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Veronica Brady
from Proceedings of The Inaugural Conference Conference
of Australia Reforming Catholics, 2002
Let me begin by remembering where we are, on the land of the Garigal
people. Nor was it once but still is their land. We are the only former
British colony which never made a treaty with the indigenous peoples of the
land to which we came. We are on sacred land, on land which has been celebrated
and prayed upon by its indigenous peoples where God has spoken.
But since Tissa has spoken about young people and the unchurched, let
me begin with some lines by a friend of mine, an academic, a poet who has never
darkened the door of a church. This is the very first entry in a collection of
ideas and poems he gave me last night. It leads, I think, however, into my
subject, gender:
Life is defined by those who lose
Because by losing they discover the point
At which loss becomes
possible, indeed necessary.
There are those who live on edges,
The
edges of language, of politics
And, I would add, of the holy Catholic
Church
Of life itself.
Haunters of frontiers, they can’t be
safe
Because safety is death.
They risk all to find out what it is that
they have
They live between borders in no-person’s land.
It is
only by losing that we are given ourselves.
Those who in this way have
themselves completely
Are terrifying because they have lost everything.
My subject is Gender and the Sense of the Faithful which I would
like to approach from an inclusive position - there has been far too much
‘male-bashing’ in my view. Let me start with a proposition by Julia
Kristeva: ‘This “situation of women” raises questions more
generally about the way we represent and define ourselves and our search for
meaning and value’.
I want to argue that these binary divisions which underlie the
oppositions between male and female are ridiculous, nonsensical, non-Christian
and out of touch with reality. As the Macquarie Dictionary points out, gender
is essentially a grammatical term, that is a way of ordering reality, not
‘reality’ itself. It has to do with a set of classes, a system of
classification, which means that it is part and parcel of our present
epistemological foundation - the way we think about ourselves and about the
world. I am woman and some of you are men, just as some of us are
‘white’, others are ‘brown’ or ‘black’ or belong
to cultures which we call ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern’,
‘Christian’ or ‘Muslim’. Ad so on. However, we tend to
think we are the norm and everybody else the exception so that if they all
became like us all will be well. That is nonsense, however, in social and
biological terms but above all theologically.
We move now to what we mean by ‘the sense of the faithful’ -
our reflection throughout the ages of the meaning of God’s gift to us in
Jesus. As Tissa says, God has also spoken through Buddha, Mohammed and other
religious traditions. But we believe there is a special revelation in Jesus.
This sense of the faithful then is a great and noble tradition, if we really
understand what it is as many of us have been privileged to do, growing up
loving Mother Church - who sometimes now disappoints us - though we still, most
of us, love her. We grew up with a sense of mystery, for instance, and we
grieve for its loss. That is why I now want to draw on the work of Balthazar, a
theologian who was preoccupied with aesthetics, the beauty of God. According to
him, the problems we have today should always become more luminous in the light
of the great mystery of God, that mystery of what we don’t know, we
can’t know. Finally, he argues all problems can be contained within the
light of that mystery. As he goes on: ‘We don’t grasp the truth
without being grasped by what is the truth.’ Is-ness, if you like. As
Shakespeare says: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of and our little
life is rounded with a sleep’. ‘A faithful response to this truth and
being grasped by it’, Balthazar argues, ‘constitutes the community of
those of us who have been gifted with the call to live in faith, hope and love,
and called also to share this gift.’ As one of my sisters, Sister
Christine Burke, points out: ‘It is not that the Church has a mission, but
God’s mission has a Church’. We are then figured and shaped by the
fact that we are called into this mystery and this mission and sifted by it. In
its light the problems facing us today dissolve. Take, for example, the
challenge posed by the new understanding of the world given us by contemporary
science which suggests that the whole cosmos (of which we are part) has been
evolving, stage by stage, from the Big Bang onwards towards some great fullness
of life and energy, at each stage reaching just the point necessary to carry it
on to the next stage. In this sense our genes go back to that original Big
Bang. Surely this great vision of God, of the is-ness of things (and is-ness
was amongst us in Jesus and still works in other ways in his Spirit) gives us a
vision of God, a sense of the faithful: worthy of what I might call the
“goodness of God”. In it there is no room for the egoism, the
divisions, the violence, the individualism of contemporary culture.
