Cooking the Curate’s Egg

So, where has the C of E got to this week on Ministry and gender?
Assuming Les Six have done their stuff, an amended scheme will go before the General Synod in a few days time.

Down the road leading here two mantras have pullulated behind the discussion:

(1) “This isn't, of course, about gender. Perish the Thought.”
This assertion is a lie. It is, and it always was. Discriminatory is as discriminatory does. It is not for the discriminator to judge the matter, based on their intentions, but those discriminated against, based on what actually happens. All else is illusion.

(2) “This is about theology not discrimination.”
This assertion is a lie. However you tart it up, Trevor Huddleston showed us years ago, discriminating is actually a theological assertion. Imagine, as I have attempted sincerely to do, that there is a theology that justifies treating women, against their will and calling, as inferior. I can't conceive of such a thing, but let's suspend disbelief for a moment. What is the difference between that noble theology and cultural prejudice dressed in voodoo? At no time in the past five years has anyone showed me. All that unites reactionaries in this matter seems to be a cultural prejudice against seeing women in positions of authority, reinforced by a reactionary subculture. It is every bit as much drawn from the contemporary world’s values as progressive aspiration. It’s just drawn from the reactionary quarter of them.

So, for synod members, it’s what one game show used to call make-up-your-mind-time, for the next five years anyway.

If the Church needs a gender-neutral ministry, something the vast majority of people believe to be right, this scheme does not deliver that. It is fundamentally inequitable and discriminatory. The best condoms do not have holes in them, however small. There is no telling what monstrous births may take place in the various caves of Adullam this measure potentially creates. It could be a step in the right direction, but it will retain the Church’s institutional sexism in a way most people outside the bubble find puzzling and, ultimately, morally disgusting.

If what matters most is the lesser matter of allowing women to be bishops, this scheme does finagle that. In itself the eventual presence of women in the house of bishops might be able to achieve what the present set-up couldn’t for the institution, and plug the hole in the bucket. In a down and dirty world this won't be the first time in human affairs tulips were grown on dung.

As to the leadership of the Church in synod, a lifetime of pretending, whilst trying to set their course on dead reckoning and politics with only an occasional star sight, scarcely prepares them to exercise moral leadership at a critical moment. Most episcopal palaces are emitting a loud and eloquent silence now. Many of our senior men probably thought on Monday that all they were doing was giving the women what they wanted whilst being as nice as possible to the other lot. That's why you can't see them for dust now.

It’s Touch and Go, I’d say.

Swimmin with the Wimmin part 94

So what was the women bishops result? I don’t really know, of course, not being part of the house of bishops, but preliminary indications are pretty much that things can roll forward. Bishop Pete Broadbent, who sits in the House, has provided a good thumbnail summary.

The result, in true C of E fashion, is a curate’s egg, but probably not such a rotten one as to send the whole process around again in five years time. The Bishops said “yes,” mainly because anything else would be ludicrous now. The number of people requiring alternative episcopal oversight has dipped in most of the country, very likely, below 2-3% of electoral roll members — something like 0·06% of the population. Another circuit to land in 5 years time would not yield a different result, and certainly not one more congenial to those who believe women do not belong in positions of episcopal authority.

But, some inquire, what exactly does the press release Ruth Gledhill called “the worst written since the Reformation” actually mean?

The project basically moves forward with two amendments. I will now attempt to pick through the entrails. If I am wrong, please correct me. But this is what I think it means...

(1) The first amendment expresses the slightly donnish theological distinction Rowan pushed at the last general synod between “delegated” power, a legal thing, and what could be called ordinary episcopal authority. Thus when I ordain people I am understood to derive my authority to do so from my ordination as a bishop, not from the Bishop of Oxford let alone his gene pool. This has the benefit of expressing traditional ecclesiology in the way that the flying bishops project never did.

The distinction is supposed to help on two fronts. Those who believe higher clergy need male gonads can comfort themselves in the knowledge that their guy got all of his regular authority to function from the admittedly nebulous entity called “the whole church of God,” not the XX bishop up the road. On the other front the Chromosomally Simplistic One can reassure herself that she got her authority from the same place and did not lose any of her episcopal Mojo in order to placate the XY-only people. Their arrangements were a merely legal fandango.

