the heart of the salvation history of the People of Israel and of Jesus’ followers. Indeed she states that history only moves on because of sexual subversion, arguing that whilst words spoken by ‘The Lord’ on sexual matters are ordered to advance heterosexuality, monogamy and family life, the story of the working out of the divine throughout salvation history relied on the complete reversal of that Law of the Lord. God as She (Sophia) is experienced as the passion between people, examples being: the two lovers in the Song of Songs, David and Jonathon, Ruth and Naomi and Jesus and his friends. Stuart points to evidence in church history of liturgies celebrating same-sex unions together with details of penances given for same-sex intimacy; the law and the story carrying differing messages. However, she recognizes that these relationships are also always tragic. Logos, Stuart claims, can never catch or contain Sophia and she urges feminist theologians to continue to grapple with the story and not follow feminist theory to become logocentric and legalistic.

Stuart upholds the Cross as the symbol of passion and a reminder of the fragility of passionate love in a broken world but is mindful that the brokenness is not the end: the resurrection denotes belief in the triumph of relation and passion over disconnection and broken hearts. This she states is a matter of faith based on glimpses of possibilities and is what is celebrated at the Eucharist. Our task is to deal with the tragedy, complexity and pain of passion, with the connection and disconnection at the heart of the cosmos recognizing that the cross and resurrection are intimately linked.

Human Relationships Are Tragic

Reading the paper I wrote 20 years ago is an interesting experience for all sorts of reasons. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge of my personal life since then. I am no longer a full-time academic, for example. When I wrote the piece, Pope John Paul II was in Rome focusing on a very distinctive theology of the body based on male/female complementarity which had extremely negative implications for gay and lesbian people; the Church of England was just getting used to women priests but in an unholy mess on issues of human sexuality. Homosexuality had become the test of theological orthodoxy in many Churches. Queer theory was just beginning to emerge as a distinct discipline. Since then the Roman Catholic Church has been rocked to the core by the issue of child abuse and the Church of England is still rather paralysed by the cat’s cradle of muddle it has woven around itself over homosexuality. However, it is also true that in Rome Pope Francis has struck a rather different tone to the previous two popes on sexuality, if not on gender. In the UK and in many countries across the world equality for lesbian and gay people has been largely achieved even as in other parts of the world it has been rolled back. No respectable academic theology can now be done in the West unless it is informed by feminist and queer theologies.

My thinking on matters of sexuality has developed significantly in the last 20 years although reading through the paper I note that this is largely in terms of the foundations of my thought rather than in terms of the conclusions. In this article I will focus on three interrelated themes: the tragedy of human relating; desire and the non-ultimate nature of gender. But before I do that, as a prelude I want to make the point that in those 20 years I have become highly suspicious of the creation of what one might call alternative orthodoxies. Theologies which construct themselves in tension with dominant orthodoxies often end up creating their own orthodoxies which it is hard to resist. Mark Jordon has argued that repetition is the key to establishing orthodoxies as repetition creates an illusion of naturalness and obviousness. ¹ Jordon was writing about the Vatican’s rhetorical strategy around homosexuality but it is equally true of us, theologians of liberation. We repeat things and they become the sort of things one just has to believe in order be such a theologian e.g. that an emphasis on the divine’s immanence is more libratory than an emphasis on God’s transcendence, the divine can be identified with the erotic, that friendship is the relationship in which mutuality can be most fully realized, that an emphasis on life after death is fundamentally patriarchal, that theologies can and should be based on experience, that the tradition is hetero-patriarchal and has little positive to offer. These have become the un-interrogated foundations of much feminist theology. Thus is ideology created. Ideology is dangerous for all sorts of reasons. Ideologies are based upon and sustained by lazy thinking. One aspect of that lazy thinking is the demonizing of certain groups and effectively blaming them for all that is wrong with the world. It is incredibly easy for liberation movements of any sort to become ideological and the clue to one becoming so is repetitions which become almost unchallengeable. Perhaps I am just a natural heretic but I have become increasingly suspicious of many of these Christian feminist orthodoxies which we repeat as if they are obviously true. Indeed, I no longer believe most of them. Repetitions of all kinds make me highly suspicious, including my own.

The Tragedy of Human Relating

One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.

Willa Cather

The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.