This brings us back to the idea of gender as division. Whatever our
anatomical differences, or differences in social position and power, they have
to do with the economy of God’s creation which is infinitely various. To
refer to the passage I quoted to begin with, however, it is perhaps easier for
those who are powerless, live on the edges - where many, if not most, women
live - to be aware of this. That, I suspect is why Alicia Ostriker can write:
‘I am concerned with the question of what will happen when the spiritual
imagination of women is released into language and history’. The
patriarchal church has silenced women and imposed an impoverished patriarchal
view of the world on us all - you men, I think, have suffered almost as much as
we women. To a greater extent, we are ‘male’ and ‘female’
inside, even in a patriarchal society like Australia in which the
‘feminine’ aspect is suppressed in most men. This means, as Ostriker
argues, that so many of us are deeply fractured and living as we do in a
pathological culture which neglects the ‘feminine’ - a dimension, I
would argue, which goes beyond the dimension of mere ‘gender’.
We have to think about who we are in the light of the larger mystery of
being which we have been trying to reflect on. To think about
‘gender’ and the ‘sense of the faithful’ we need a larger
model. Here I suggest that the French feminist philosopher,
Hélène Cixous, has much to contribute. She suggests that there
are two main ways of being in the world - she calls them economies - the
masculine and feminine. In our culture, she argues that the masculine is
dominant, the economy of the proper which has to do with property, propriety,
appropriation, control, of knowing where you are going. In the patriarchal
economy, for example, we know exactly who and what God is. In effect, however,
we make a God to our own image and we make the rules we say God wants us to
follow. The other mode is the economy of the feminine and what Cixous calls
‘the economy of the gift’. It is preoccupied with internal reality
and is not concerned with frontiers and boundaries but crosses them all the
time, giving and receiving, in tune with whatever is the case. As we are
beginning to realise, indigenous cultures, the Aboriginal people of this
country for example, were like that. They knew what we are only just beginning
to realise what, as the British astronomer Fred Boyle wrote in 1942 as space
travel was just becoming possible: ‘When we have digested the implications
of photographs from the earth taken from space, we will begin to realise what
we haven’t realised before, that all human beings whatever colour,
culture, language or gender, all the animals, birds, fishes, insects, plants,
the air, the waters and the earth itself all share the one life of our very
small, very fragile planet suspended in space.’ We have therefore to love
and care for one another though we human beings may have a very special place
in this planetary life because we are conscious of it. That, I suggest, is the
‘feminine’ mode and it may be the only way through for humanity in
the future on this fragile, over-populated planet. To become aware of the
importance of the ‘feminine’ mode, there is a call to develop the
full range of our psychic possibilities, a call which the Roman Catholic Church
has for some time avoided. It also involves different notions of power, based
not on war and conquest, domination and hierarchy, but on mutuality, on giving
and receiving.
There is a sense then in which we have neglected an important strain in
our culture, a strain which I will argue is strong in great medieval Christian
classics like Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Indeed Dante may foresee
in the angel’s lament in The Pergatori:
‘O, Christians, arrogant, exhausted, wretched.
Your intellects are sick and cannot see.
You place your confidence in
backward steps.’
So those who have been excluded and oppressed may be in a privileged
position since it is easier to see from the fringes. As Elisabeth Schussler
Fiorenza says, it is very difficult being a Catholic Christian and a woman in
these days. But that is not because there is something wrong with Christianity
but something wrong with the people who have claimed to define and control
Christian faith and practice. Prejudice by definition leads us to select some
facts and not others and that is what has been done in the interpretation of
the mystery of God amongst us and shown to us in Jesus and continued in the
Spirit.
In this respect, we have much to learn from contemporary thinking.
