Word of the day: Aha-Erlebnis

It is official, I have become a "poseure" (yes I do inist on the final "e" please).
Now I should explain that Ferney Voltaire does not really have the equivalent of Aix en Provence's Les deux Garçons or Paris' Les deux Magots, so philosophizing is reserved for my morning bus ride. On days when I don't have a book I often try to read the titles of what my fellow travellers are reading. This week I've been feeling a bit of a fraud, wandering around carrying a book which has "Becoming Divine" in large letters on the cover. Regular readers of this blog will know that my usual reading matter tends to be the latest detective fiction.
Today I nearly missed my stop because I had what the Germans refer to as an "Aha Erlebnis". Something Grace Jantzen wrote really struck a chord with me and moved me. I suppose I suddenly realised that it is absolutely ok to think theological thoughts in my crazy, imaginative, feminist, francophone-anglophone, intuitive way ... I arrived at work feeling good about life, about thinking, about ways forward. Perhaps this really is what is referred to as one of the consolations of philosophy!
I realise that once or twice before I have experienced something similar while reading philosophy. I was still rather under the influence of Walter Benjamin when I first really met and impressed Dr B, and I remember having a rather minor epiphany reading a page of Adorno
many moons ago on an East German railway station.
Anyway I'm not sure that what I am currently reading will change my life but anything that can both nearly make me miss my bus stop and lift my mood must have some power to it. It also made me want to read more and believe I would continue to understand. Here's a small taste of some of what la pasteure poseure was reading - but perhaps the Aha-Erlebnis only came as a result of my longing for café society!
"... if ... the aim of philosophy of religion is to enable becoming divine, becoming our sacred sexuate selves in relation to the earth and to one another, then mathematics and rigorous applications of scientific epistemology are less likely to be helpful than are psychoanalytic theory, imaginative possibilities of human becoming drawn from literature and the arts, and careful social and political analysis."

A spirituality for combat, of hope and of communion

God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed; Give me the courage to change things which must be changed; And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.

As we reflected at work on how to prioritise and also how to communicate our work; how to choose the one right thing, we read these three quotes and they spoke deeply to me today:

A spirituality for combat
"All liberation movements are prone to collective self-justification and self-righteousness, and are likely to en in seeing themselves as the Messiah or Saviour; the self-idolatry becomes the source of a new oppression ... But we should find a spirituality which can keep people in the power struggle without their turning corrupt and oppressor. Here the gospel of forgiveness or jusitification by faith has great relevance to collective liberation movements, in moulding their spirituality for struggle."
M.M. Thomas, in Religion and the Revolt of the Oppressed.

A spirituality of hope
"At Uppsala the mood was one of Exodus, going out to change the structures of society and the perspectives of races. Now we find ourselves in teh wilderness. A pilgrim people in conflict and penury, we have discovered a need for spirituality, a spirituality of penitence and hope." Phillip Potter in his closing address at the WCC Nairobi Assembly, 1975, Breaking Barriers, p.208.

A spirituality of communion
"The process of a book's birth reminds the author of Paul's insight that we are but members of one body and as such are indebted to other members." Walter Altmann, at the end of the preface of his Luther and Liberation.

Eating together to share stories and set up signs

Yesterday I was intrigued to read a post on Deirdre Good's splendid blog On not being a sausage which just read mmmm... if you clicked on the link you went here. Here's a taster of what you find:

“With any decent form of teaching,” says Good, a professor of New Testament at the General Theological Seminary, “you’ve got to show a form of hospitality.”
Cooking dinner for your class (and holding class in your house) may sound extreme, but Good was simply putting two and two together: she enjoys cooking, and many of her evening students would be coming from out of town needing dinner.
In that first class, one student looked down at his plate and quietly said to Good, “this is the best first seminar I’ve ever had.”

As a result I shared some thoughts about food and fellowship on Women in Ministries yesterday. Then today at work in a staff meeting Hielke Wolters encouraged us to think of different methodologies for our work, mentioning how as part of a fairtrade campaign young people had been encouraged to learn how to make chocolate; doing and tasting justice rather than reading and writing about it.
Later in small group work we discussed possible new methodologies for work on inter-religious dialogue. One of our ideas had to do with encouraging story-telling and then someone said, "Ah but the best stories are always told when you're having a meal".
And I remembered the wonderful inter-religious cous-cous we organised in the Pays de Gex just after I arrived in the pastorate, the women I met and talked with, the inspirational young couple who spent two years getting the different religious communities to agree to a day when they would all meet. The original plan had been for a prayer for peace together, but that didn't work out and the idea for the meal was born instead. That eating, talking and story-telling was our prayer for peace and had a more lasting impression than if we had only met to pray together.
Of course in the postmodern age this is just another story that I'm throwing down, but I realised today that there is a taste to story-telling, to learning and taking time to be with one another. It's the flavour of humanity learning in small, humble, significant and insignificant ways to live, laugh and share together. So perhaps the simple sign of hope humanity needs is a table spread in the face of cynicism, where others are awaited as potential friends from whom new things can be learned, with whom new memories can be made.