W.B. Yeats

Human relationships are tragic. In 1994 I argued that is largely because we are formed in our relating by those with whom we have previously been in relationship with. We mould each other’s hearts and take the impression of everyone with whom we have been close to into our next relationships. Our hearts are often broken by our previous relationships, going back sometimes to our childhood, and we break the hearts of others with our own brokenness. I argued that only love can heal us and this I still believe, but in 1994 I had greater hope than I do now that that healing, saving love can be provided by another human being. Of course human love can be and often is healing but I now think that all of us from the most conservative pope to the most radical feminist have placed too much faith and expectation in human relations. Whether they are the idealized, supposedly complementary, heterosexual marriage of the conservative or the radical friendships of the lesbian feminist, we have asked them to bear too much: our very salvation, our reunion with the divine. Pope John Paul II argued that the body has a ‘nuptial’ meaning and in marriage, which of course, he defined in entirely heterosexual terms, the partners reveal the full nature of humanity and the nature of the divine. ² Lesbian feminist theologian Carter Heyward defined God as right relationship which she describes broadly as mutuality. She argues that when we engage in relationships based upon mutuality we ‘god’, we bring forth God. ³ In my 1994 paper I argued that the divine should be located not within us, as Audrey Lorde had famously suggested, but between us, ‘we learn that our survival, our happiness, our self-fulfilment lies in connection in interdependence with others’. But there were already clues within my own argument that this may have been to load relationships with too much expectation. I pointed out in that paper that in the Hebrew/Christian Scriptures the working out of the divine will in human history is often achieved, not in relationships which accord with the ideal set out in the Law, but in the passion between people who are often in relationships outwith or not accounted for in the Law, Ruth an Naomi, David and Jonathan, Jesus and John, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, to give some examples. However, I also noted that these relationships always have a tragic dimension to them: David and Jonathan had to part and Ruth had to marry. They do not last. I have since realized that this point is clearly and poignantly made about all relationships, whether within or outwith the Law in John’s account of the resurrection in the encounter between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene. This relationship is at once one which troubles the Law by being not clearly definable and yet in its heterosexuality unpins it. Jesus instructs Mary not to cling to him (John 20:17) which recalls Genesis 2: 24, ‘therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh’. There is no clinging in the resurrection: marriage, heterosexuality, even subversive relationships in which the divine has been clearly evident in the betweenness of persons do not carry over into the new life of the resurrection (Matthew 22: 20). Leo Steinberg observed that artists of the Renaissance, in their desire to emphasize the full humanity of Jesus, tended to portray him with exposed genitals, whether as a tiny baby, a crucified man, or a risen Lord. He noted that in some depictions of the resurrection from this time Jesus is resurrected sexually aroused. ⁴ This device obviously emphasizes the fact that the resurrection was not merely a spiritual matter but fully embodied; it also points towards a desire to be still fully satisfied, not with the woman in the garden nor with any human being, but in God. This is why the woman cannot cling to him. All human relationships, however happy and God-filled, end, even if it takes death to make us part. All relationships are mortal. The grace of connection always cedes before the grace of disconnection – more of that later. Our best relationships can give us a foretaste of the union with the divine but they cannot deliver such a union. There will always be a moment of fracture, even if that moment is death. We expect too much of our relationships if we expect them to deliver anything more than a foretaste, a thirst for oneness with God. They can neither offer the complete complementarity that results in an unfractured image of God nor create the full reality of God between them. Only God can do that. There is, and indeed there must be, something unsatisfactory about all human relations. Failure to recognize that and build expectations accordingly results in idolatry of human relating which in turn leads to unnecessary heartache and premature fracture. Within feminist theology God tends to disappear into relationships with no horizon, no transcendent point from which to be able to assess the true quality of relationship. In this model relationships become privatized and human desire becomes ultimate desire. This puts enormous strain on relationships which as I have noted are inevitably fragile. I think it is dangerous to think that God can be captured or contained in between us.

There is now debate among scholars as to whether sacred prostitution or sacred marriage was ever practiced in the Ancient Near East or whether they were simply part of a religious discourse. ⁵ However, both ancient Judaism and early Christianity as represented in the scriptures were at pains to disassociate themselves from such a discourse. Sex was not necessarily dismissed or denigrated in this strategy but it was clear that it was not regarded as a royal road to unity with the divine. In their noble desire to reverse the denigration of sexual relationships that did take place, in Christianity, both conservatives and radicals have actually come close to suggesting that sex is a route into the divine. But, in reality we all know that sex is too messy to draw such bold conclusions. Sex can be sacramental, it can also be violent, it can be a deep expression of love, or a shallow expression of surface desire, it can be an act of self-giving or a resentful expression of a sense of indebtedness. It can be bought and sold. There is nothing essentially good or holy about sex itself.

