Don't protect gays from discrimination

This is utterly appalling. How does a person find the words to react appropriately to this news item?:  Vatican attacked for opposing gay decriminalization

Gay rights groups and newspaper editorials on Tuesday condemned the Vatican for its decision to oppose a proposed U.N. resolution calling on governments worldwide to de-criminalize homosexuality....Archbishop Celestino Migliore said the Vatican opposed the resolution because it would "add new categories of those protected from discrimination" and could lead to reverse discrimination against traditional heterosexual marriage.

If I write my true feelings it's going to sound like a rant.

I repeat my statement that I have made elsewhere on this blog here, here, and here: It is one thing to hold that homosexual acts are sinful for a Christian. It is quite another thing to condone or support the imprisonment of gay people in civil law, particularly in the knowledge that, in many countries, imprisonment for homosexuality means that a person's life is at risk.

Again, I ask the question that Cecilia asked: How is love made to grow by these actions? And I'm not talking about romantic love between two people either. I'm talking about the kind of love that says 'This is simply wrong'. The kind of love that builds the New Creation and works for justice and peace?

For the life of me, I do not understand this argument that many Christians, including the Vatican, are using that gay rights undermines heterosexual family life. But lets look at the practical outcome of this: We are saying that we are ready to deprive gay people of their civil rights and that we are even willing to deliberately place them in situations where their lives are at risk, for the sake of 'family values'? Doesn't anyone see anything wrong with this?  (If you're a Girardian, this is a great example of the scapegoating mechanism.)

Hat tip to Sebastian for the Reuters article.

James Alison on Forgiveness

Quotation of the day on forgiveness by one of my favourite Girardian theologians:

..this is what acting out forgiveness in the world looks like: it looks like knowing that you are dealing with dangerous people, who are more than likely to be deeply destabilized by your innocence and because of that to seek to lynch you.

I also recommend the Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary website from which this quotation is taken.

A Sonrise Story

I have just come across the sermon entitled A Sonrise Story by Paul J. Nuechterlein which does an excellent job of explaining how Girardian non-violence fits into the story of salvation.

Not a sermon I could preach to my congregations! Nevertheless, I think it explains some Girardian ideas in a more accessible way than either Girard himself or most Girardian theologians.

I particularly like the explaination of mimetic theory at the beginning of the sermon. Nuechterlein manages to explain mimesis in a way that I've been striving to do for awhile.

Too Intelligent to Lead?

Around cyberspace these last few days, there seems to be a lot of blaming of the Archbishop of Canterbury for the content of his lecture entitled: Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective.

The most reasonable criticism to my mind is one that says he ought to get more media-savvy and to feed the press his message in language the reporters and people can understand. Fair enough, that's probably a pragmatic statement.

Extending from this view, however, there seem to be a lot of people blaming the Archbishop and saying that it was 'his fault' that the media falsely reported his message. It's his fault, people are saying, because newspaper reporters don't understand theology and Rowan Williams is too intelligent for the common person to understand him. I have to confess that I find this astounding.

First of all, I think that reporters reporting on theology and religion have a responsibility to know something about the subject on which they are reporting. No newspaper would tolerate a business reporter who didn't understand basic economics and although I've seen a lot of bad reporting of financial news, I've yet to hear anyone baying for the resignation of the Governor of the Bank of England on the grounds that the 'person on the street' doesn't understand monetary policy.

Secondly, it really beggers belief that a society is baying that a national leader knows his subject too well and that he is too much of a careful thinker to be a good leader. People seem to be essentially saying that we don't want intellectually brilliant leaders who engage in complex thought but we want leaders who divide the world into simple categories of black and white and go after the 'bad guys'. Girardian theory at it's finest!

Dualism?

A weird sort of brainstorm at 11:00 at night and a question:

In a Christian theology which uses Girardian paradigms, is dualism in and of itself a manifestation of sin?

If human sinful nature is all about creating categories of 'them and us' and about expelling 'them' in order to keep 'the in group' pure.....Isn't this process exactly what dualism is about?

I always thought of dualism as being an overly simplistic analysis which failed to see the complexities of any given situation. But I wonder if it's actually our need to scapegoat others that is at the heart of dualism?

For example, why have UK children's reading abilities dropped down the European league tables? The actual answer is probably quite a complex one with no easy answers. But if we can apply a dualistic formula that 'It's because of lazy teachers' or 'It's because of parents who don't want to spend time with their kids', not only do we have an apparently simple remedy ('they' just need to behave more responsibly), we are also able to say 'It's nothing to do with me'.

It's a scary thought with respect to the media as well; dualism sells.

And, as Christians, how do we guard against this when much of Christianity seems to function in the dualistic categories of 'me good, you bad if you don't think like me'?

September 11th

I don't know that I have anything profound to say about 'September 11th'. As a 'Girardian', I feel that the theory of violent mimesis is particularly useful in understanding a lot of the dynamics behind the events of '9/11' as well as the current 'war on terrorism'.

Very briefly, the theory says (among other things) that societies maintain internal cohesion by identifying and expelling scapegoats. That is, a society has to be genuinely convinced that some person, category of person, or groups of people is responsible for all of a society's problems and that peace will reign when that person or those people are 'destroyed' in some way. The Islamic war on the West is an example of this as is the Western war on Islam. As was the war on communism; in fact, I'd venture to say that the 'war against Islam' has simply replaced the 'war against communism' as our collective scapegoat. And, following Girardian theory almost to the letter, once we'd expelled the communist scapegoat, our peace was fragile until we found another scapegoat.