Luce Irigaray and the potential to become divine

"Love of God ... shows the way. God forces us to do nothing except become. The only task, the only obligation laid upon us is: to become divine men and women, to become perfectly, to refuse to allow parts of ourselves to shrivel and die that have the potential for growth and fulfilment."

Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies

"According to Irigaray the wisdom that women and men in the postmodern world most require is the wisdom of becoming divine, without which we 'shrivel and die'."
Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine.

Praying to change the world

Dr B has written from Leipzig about the Monday evening prayers which helped trigger the peaceful revolution in the GDR and which still continue today.
I found it very moving to think of the small group of people meeting week in, week out. That this small act of prayerful resistance becomes the act that inspires others across the land to do the same and sets the tone for the peaceful revolution.
Speaks to me of the discipline of piety having transformative power.
(We're still having a few problems with the comments function on the Holy Disorder blog so this post is my comment!)

Can death overcome death?

This morning Father Daniel Buda led our prayers in the chapel and we began by lighting candles and passing the light of Christ's resurrection from one to another in this symbolic way.
There were powerful prayers and songs as we contined to affirm Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!
There are several lines in the liturgy which say:
trampling down death by death …Christ has destroyed death by death.
On the bus in the morning I'd begun reading Becoming Divine by Grace Jantzen and was as I walked into the chapel trying to get my head around her idea of natality rather than mortality. I suppose it's not really surprising given those circumstances that I found the idea of death triumphing over death or death destroying death a discontinuity.
For me it is Christ's love, Christ's giving, Christ's following and faithfulness that triumph over death. If I had not heard and read the words the order of service this morning I'm not sure I would have so quickly understood what it is Grace Jantzen is driving at in her development of a feminist philosophy of religion.
Life, love and hope tramples down death but then I suppose my mystical meta-narrative would discern and fashion things in such a way.
Anyway despite these thoughts triggered by stray words in the liturgy I still felt connected rather than disconnected through worship and prayer, the message of the resurrection held things together for me.

Holy disorder journeys to the past

Dr B has begun posting on Holy Disorder about his journey to the past:
in 1989, it was the followers of the Reformer Luther who led the (peaceful) revolution, and the followers of Marx who were overthrown. This blog is to remember the events of 1989 and how they are being remembered ...

Avoid the supermarket queues by going to church

Today is Sunday and I didn't go to church. I also did something I almost never do on a Sunday, I went to the supermarket. One of the things I love about living in France is that we do not yet have a 24/7 culture. The week still has rhythm and downtime. There are though a few shops and markets open on Sunday morning, and a special law allowing for full Sunday opening in December.
Today I wanted to buy some flowers for a friend I was going to visit in her new flat. Rather than paying more for the flowers at the florists I went to the supermarket. Mistake.
I was shocked at how many people were there, at how the fresh produce section looked as if the vultures had descended on it. And I was sick about the sheer waste of time of it all. If I am going to have to queue 15 minutes for the privilege of paying for my seven items I rather feel as if the supermarket should be paying me for my time. Upstanding middle-class citizen that I am, pointless hanging around in one of the forefronts of capitalism can quickly turn me into an anarcho-syndicalist. My own fault for making the wrong choice I suppose.
However I also wondered about how this hanging around encourages communion in a weird sort of way. There is an odd sort of human solidarity in the ghastly pointlessness of the supermarket queue. None of us can quite believe that we were so stupid as to all come to the same place at the same time and create this nonsense.
I also had idle thoughts about trying to talk to the people about why they were there and what they were doing with their day. I wondered about how to do that in a way that would offer them grace, respite, gentleness and humour. What does the gospel have to offer in a consumer society, how to speak to people in the right tone, that shows engagement and interest in their lives and truly offers them love? I've not yet got a copy of bishop Stephen Cottrell's book Do Nothing to Change your Life but my thoughts meandered a bit in that sort of direction - I love his Do nothing Christmas. But how do you enter into conversation - do you hand out egg timers as a way to encourage people to take time out and recognise that they are so much more than what
they buy or do?
So I may not have gone to church today but perhaps my supermarket frustration encouraged me to reflect more deeply than I often do on what the core of my faith is, and how I might begin to communicate that to the Sunday morning shopping congregations.