However, to say that human relationships are tragic is not to say that they are devoid of grace. Indeed, as Sarah Coakley has recently so clearly demonstrated, theologians have long recognized the close connection between human desire and desire for God. ⁶ There is something of the divine that is communicated in our best relationships that does not merely satisfy our own desires but propels us out of ourselves so that the other can inhabit us so that we are no longer simply ourselves but the other also. It is these relationships we may term sacramental for they reflect the rhythm of the divine which is characterized by the outpouring of the divine self and the return to itself incorporating others within it. These relationships are graced. However, it is impossible to sustain this ecstatic condition in human relating. We easily fall back into self-centredness or have to endure the hurt as our partner does so. We can go from ecstasy to self-absorption, from grace to sin, in a matter of seconds. Connection, disconnection is the rhythm of even the most successful human relationships. I would want to argue that there is grace in disconnection as well as connection, in failure as well as in success. The grace of disconnection lies in the realization that human relationships cannot deliver the permanent opening of the self to the other. It also reveals the longing of that self for transcendence. There is something about human relating and, particularly human sexual relating, that is always unsatisfactory. There is something slippery and fleeting which propels us either into despair or into constant repetition. But there is grace that lies in that dissatisfaction which points beyond itself to the possibility of ultimate satisfaction. In emphasizing the grace of disconnection I am not suggesting that we must simply accept that relationships fail, on the contrary, I think that the idealization of human relationships almost inevitably leads to failure and unhappiness but an appreciation of the grace of disconnection can lead to more stable relationships. If we do not expect our relationships to deliver complete ecstasy, complete union with the other but fleeting experiences of such and if we believe that we encounter the divine within them but not capture it between us we may be more willing to accept the failures of others and indeed our own failure and stick with the relationship recognizing that the opening of the self, of which sexual ecstasy can be a foretaste, takes practice and patience and endless repetition in which the divine can manifest itself. So the tragedy of human relationship is good news. Leonard Cohen famously said ‘there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’. We might say that there is a crack in everything, that’s how the Spirit gets in, fuelling our desire but pointing beyond our human attempts to satisfy it. It is our soul that needs to lose its virginity to become one with the divine.

Desire

Our hearts are ever restless until they find their rest in Thee

Augustine

Since writing the 1994 paper I have engaged in more reflection on the nature of desire in the light of the tragedy of human relating. If desire cannot have its telos, its fulfilment in human relating which is fragile and mortal and yet can enable us temporarily to create room in ourselves for others, then it must point beyond itself and have its end beyond us in God. St Augustine has some helpful insights here. He characterizes the Christian life as ‘an exercise in holy desire’ ⁷ and though, of course, he might find it more difficult than us to associate that holy desire with sexual desire, he did recognize that the human heart is restless and that restlessness is an unconscious desire for God.

And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though I was not with you. ⁸

For Augustine the act of desire is an act of preparation for its fulfilment in God. It is therefore vital to experience desire. He likens it to a wine skin or sack which a person stretches before trying to fill it. So God, by making us wait to fulfil our desire, stretches us, increases our desire and in the process enlarges our soul and prepares it to receive the fullness of the divine. This is itself an expression of God’s desire for us which for Christians is embodied in the outpouring of the divine self in Christ. This is what distinguishes Christian from Platonic mysticism, the notion of God’s ecstatic outpouring. Augustine was clear on this point that God seeks to entice our desire for the divine because God desires us:

You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew my breath and now I pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. ⁹

Our souls respond to God’s love for us. Augustine is obviously drawing on the Song of Songs in this passage and it is clear that he, along with many of the early Church theologians, recognized the divine in the erotic. But the divine was not conceived as being created between persons but enticing souls towards itself through its own self-giving and through our own desire. Our desire depends on a sense of lack. There is something missing which we are trying to fill but which, in truth, we cannot meet. Complete fulfilment is anticipated but never delivered. This is the blank that no human being or any aspect of creation can fulfil. But desire is not merely a blank because in the pleasure of pursuing our desire we may also experience some satisfaction which anticipates ultimate fulfilment. This satisfaction is the experience of ecstasy, of the pouring out of oneself to create space for the other, fleeting though it is. It the blank and the satisfaction, the presence in absence that is the interruption of desire by the divine, the frustration in fulfilment that leaves the trace of the divine as it calls us on to itself. The divine’s desire for us on the other hand comes out of abundance not lack, full satisfaction, not partial fulfilment. This is perfect desire. It is pure excess, purely focused on the other and their fulfilment. Divine Wisdom, we are told ‘pervades and penetrates all things’ (Wisdom 7. 24) inciting desire for her.