In itself this amendment was probably necessary to move forward at all, given the situation created by the Act of Synod from 1993. Unlike the nineties flying bishops arrangement, at least this amendment is ecclesiologically coherent, and it could help normalise perceptions from a theological point of view. The extent to which ordinary people (in the non-ecclesiastical sense of that term) know or care about it may well be limited.

(2) A second amendment requires bishops to have serious regard, when allocating clergy, to the reasons parishes require bishops or priests with gonads.

On the face of it this is common sense. If people want a male because the Eucharist must be celebrated by someone who shares Jesus’ biological gender (if not his Jewishness or Beard), they get a Real Man of the Eucharist. If on the other hand they believe that God Made Woman not to hold any authority over men in Church (unless an Archdeacon or Supreme Governor), then what matters isn’t the Eucharist, but that women don’t preach to other men. In effect these latter want a proper male preacher, having often in past times had an Oxbridge blue in some Manly Pastime. Just remember this is nothing to do with gender, and that this second amendment, kindly and sensibly, requires a proper match in this matter.

Is the Church going to remain a discriminatory organisation, with a thinning theological figleaf to cover its vulnerability? Truth compels me to say, probably yes. In Brer Rabbit terms the old deal was that the buses were not segregated, and as long as the whites who believed in segregation on biblical grounds sat at the front, they could kid themselves that there weren't blacks at the back of the bus. This has now been modified. The driver can soon be black, and those who believe in Biblically based separate development can either stare out the window sideways or comfort themselves that they only have to look on the back of the driver's head. This scheme could well be a way to bring women bishops onshore from places like Oz, New Zealand, Canada, and the US. That's progress, I suppose. Intellectually, it’s not quite desegregation. But do not underestimate the power of evolution. We wouldn't be having this discussion if Evolution didn’t work.

In the meanwhile my picking over the entrails mattereth not a pig’s burp. There is a special Group of Six Wise Ones (including one woman) who will now pick over the entrails to decide whether this is too radical a change to go forward. I wouldn’t think that's too risky a bet, but the C of E is a place loaded with surprising possibilities. If Les Six do decide this amended scheme won’t blow all the fuses on the Enterprise, everything rolls onward to York in June. Get that old ecclesiastical anorak out of the cupboard and tighten your underwear. The Monstrous Regiment is at the gates.

The Plain Truth (100 words)

Read the comments and weep. Everybody outside the Bubble sees that this is about discrimination. The C of E as a discriminatory body is running hard over thin air, way off a cliff that used to be there. What yesterday's synod debate demonstrated clearly is that binloads of dense legal verbiage actually obstructs understanding and mutual communication. Better just sit down, talk and arrange matters, like they have everywhere else in the world. It's the Gospel way. If this ludicrous Sir Humphrey approach is all that's possible, at least try and keep the legalese simple, brief & to the point.

Communal Bath House manners

Interesting times down the local Hammam this morning. Cultural interaction, this being a local rather than tourist bath house, was fascinating. Women whom we would think prudish because they wouldn’t walk down the street in a skimpy top and shorts found our female Western insistence on wearing a top in a wholly female bath house weird and prudish. So what is, actually, “prudish?” what is “natural?” Another conversation with someone local who had been to London posed a question —“why do you need millions of security cameras in England? Here, most people, most of the time, know God will be angry with them if they steal, so they don’t” — a naïve point of view, perhaps, but indicative of another cultural gap?

Back to the Public Bath House. Hammams conserve water and combines the advantages of a shower and a bath — you open your pores and relax like a bath with steam (aided by gommage = mud scrub if you want) but refresh and get rid of the dirt like a shower. The whole notion of a community bath house is a bit odd to our very privatised Western sensibilities. Being bloky and throwing water over ourselves was a lot of fun and we all wish we'd taken the plunge (except there isn't a plunge to take) earlier in the week.