Picture by the wonderful ASBO Jesus, a tribute to the brilliant supermarket checkout staff whose good natured professionalism and banter shone through today's interminable queue.

Morning service in remembrance of Stanley Spencer

The Resurrection, Cookham, 1924-7, oil on canvas, by Stanley Spencer, Tate Gallery
It's difficult to get a real impression of the power, whimsy, humour and beauty of this painting in this small reproduction. I'm always sad if it is on loan when I go to the Tate Gallery in London. Like almost all of Spencer's work it has a wonderful naive magic realism and is completely rooted in his native village of Cookham.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Spencer's death and you can listen again to the service from Holy Trinity Church (which is depicted in the painting). Spencer's religious paintings often depict Christ incarnate in Cookham, carrying his cross through the village street, preaching the beatitudes next to the Thames.
I hope one day to visit Sandham Memorial Chapel and see the extraordinary murals of the resurrection Spencer painted there. They show the troops from the first world war rising up out of the trenches from underneath rows and rows of white crosses. I do not understand resurrection or rising in glory in such graphic physical terms, yet Spencer's earthy contextual pictures of the resurrection speak to me, making me smile with understanding of I am not sure quite what.

New blogs on the ecumenical block etc.

This week I discovered that Maryann Philbrook, who works with WSCF as a communications intern, is also blogging from the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva. She wrote an interesting appreciation of an international ecumenical meeting this week. I also very much liked this post on ecumenical learning. It made we realise that we take so much for granted in terms of what we know or think we know about each other's churches and spirituality. It sounds like a really good exercise.
And Dr B who is off to Germany tomorrow has allowed himself to be tempted into a joint blogging venture with me. It's called "Holy Disorder" and througout this year we'll try to post thoughts, stories and reminiscences about the peaceful revolution in East Germany. Some things will be in German others in English. We'll see how it goes but particularly as the Summer and Autumn advance I hope to post parts of my diary from the time and translate parts of a radio script I wrote and read in diary format. Anyway despite being a journalist Dr B doesn't really reckon to be a blogger, so this is really to encourage him to try this form of writing too!

Women as religious leaders in Japan

Thre is a really interesting ENI article on how women played a key leadership role in Japan's religions in the medieaval period.
I've posted more about it to the Women in Ministries blog.

But here's a taster:
"Networking with these women predecessors from the past in their imaginations might empower today's women leaders in their resistance against familial, social, religious, and political misogyny." said Nawata Ward.
"Also, Christian women leaders might carefully find some enriching resources in Japan's Buddhist and Shinto cultural traditions while being critical in assessing what it means to be Christian leaders in a predominantly non-Christian environment," she added.
In writing the book, she became aware that there had been many women leaders who were part of earlier mission movements who created their own ministries.
Nawata Ward added, "I would like to have a network of scholars, researchers and leaders from the ecumenical Church who might be interested in resurrecting these women leaders' stories from Goa, Macao, Manila, China, Vietnam, Brazil, Ethiopia, England, Canada, and perhaps in other places that I have not even imagined during the early modern period and beyond."

What do I really want to ... - a bucket Friday five from Revgalpals

So as we go along we learn - I had no idea what a bucket list was until today but, according to today's Revgalpals Friday five, apparently it's a "before you kick the bucket" list. Hmm - the last two Friday fives have been easier for me than this one ... I think it will take me a while to get around to getting this one sorted.
I'm not sure I want to "achieve" so much as to "be" - interested, accepted, respected... anyway here goes:

1. I want to go on learning how to be happy being me - probably my biggest challenge. Here I am living in a lovely part of the world, doing work I enjoy, sharing my life with a man I love who is funny, talkative, deeply intelligent and knows how to listen and also loves me. Walking to the bus this morning I was thinking about just this. The gentle joy of satisfaction, being content and learning to celebrate it. If I manage to do this it will be my greatest achievement but I hope I will still be learning it right up until I die.
2. In some small way I hope I will have borne witness and been true, and I hope that will mean I will have spent time outside my comfort zone.
3. I want to write the kind of satisfying book that I myself love to read, but I'm fairly sure I don't have the discipline or really the inspiration. I think I'll just have to content myself with reading more.
4. I hope I will have had good relationships.
5. I hope I will have had fun helping people to have memorable days, making memories, liturgies and meaning.

