Morality or Illness?

You know how sometimes, in a word or a phrase, or in a picture, or in a moment – suddenly something becomes clear? Archimedes “Eureka”? Oprah’s less durable “Aha” moment? Well, it happened to me yesterday in conversation with a friend. It was what she said that gave me that moment of clarity.

We had been discussing an article that I and a colleague had written nine years ago, in a little known Festschrift for Albert Nolan. It was called “Oil and Water: the impossibility of Gay and Lesbian identity within the Church”.

This long-forgotten article has suddenly re-surfaced the other day. It was found a by an apparently not unsympathetic cleric, who is attached to the University of Cape Town, and who is valiantly trying to “listen” to LGBTI people in the “conversation” which the church is presently supposed to be having on the Gay issue.

The article had given him quite a shock,apparently. Because it is completely uncompromising and unforgiving. Both I and my Lesbian colleague described, in some fairly graphic detail, the journey we had taken to get us to this place. We decided not to pull any punches and consequently, the piece is fairly candid.

And that was that for a very long time. It seemed to have been studiously ignored, until now, when a shocked Dean of Studies from the University of Cape Town stumbled across it and raised the alarm. He is, I understand, one of the few Evangelical Anglicans around who is willing to even consider the issue.

So, I was talking to my friend about how it is that this, out of all the things I have written and said about the Church, should become the focus of concern? I have had “controversial” views on a range of things, and I have written extensively about them. But this is the area where the alarm persistently gets raised.

The article said, in brief, that sex should not be determinative of relationship. That there are other things much more significant than sex, which determine and define relationships. That of itself, sex is not particularly significant and should not be held as the grounds to decide anything at all.

And specifically with regard to homosexuality, we argued that a church which was entirely and disastrously hetero-normative cannot expect homosexuals to simply buckle under and accept (or even worse – promote!) hetero-normative standards and ideas. Because time has proved these to be changeable things in themselves and that the path chosen by the church is both unrepresentative of the human reality and disastrous in its own right.

So, if there is to be a “discussion” or a “debate” or “listening” to LGBTI people, then it has to consist of much more than the one side happily talking to itself, while the other side stands obediently silent. If the church wants to listen to the experience of Gay and Lesbian people, then it needs to accept the possibility that its present hetero-normative paradigm regarding sexuality might be so seriously flawed as to be worthy of being dumped. And if that is not at least a possibility, then the conversation is not worth having.

My friend then made the point which sharpened my perspective. She said this: She said that the view of the Church is essentially the view of an addict. When a food addict is at a party, they will know what every person in the room has eaten; they will note each time a person returns to be buffet table and they will observe what has been placed on the plate. An alcoholic will know where the liquor is in every house they visit. They will know where the liquor store is in every suburb. They will know the alcoholic content of every drink.

It is an obsession. It is a sickness. It is something which takes over rational thinking and distorts it and twists it and produces a view of reality which is profoundly dis-ordered. It shows itself in the kinds of decisions which have been made protecting priests who are paedophiles. It shows itself in the way in which parts of the church have handled intersex people. It shows itself in the discrimination which of Gay and Lesbian people in the church routinely endure. It is an obsession. It is an illness. It is not wholesome.

It cannot be expected that Gay and Lesbian people have any responsibility to protect this obsession, or to perpetuate it. It cannot be expected that we have any reason to tolerate or entertain a system of wrongdoing which is so clearly and obviously distorted, in its view of reality.
So when the Church tells us that they want to “listen” to us – then that is what they need to do. It needs to start by shutting up and allowing us to say what we need to say. It needs to start by dumping the sanitized and doctored versions of tame homosexuals who actually believe that the homosexual orientation is something less glorious than the heterosexual one. They are the “Bantustan leaders” on the sexual map. They are the “Uncle Toms”.

If the Church is not willing to accept that LGBTI people can teach it a new and better way of being the Church, then frankly, they should just stop talking. It is wasting everyone’s time. Because the sickness lies within the Church, not elsewhere.

The article I refer to above is in:

Spekman MT & Kaufmann LT (eds) Towards an Agenda for Contextual Theology. Essays in Honour of Albert Nolan. Pietermaritzburg, Cluster Publications, 2001.

Garner H and Worsnip M, "Oil and Water: The impossibilility of Gay and Lesbian identity within the Church".

Making a saint out of Newman

I have to say, I have watched the recent scenes of the visit of Benedict the 16th to the United Kingdom, with some amazement. Besides the screams, the adulation, the mumbled apologies and exchange of pleasantries, the highlight was the beatification of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Personally, I have not a single doubt in my mind that he should be recognised. If sainthood provides the context for that to be done – then so be it, and jolly good luck to it. At university, I read his works and they inspired me. I changed my perspective fairly fundamentally because of him. As a student, I read his “Apologia pro vita sua”. And found it both moving and profound.

But until very recently, I had missed something fairly essential about the man. He had a long term relationship with another priest, by the name of Fr Ambrose St John. They lived together for a considerable period of time and it was Newman’s express wish to be buried with him.

His desire was very clear and unambiguous. On no less than three occasions, he indicated it, in writing. The last time, a few months before his death in 1890.

“I wish with all my heart to be buried in the grave of Fr Ambrose St John. I give this as my last, my imperative will.”

On the death or Fr Ambrose, Newman wrote the following:

"I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine”.

He had waited some 15 years to be buried with his beloved. This was no will-o’-the-wisp. It was obviously something very clearly thought out. It was something he wanted very passionately.

Two years ago, in preparation for making him a saint – the Vatican gave the order for him to be disinterred and to leave any remains of Fr Ambrose in situ, and to remove Newman’s remains to the Birmingham Oratory.

On opening the grave, very little was found. Some hair, apparently, and a brass plaque with his name. The coffin was a wooden one and the ground wet.

Since discovering this, I have to say my mind has played on it a lot. I am left aghast at the sheer arrogance of it all. Newman had expressed his will in the clearest terms imaginable. Yet the Vatican decided that his body should be elsewhere. I understand that moving the bodies of saints – or people soon to be saints – is “traditional” (whatever that might mean!).

Now, obviously, I think it is at this stage impossible to prove conclusively that Cardinal (now “Blessed”) John Henry Newman and Ambrose St John were lovers. But it certainly looks likely. And one would not need to be a member of the “homosexual lobby” to come to such a likely conclusion, based on the evidence which is already at hand. Whether or not they remained celibate is another matter entirely and, from my perspective anyway, has little bearing on the substance of the enquiry.

But for the church to simply extract elements of his life which they like – and make a big hullabaloo about them and sanctify him because of them, while ignoring other equally significant elements, is sheer cynical manipulation of the facts. Indeed, the same could be said for the way that the church generally does its theology. It parades the easy bits and ignores the more difficult, as a matter of course.

But there is a problem with doing this, because eventually common sense (or science, or history) will catch up with it and expose it as fraud, as it has already, on so many other issues. The secularism of the United Kingdom, which the Pope seems to find so problematic, is in fact not only a consequence of the church’s continued fraudulent theological thinking, but represents a triumph of progress and rational thinking over idiocy and ignorance.

The only way in which this could be seen to be problematic is if one had some kind of vested interest in keeping people stupid, by denying the facts. Such as the facts about HIV/Aids; contraception; women; abortions etc etc. Oh, and did I neglect to mention the historical prevalence of gay and lesbian people within the ranks and hierarchy of the church itself?

On the tombstone where John Henry Newman and Ambrose St John lay buried for just shy of one hundred years, was written the following:

“Out of the shadows and phantasms, into the truth”.

Maybe one day, a long time from now, society will write the same on the grave of the church itself.