I came away feeling that how we interpret and understand gender are the finest tuned most personal bits of our cultural conditioning, and the easiest to get wrong. Absolutising them is ridiculous. They live within our comfort zones and evolve all the time. It’s all too easy to assume we know that the other person is being liberated or oppressed when all they are being is themselves! Observing gender interactions in an Eastern culture also throws some of the context of the Bible into perspective, as a near Eastern text.

To respond to God in others, we need to listen carefully, reducing our interpretative filters and assumptions to a working minimum, defocusing on our own reactions and respecting their provisionality. We need to express ourselves openly but courteously, suspending our disbelief about the other person’s culture. Then we need to draw gentle and provisional conclusions. That’s how cross cultural sensitivity works, and seeing the different strategies people have for straddling cultures, it’s plain Christianity in an open Cross-cultural environment feels very different to the way it does from an Imperialistic ( = Chauvinstic and standardized) standpoint.

Early Christianity grew best at points of cross-cultural intersection, the open ports and trading system nodes of the near East; so an age of globalised communications should be fertile soil for the authentic article... What has to change in us for this to be the case?

Man and Superman with Richard Rohr

Thursday begun with an excellent Bible Study on Gensis 3 by Bishop Wolfgang Hüber, (Ratsvorsitzender EKD, Berlin). The afternoon was taken up with some rather extraordinary learning about the meaning of gender and life with Richard Rohr, Franciscan and all round good guy from Albuquerque, USA. In addition to establishing a reputation as a weltberühmt Enneagram Wonk, he has done some serious thinking about the meaning of being male. I listened up and I learned this, I think.

As a priest, the young Fr Rohr noticed around him, inside and outside Church, men with a desperate need for father figures, and a sense of spiritual hunger and disconnectedness.

A rather listless and irresponsible, shallow sense of maleness pervaded the US tribe. Responding to that as a Catholic priest and a Franciscan, he has developed a way of understanding what this is about, and what to do about it.

So here’s the deal. We all have to grow up, as mind, body and emotions learn from reality — experience that yields increasing wisdom. Women have the same learning to do as men, but it helps instill realism within them that physical processes, menstruation, child-bearing, and menopause, entail regular inescapable engagement with corporeal reality. It’s harder for women to kid themselves they are superman. This doesn’t mean all women get it all the time, but it makes it easier for most of them to get it, most of the time. Men have to learn the hard way what their lives are about, and who they are, and how to live in a way that is understanding, confident, truthful and fruitful.

The meaning of men’s lives falls into two necessary phases, a survival dance to establish themselves and a sacred dance, to express fulfil the purpose for which God created them. In basic societies challenges are all around to enable young men to show off whilst becoming increasingly aware of how to handle the business of life as men. Male role models at hand show the way. The process is often expressed, sealed and celebrated by rites of passage in which the young man is wounded or humiliated, and has to show he can handle it — forgive me, Richard Rohr, for putting it this way, but a kind of Lion King process is how people learn to accept responsibility and move from survival dance to sacred dance.

The effect of living in Western societies, with their high levels of detachment from nature, easy availability of information, spiritual immaturity and fantasy, with material abundance and ease, is to prolong male adolescence. Average ages for achieving its goals are rising fast, currently to a mid thirties average. A few are forced there early by traumatic experiences like loss of a parent, chronic illness, or poverty. Some never make it.

Most sail on, playing the games of the survival dance, posing for anyone silly enough to be impressed, sometimes until their fifties and beyond, as though the one with the most toys at the end of the game wins. Life is consumed in emotionally immature, driven, acquisitive, and ultimately irresponsible behaviour. Hearts and minds are not connected up right, if at all, and men become anxious and withdrawn from life — vain and shallow, incapable of being what God created them to be. A young man who cannot cry is a savage, an old man who cannot laugh is a fool. We have plenty of both out there. Often the transition from survival dance to sacred dance comes from a mid-life experience, and is sealed by an experience of loss, such as career collapse, first marriage failure or bereavement — some place where the game breaks down, and men become aware of their limitations, capacity to feel and humanity.