Listen to Dr B talking about ENI

You can listen to a podcast with Dr B talking about the ENI news agency here.

Resistance - pointless or purposeful?

A few months ago someone said to me "resistance is pointless". I think it was their way of saying we all just needed to submit to the inexorable march of change and that there is no point even crying out against injustice.
I thought about this conversation yesterday when I came across this book in the WCC library and realised that whatever else I believe about resistance I do not believe it is pointless. You can find details of the book here and read the contents here.
Thinking about it a little more I realised that I am also not very good at resistance, it's easier to be liked, to get on with one's little life, to play self-preservational politics or even the politics that destroy others. It's also easier to get lost sometimes in the red heat of moral outrage and lose the energy for the long tough struggle.
I suppose somehow for me resistance is about trying to hold fast to some kind of moral compass - often failing but trying to start over doing it again, calling myself, society and the systems and organisations I am part of into question.
Yesterday's quote from Bonhoeffer opens a chapter in this book on "Poisonous Inequality". The book begins with why and how to resist, looking at the call of the Bible to resist and the life of prayer as offering the strength to resist.
Resistance is a complex and multi-faceted term. Interestingly managers are taught to recognise and "deal" with resistance. (As I write that the image of olive trees and bulldozers in Palestine comes to mind.) In management terms resistance is often seen as a negative thing. If we cannot reform we can resist, says the introduction tho the book. Within myself I recognise both positive and negative forces of resistance. Resistance that wants to hold on to my own power, privilege and comfort; resistance that tries to do what is right, hold on to what is good, point to the values of hope integrity and the future. I'd like to kid myself that I'm more involved in positive rather than negative resistance but as they say life is lived forwards and understood backwards. Resistance and its importance is often only fully understood afterwards, years or decades afterwards.
Résister, as I have written before several times, is a key element of my assumed French Protestant identity.
So who is willing to plant and protect real and metaphorical olive trees, to protect them and to say that they have always had a right to grow?

Christianity for the weak or for the strong?

Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its apologia for the weak … Christianity is rather doing too little in showing these points than too much. Christianity has adjusted itself much too easily to the worship of power. It should give much more offence, more shock to the world, than it is doing now. Christianity should … take a much more definite stand for the weak than to consider the potential moral right of the strong

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

From Volume 13 of the Collected Works London 1933-35, edited Keith Clements and translated Isabel Best

Have you lost the plot or have you got your nose in a book

It is a well-known fact in our household that my husband is only really interested in talking with me if I start reading a book. Suddenly the computer screen no longer holds sway over him, he loses the plot of his online research and wants to start a conversation. To beome fascinating and alluring I need to put my nose in a book.
I however am reading. It's not easy to lose yourself in someone else's narrative if you are being interrupted. I become a parody of a distant, uninterested spouse. What is it about seeing someone reading that makes you want to interrupt them? (I have asimilar tendancy to remove teh newspaper from him if we go out for morning coffee.)
For the reader the only solution is to choose a book which bears such a stop-start approach to conversation and marital communication. Unfortunately such reading matter tends also to have little or no plot to lose and certainly no narrative. Michel Tournier's Le pied de la lettre is a case in point. But it is satisfying none the less, a splendid selection of words and their defintions gleaned from French dictionaries or the author's imagination.
So what are you reading at the moment and who or what is interrupting you? Do let me know, I'm desperate for ideas of which book to get lost in next. If I don't have something to read I might just lose the plot.

Is overcoming fear, anxiety and despair overcoming doubt?

This morning in the chapel some of the young interns led worship. We listened to the reading from John's gospel about the risen Christ appearing to the disciples on the other side of the doors locked because of their fear.
Meanwhile at the front of the chapel each held a large piece of paper with a word on it - despair, depression, fear ... As the reading progressed one person gradually moved among all of the others tearing up the fears, feeding each bread and giving them bread to share with others. It was a powerful and simple message, overcome fear to overcome doubt.
Meanwhile Maggi Dawn has been writing passionately about doubt here.

Quote of the Day

"One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life." E.M Forster

This quote comes from the essay Forster wrote in support of humanism called "What I beleive".

Bertrand Russell wrote an essay with the same title to go alongside it from which this comes:

"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge".

Today these words about trust, love and humanity spoke to and guided my faith and hope. Not sure what Richard Dawkins would say about that., but hey.