Girard, I think, offers a compelling lens through which to read not only the history of nations but also Christian theology.

+ + + +

On September 11th 2001, at 8:00 am my husband and I boarded an airplane in Cleveland, Ohio bound for Houston, Texas. As was the case in New York, it was a beautiful, clear day and the flight was proceeding without any problems. I had just finished eating the carry-on breakfast we'd been given when the pilot announced that we were going to have to land in Little Rock, Arkansas due to a problem with air traffic control.

It was not until we landed some time later that we were told that we had landed 'because a national emergency had been declared'. I don't actually know if the pilot knew about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or whether he was simply sparing himself the trauma of breaking the news to the plane.

After several unsuccessful attempts at ringing my parents in Ohio, we were finally able to get through to tell them we were OK. I remember my father saying 'Oh thank God!!!!' when I said 'Hi dad.' That was the last time I spoke to him before he had a stroke a few weeks later that left him with aphasia (a loss of his ability to speak properly).

My husband and I travelled by Greyhound Bus (Coach) from Little Rock to Houston the following day; a ride of about 8 hours, as I remember. We had been on our way to Houston to attend an annual conference sponsored by my then-employer; the conference was cancelled, needless to say. This was something of a surreal experience. The lady who had organised the conference in Houston actually had her offices at the World Trade Center, but she'd been in Houston early to organise the event. All of her immediate colleagues were on lower floors and were able to leave. The parent company lost about 390 people.

One woman I knew from another company who worked in the World Trade Center had been travelling on 9/11. None of the people in her firm who were in the WTC got out alive.

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I attended a mid-day service at St. Botolph Aldgate, a church where I regularly attended a noon-time Eucharist. Because of the location in the City of London, there were many firms where people had lost colleagues. What really cracked me up, though, was the card our firm sent each employee with the names of each person from our firm who had died. I couldn't look at it without crying and I still have tears in my eyes as I think of it now.

Prayers for the families and loved ones of those who died. Prayers for all those who have died at the hands of Western-sponsored violence. God's will for peace applies to all people, even those we want to hate.

Sermon - Division and Peace

Today's sermon was Division and Peace.

We had a wonderful service with our Anglican neighbours. Theirs is a team ministry that includes three Anglican churches in the area; they all worship together during August. We joined them as Methodists at one of their churches and they will be joining us next Sunday.

How fantastic it was to have almost 100 people in the congregation rather than 20 or 30. There was an awful lot of goodwill and I hope that we can all work together more closely in the future.

Perspective

Just a musing after having looked at a blog of someone who has been to a theology conference. The blog is filled with photo after photo of the speakers at that conference. All male. The pictures of all male speakers made me depressed and even angry (even though I know that in my egalitarian branch of Christianity that there are in fact very few female theologians).

Reflecting on it, I think that the reason I had those feelings was because it seemed like a pictoral collage of what it means to be a female Christian in such an environment: it means literally having no voice. It means censoring the voices of any human being who shares one of the most important things about my humanity: my gender. "Male only" Christianity is depressing not because men are awful or because they are depressing, but because it means that there is something "not quite 100%" about being female. Whatever is said about "all are equal", not allowing one category of person to speak makes that category of person unequal - whether the reason be gender, race, class or sexual orientation.

I honestly believe that there is a connection between silencing a category of person and violence. It probably would not be accurate to call this way of thinking "violent", but in Girardian theory, violence begins when individuals strive for (what I'd call) radical individuality at any cost. I must be an individual; I must not be like you and I must not believe that I am imitating you. At the extreme end of this behaviour, I will make a scape-goat of you and I will murder you. Less dramatically, I might bully you. Less dramatically than bullying, I construct a theory that you are not to speak and I get you to agree with my theory; if I do not have to hear your perspective, then I do not have any worry about being like you.

Just a theory. I wonder what others think?

Christian Peace Bloggers

Michael Westmorland-White at the "Levellers" blog has just started the Christian Peace Bloggers web ring. I've joined but I'm a bit nervous about being able to fulfill his criterion of blogging on peace at least once a week. So why am I nervous and why I have joined?

I've joined and I'm nervous for the same reason. I never set out to study Christianity with a "peace agenda" and I've not really studied any sort of "theology of peace" in depth. My convictions about peace and reconciliation have come out of my study and devotion as a Christian person. To me, peace and reconcilation are at the very heart of the Gospel. Being in a "peace blog ring" seems rather like being in an "Agape-love blog ring".

But maybe the fact that so many other Christians consider peace and reconciliation to be periperial issues or even matters of "worldliness" is part of why being identified as a Christian pacificist and reconciler is a necessary thing.

So I will leave the academic theology of peace to Michael and other ring members who have studied this issue in depth. For me, my basic belief is that selfishness, greed, competition and violence are all out-workings of original sin. I believe that peace and reconciliation (God with humanity and human beings with other human beings) are only possible through Christ and by the grace of the Holy Spirit; I believe that peace is an out-working of holiness. To say that "peace" is a worldly issue or something that God is not concerned about is to say that God does not care about holiness and that God does not care about salvation or reconciliation.

The basis for many of my ideas on peace and Christianity is Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire.

Grace

I loved this take on Grace from James Alison*:

Gratuity is experienced as the lack of retaliation where some sort of retaliation is to be expected, and then as the giving of something unexpected. This surprising nonreciprocation is what pulls the person experiencing it out of the reciprocating mode-of-being and enables that person to begin to recieve and then transmit love as something simply given.

To me, this explains why Grace can never be limited to a select few and why God can never be violent.

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*Alison, James, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter eyes, The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, 1998.