Most men engaged in the survival dance are disdainful or disconnected from religion; they get by in life pragmatically on limited wisdom. Their lives exhibit spiritual emptiness, insensitivity, and an occasional will to acquire (as fast as possible) secular or sacred ideologies in shallow ways that shore up the ego temporarily but are ultimately silly, meaningless and unreal. Men with a streak of cruelty know how to acquire power, but not how to use it. This is the way to gross abuse. All great spirituality tells you what to do with your pain. If you cannot transform it, you will transmit it to your wife, children and others around you; and you'll be the last to know what you're really doing. If anything disturbs you, you cover up and lie.

Religion can articulate and enable people to access human and spiritual reality — a supreme expression of the sacred dance. Unfortunately it also provides games and routines which are easy to take as the metier for survival dances. Rather than engaging with reality, religion can be made an insulation against reality. People can enter into religions and use them to shore up personal insecurity, in a passionate but immature way. This is desperation and paranoia, more than connection with God or creation.

In this state, Devotion becomes immature, driven and even paranoid; this is the world of parade ‘n trophy religion with its manifold opinionated fundamentalisms. Most men shun such religion, but a few embrace one of its many forms in absolutist ways. You can tell this process is going on, not by the content of their belief systems, but by the unreflective, obsessional and immature ways in which young men follow such faiths. One tell tale sign that this is going on is a disconnect between religion and spirituality.

Men who make it through the survival dance to the sacred dance have met their fears and fantasies and achieved, in the main, a state of realism where they mostly know their strengths and know themselves. From that unfolds deeper knowledge of God. Men engaged on the sacred dance become increasingly open to wisdom, and do not have to prove their validity to themselves all the time, because it is real enough to them to be able to own it joyfully and truthfully. Faith which integrates spirituality and religion is an articulation of this sense of belonging, and a framework to support real living.

I find Rohr’s hypothesis fascinating. Is he right, or is he right?!

Elizabeth Tudor — Lust for Glory

The Flicks with Stewart (at his request) yesterday to see Cate Blanchett do Elizabeth I. It's very different from her first outing in the role. She’s amazing, but more Flora Robson/ Mrs Thatcher than last time round. Cinematography & design are sumptuous. The script is lousy. Is it historical? The Chronology of Raleigh’s marriage ain’t, and Sir Walter does unhistorical Errol Flynn duty. It’s a simple binary Catholic/Protestant world with no awareness of Elizabeth’s religion the way it was, defined against popular Protestantism.

Has Blackadder the Second ruined the genre? There’s a flat pack Osama-like Philip of Spain who seems to spend all day down the Cathedral, shadowing a procession of a dozen Cardinals, who maintain their group cohesion like Kenyans on a training run, tripping out on Dago devotions. His Catholic Majesty strides purposefully around, with the air of a man looking for the rest room, or an exit. He also has a Chucky like daughter with a ghastly Mrs Thatcher doll. Off in England his shifty Jesuitical henchmen, mysteriously, seem to spend most of their working time tie-dying bedsheets red. Elizabeth treats herself to quality time down the health spa with the girlies from the office and has, weirdly, a Mini-Me who pootles nonchalantly around the Throne on state occasions, like the little chaps on Fort Boyard. Historical? Nah.

If, however, a myth is a made up story which gets the facts over, this is a historical melodrama steeped in authentic fantasy. Its ambience is what Gilly Goolden used to call “old toffee soaked in turpentine and strained through a tramp’s sweaty vest.” Cate is extraordinary, and, incredibly, almost manages to carry off the Clotheshorse Gloriana / Mrs Thatcher (3rd time mention)/ Menopausal Bridget Jones/ Boddice ripping thing. This film probably doesn’t quite work, and won’t be getting any Oscars, but it perishes in a noble and unusual quest.

PS You need to work out why the gun wasn’t loaded, or you won't actually understand the Mary Queen of Scots bit. (Tip for parents of 12 year olds)
PPS Since we’ve only got to 1590 there's still time for us male Cate fans of a certain age to see if she can make William Shakespeare blush in a notional part 3 (sponsored by a prostate charity?). This one get four stars out of five, for effort and design. Shame about the script.