There is a wonderful essay in a recent Concilium on the subject of
identity by a Brazilian Franciscan sociologist, Jean-Marie Susin. In the West,
he argued, there are basically two notions of identity: the first one, which is
masculine and patriarchal, is based on the model of Ulysses, the Greek hero who
went with the expedition to Troy. His great feat, however, was his return home.
As he travelled through strange places, he saw this strangeness as hostile,
trying to destroy it or turn it into what was familiar. In this sense his
journey constituted a great circle around identity - the model perhaps of
colonialism and its alliance with Christendom.
The other model of identity is, however, the model of Abraham who was
called beyond the horizon to a promise not yet realised and, trusting in that
promise, journeyed into strange and unfamiliar places. The model of Ulysses, if
you like, is patriarchal and belongs to the economy of the masculine. But
Abraham lives by the economy of the gift, lives by a model which is open and
dynamic.
It is the notion of identity which is surely in tune with the
definition that God gives us of God-self in Jesus and, through Paul, in his
description of what the community of Jesus might be. It is a community in which
there is neither male or female, Jew or Gentile, slave or free, since we are
all one in Christ. We all exist as human beings, not just as Christians, or
women and men, in relation to the other. They are not enemies; they are called
in love by love. They are the other through whom the Other, God, speaks. This
then is the tradition of faith - as someone has said, ‘Tradition means
running errands for the dead!’ Amongst these dead, John Baptist Metz
suggests that those who suffer, have been oppressed and marginalised, are the
crucial people because until we recognise and context their suffering the
Church’s vision of a new heaven and a new earth is still not realised. So
long as people suffer, are marginalised and neglected, so long as some dominate
over others, then the energy which is God’s spirit moving through the
world has not achieved its goal. This wonderful passage is surely relevant to
us in this country as we contemplate the sufferings of Aboriginal peoples.
What I am arguing for then is the need to recover our sense of who we
are - a vision which is completely in tune with our time since it also demands
that we care for God’s creation, the earth, the plants, the animals. The
long tradition of mysticism is also in tune with this vision. Here too, the
renewal of the liturgy seems to be crucial, reminding us that we celebrate the
mystery of God’s gift to us, God’s presence amongst us, in bread and
wine and in the community of friends, celebrating the giving of life, the
losing of life and the taking of it. As Balthazar, to return to him, says:
‘God’s power also depends on his beauty, his unattainable, primal
beauty’. This is one of the great ways in which God convinces and
persuades us. Beauty used to be a mark of worshipping community, and we need to
recover that ‘feeling for the glory of God’, ‘the grandeur of
God’ that, as Hopkins had it, will ‘flame forth like shook
foil’, something we have forgotten by turning God into a moraliser. The
dream of God, to quote Balthazar again, is a dream of beauty, a dream springing
from the old promise, that all God’s people can become prophets.
We have lost this way in a world of division and conflict. But we need
to get back to this sense of the holy, return to this ‘feminine’
economy - men and women together. The whole idea of sexual difference therefore
has become a great problem. But, as Balthazar says, it can be seen also as the
chiaomus of creation, i.e. the crossing place, where the masculine and the
feminine come together and we commune with and receive from one another. It is,
he says, a threshold which indicates no horizon or limit of the world of God
who is always in an erotic relationship with us and the world, as we need to be
with God.
This world then is a threshold as we move onwards across frontiers from
the fringes. So we must never settle down. Perhaps indeed in this country we
might reflect on the treasure we have in our folk song, Waltzing Matilda.
Folk song it may be but it speaks to something deep in us abut a man
travelling light who keeps moving and, on the other hand, there’s the rich
man who grudges him one sheep and tries to keep control. Rather than lose his
freedom, however, the swagman chooses to leap into the dark mystery of the
billabong and chooses death. I learnt this, by the way, from some students in
Spain! Today this is the kind of courage perhaps which we need to transfigure
what we believe in, the mystery with which we are gifted.
So, to sum up: let us take our stand on God’s promises and see the
Church as a stained glass window through which God is. Institutions can become
obstacles to human happiness and vision. But they can also become channels of
grace and transcending all distinctions, transfigured in and by the mystery of
God.
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