Coakley is surely right then when she argues that prayer and contemplation are an essential aspect of desire because it is in prayer we are confronted with the divine’s desire for us and our own desire for the divine and others (in ways that are often mixed up and confused). ¹⁰ Anyone who has seen Bernini’s famous sculpture of St Teresa cavorted in ecstasy as the angel poises to pierce her with its golden spear can be in no doubt that here is a soul caught up in union with the divine but also it is clear that such a union is caught up in and is the rapturous fulfilment of sexual desire. Her friend, St John of the Cross, wrote of the divine as the Lover who waits for the soul, guiding the soul towards it through the desire that burns in the heart of the believer.

  When the breeze blew from the turret,

  as I parted his hair,

  it wounded my neck

  with its gentle hand,

  suspending all my senses.

  I abandoned and forgot myself,

  laying my face on my Beloved;

  all things ceased; I went out from myself,

  leaving my cares

  forgotten among the lilies. ¹¹

The divine Lover entices us through our desire to a state of kenosis, self-emptying, into which the divine pours itself. We are not lost in this act as the divine has prefigured our kenosis by its own in which it has taken us into itself already. We find ourselves in God.

It is also in prayer that the necessary consequences of such an exchange of desire become clear as Gregory of Nyssa noted:

You are the master of your prayer if abundance does not come from another’s property, and it is not the result of another’s tears; if no one is hungry or distressed because you are fully satisfied. For the bread of God is above all the fruit of justice, the ear of the corn of peace, pure and without any admixture of the seeds of tares. ¹²

The connection between desire for the divine and social action is another distinctive element of Christian mysticism. Liturgy too is a school for desire. The Eucharist forms desire by enacting the divine’s desire for us as expressed in Christ: This is my body … take ye all of it and eat it …This is my blood … take and drink ye all of this … It offers us the opportunity to know what it is to be desired from a position of abundance rather than lack whilst at the same time continuing to expand our desire by offering that abundant desire in forms that are fragile and mortal and have to be returned to. The Eucharist ends, bread and wine passes through us. In the sacrament of marriage a couple consciously and explicitly recognize the presence of the divine in their desire for each other and formally commit themselves and their relationship to open themselves to the Holy Spirit so that they may enact in their own lives something of union of Christ and the Church. This requires work, patience and a willingness to repent and start again when things go wrong which they do, all the time. It also depends on the support of the community. The Christian liturgy affirms and incites our desire with the promise of desire fulfilled and satisfied in God. Desire is what propels us towards God. It fuels our yearning for union with the divine and can bring it to the very edge of it but human desire cannot carry us into the beatific vision. The object of Dante’s desire, Beatrice, can lead him out of purgatory and through the nine spheres of heaven and the Empyrean but cannot take him into the presence of God. ¹³ Desire points beyond itself to its telos in God. It is strange that we seem to expect our desires to be fulfilled. We might compare our sexual and relationship desires with our desire for knowledge. We do not expect to ever know everything there is to know but our pleasure in learning is not diminished by the realization that full knowledge is never going to be available to us in our lifetime. Indeed, this realization adds to the sustained enjoyment of learning and to intellectual curiosity. Recognizing that our desires will not be completely fulfilled in our human relationships or in this life is not to dismiss their significance or to diminish their importance in our lives but simply to recognize that they are part of a much larger and longer endeavour, indeed the ultimate endeavour.

When I wrote my paper in 1994 I would not have imagined that 20 years later most of the structured inequalities related to sexual orientation in the UK would have been removed and same-sex couples would enjoy full equality including legal marriage. It is, of course, wonderful that so much change has come so quickly. However, I have concerns that now that any adult can get married the celibate will be marginalized. These are not recent concerns, the positive approach to the body and marriage that Pope John Paul II adopted which seemed to suggest, much like Karl Barth before him, that men and women can only participate in the divine life through marriage worried me. The marginalization of the celibate seems to be gathering velocity and I believe that this would be tragic for the Church. Celibacy has functioned as both a repressive and emancipatory practice particularly for women in the history of Christianity. But freely chosen celibacy creates a vitally important alternative space for desire and for discipleship. The celibate reminds the Church that in a context when almost anyone can get married Christian discipleship cannot be reduced to marriage and family life. And, of course, the celibate testifies in their bodies and lives that desire has its true telos in God. Christian history has pretty consistently presented two models of discipleship: marriage and monasticism. Eugene Rogers argues that both are a form of asceticism involving self-sacrifice and restraint for the purpose of preparing the soul for God. ¹⁴ The celibate, no less than the married, has to practice hospitality of the soul and find their way to the brink of the beatific vision through a concentration of their desire. The celibate no more than the non-celibate gets to the point of a permanent fulfilment of desire in this life. The most they can hope for is fleeting moments of union. Yet in their particular commitment the celibate reminds us that sex and relationships cannot save us and that discipleship and moral, holy living cannot be collapsed into marriage and family life (however conceived). For that reason, the Church needs celibates and society as a whole needs celibates particularly as more people are rightly admitted to the institution of marriage.

The Phantom of Gender

Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act …

Judith Butler

The most radical way in which my thought has changed since I wrote the 1994 paper is methodologically. I now believe that most of the concepts upon which my theological reflection in that paper was based are actually not stable enough to do theology upon. In 1994, I was attempting to do theology based upon experience. Drawing upon the methodological approach of liberationist theologies I was seeking to claim a space in the theological project for those who had been excluded from it, particularly lesbian and gay people. This was a noble aspiration and worthwhile enterprise because it exposed the extent to which theology had been dominated by hetero-patriarchal approaches. However, even as I was engaged in this enterprise I became increasingly uncomfortable with it. First, I was concerned that theologies of experience appeared to disappear God into experience with the danger that the experience no longer has any transcendent horizon with which to critique itself. Furthermore, theology seemed to be reduced to hermeneutics and/or ethics and ceased to be theology at all. Second, I became aware as a theologian who tried to do theology based upon experience that this was actually impossible. One could only ever generalize based upon some people’s experience while ignoring and silencing the experience of others. I did this myself often but most notably in my work on friendship. I argued that lesbian and gay people tend to define their primary relationships in terms of friendship rather than marriage and that therefore we need to recover and develop a theology of friendship. The rush to civil partnership and then marriage in the UK by gay and lesbian people demonstrates how wrong I was! And even though at the time there was evidence upon which to base my claim, I knew that in order to build up my theology I was going to have to ignore those people who told me and others the exact opposite. This seemed antithetical to the aims of a theology of liberation. Third, theologies of experience seemed to be becoming increasingly ghettoized, incapable of speaking meaningfully to those beyond that experience and therefore detached from the wider Christian community. I was invited to a high level and confidential meeting of theologians to discuss the ‘gay issue’ in a particular Church. It was during that meeting that it became clear to me that theologies based upon experience would only ever get us so far. They were good at consciousness raising and affirming the experience of oppressed and marginalized groups but they were not effective in changing hearts and minds beyond those groups. I realized at that meeting that the only theological resource that the Christians gathered there had in common was the Christian tradition and how foolish it had been for theologians like me to abandon the tradition and leave it in the hands of conservatives. I resolved then to take the tradition more seriously and to endeavour to find other ways of doing theology around these issues.

The opportunity came through engagement with Judith Butler and Queer Theory. Butler argued that feminism had made a fundamental mistake in basing itself on the foundational notion of ‘woman’ which is essentially related to the female body. She suggested that there is no natural connection between sex, gender and desire. They are fundamentally unstable. Indeed, she famously suggested that gender is not some natural category but an act, a performance. We unconsciously perform the scripts that society hands out to us, scripts of maleness and femaleness and in the process learn what it means to be a man or woman. But some people do not perform these scripts very well or refuse to perform them. These people reveal the scripts for what they are. Butler pointed out that the parodic performance of gender by drag queens or by butch and femme lesbians clearly exposed the scripts. It was possible for some men to perform femaleness as convincingly as women and some women to perform maleness as well as men. These people cause gender trouble and reveal the fundamental instability of all forms of identity. ¹⁵ Furthermore, Butler contended that the concept of the self in modernity was based upon foreclosure of certain forms of desire so that the person is in a state of unconscious grief for love which can never been realized. The concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality both foreclose desire and result in a deep cultural melancholia, a grief and a yearning for a love beyond fulfilment. Butler seemed to me to have stumbled upon an ancient and deep theological truth that in Christ there is no male and female (Galatians 3: 28). I came to the conclusion that there was indeed a persistent strand in the Christian tradition which claimed that the Church, Christ’s body, was one in which every identity except one was of a non-ultimate nature and therefore should have no place within it. Following Rowan Williams I came to understand baptism as a means by which we are incorporated into a new humanity which requires us not to belong to the identities which we thought we belonged to and to refuse to follow the scripts that belong to those identities. ¹⁶ It is interesting that in the Tridentine rite of the Easter Vigil the prayer that accompanies the blessing of the baptismal water notes that those who will be immersed in the waters will emerge as ‘new creatures’ and ‘heavenly offspring’ and asks that ‘all who are distinguished either by sex in body or by age in time, may be brought forth to the same infancy by grace, their mother’. As an aside it is interesting to note that this prayer focuses on sex and on age. Theology has not much concerned itself with ageism and yet with the population in the West increasingly aging, it will have to shortly. In the Church there may be no young and old. The Church then is the only community under a direct (and divine) mandate to subvert the gender scripts society gives us, to refuse to simply repeat them but to perform in ways that expose their non-ultimacy. The Church is a queer community and Christianity is a queer thing. This means that there is not space in the Church for discrimination against women or gay or lesbian or transgendered people and that the Church is a call to embody this new humanity in amidst contemporary culture. Furthermore, it is the only community which recognizes and names the melancholia at the root of so much of our culture – desire unfulfilled, not merely because it is constrained within scripts but also because it can never be fulfilled by human relating.

The tradition provided a rich vein of queerness which demonstrated the folly of leaving it as the preserve of the conservatives. Jesus is born male of no male matter. He transposes himself into the non-gendered bread and wine. Ephesians construct the male Christ with a female body (the Church) which is in fact a body of many genders. ¹⁷ According to Marcella Althaus-Reid the Virgin Mary may be the queerest figure in Christianity, the virgin who gives birth to a son who is also her father and her spouse, and who becomes the mother of us all. ¹⁸ The early Church theologian Gregory of Nyssa conceived the journey of the Christian soul to the restoration of its prelapsarian state as one in which the soul moves into a non-gendered state through the performance of maleness and femaleness. The tradition is full of stories of saints changing gender and of members of religious order taking names of the opposite gender. The Cistercians, in particular, imaged Jesus as their mother and also referred to their abbots in maternal terms. ¹⁹ It was really only in the modern period that notions of sexuality and gender became fixed and solidified. Theologically speaking, we should be moving beyond gender and sex. Neither can save us and indeed our flourishing depends upon us refusing to give them any ultimacy. We have to focus instead on what godly relating looks like in all kinds of circumstances. What kind of life do we have to live in order to ensure that our desire leads us to God?

As Andrew Greeley has noted, ‘in an enchanted world, the beloved is both enchanting and frustrating’. ²⁰ Since 1994 I have come to appreciate the grace of that frustration, of disconnection, as well as the grace of connection, in pointing beyond itself to the divine in which all our desires reach their ultimate end, their telos, and fulfilment. There are fault lines that run through our human relating, our constructions of sexuality and gender and indeed our own theological constructions that lift our eyes to a divine horizon. Sex is not a means of salvation but it is caught up in the drama and dance of salvation. If union with the divine can only be enjoyed in a fleeting manner in this life and sexuality can provide a messy, muddled but nevertheless, authentic and significant foretaste of this union then we need to turn our attention to the space in which that fulfilment will take place. Very little feminist theology has been devoted to life after death and what this may mean. Generally it is one of the feminist theological orthodoxies that life after death is a patriarchal concept. I can appreciate that it has been used in oppressive ways but fail to understand why the concept itself must be dismissed, why it should necessarily distract from concerns with injustice in this life. It amuses me that theologies which claim to be rooted in human experience shy away from dealing from about a common as an experience as you can get and it angers me that those theologians of liberation who want to treat death as only a natural phenomenon bringing an end to all life tend to be those who have every chance of living a long and comfortable life. I would want to argue that death presents the promise of desire finally fulfilled, of God and humanity at one, a space beyond sex and gender, beyond the frustration and tragedy of human relating.