Quest Digest 4
Issue 4:
April 2005
Spirituality & Pastoral Care
Contents
Editorial
Gay and Lesbian Spirituality
Meditation and Friendship – Laurence Freeman
Desire and Faith – Richard Finn
Evangelisation and Pastoral Care
How not to Evangelise – Timothy Potts
Pastoral Care of Homosexual Catholics
Civil Partnerships
Footnotes
EDITORIAL
The present issue of Quest Digest falls into three separate parts. First come the papers from the 2004 conference, held in Glasgow, whose theme was ‘Gay and Lesbian Spirituality’. Dom Laurence Freeman, O.S.B. spoke to us on Meditation and Friendship, with the assistance of Giovanni Felicioni on the practical aspects, to which a special extra evening session was also devoted. The following morning Father Richard Finn, O.P., spoke on ‘Desire and Faith’. Both of these papers are reproduced below.
The second part is devoted to issues of evangelisation and pastoral care. The Archdiocese of Westminster has provided, since last autumn, a monthly Mass specifically for lesbian and gay Catholics, and also for people who are HIV-positive. This initiative is of wider interest than just to members of the Archdiocese, as it is likely to set a precedent for the country as a whole. While this belated attention to lesbian and gay Catholics is welcome, the arrangements that have so far been made are open to question, and are scrutinised in an article by the Editor, ‘How not to Evangelise’.
In December 2001, a diocesan bishop asked Quest to prepare a paper on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Catholics that could be used as a basis for deanery conferences. The paper first set out the difficulties in the way of effective pastoral care in this field, and then outlined the practical measures that would be needed to implement it. In the event, the proposed deanery conferences did not take place, but it now seems appropriate to make the paper available to a wider audience, when active interest in such pastoral care is reviving. The paper has been slightly edited to remove references that were specific to the diocese in question and to bring topical references up-to-date, but the programme for pastoral care that it advocates has lost none of its relevance.
Finally, some late material relating to the Civil Partnerships Act is included for the record.
GAY AND LESBIAN SPIRITUALITY
Meditation and Friendship
Laurence Freeman
Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation
Fr Laurence is a monk of Christ the King, Cockfosters (Olivetan Benedictines). After graduating from New College, Oxford, he worked for the UN, in merchant banking and journalism before entering Ealing Abbey, where he was ordained in 1980. He has published widely on Christian meditation.
I should like first of all to thank you for the pleasure and the privilege of being invited to come and speak to you and also especially last night for being able to share your friendship. That friendship is really at the heart of Quest, and I would like to come back to that ideal later. But what I’d like to do first is to talk about a way of prayer and a particular dimension of prayer that I think is crucial for us, crucial for our church at this moment in history and, I believe, very important for the world as well. And then after the coffee break we will have some opportunity for discussion and to direct what I am going to say to our particular circumstances, while this afternoon we shall have the opportunity to meditate together and to put it into practice. What I am going to say is rather like the theatre session that we had this morning – it is very simple and speaks for itself.
In talking abut friendship, I should like to begin with a story from the Gospel of Luke (10: 38–42) that is about contemplation, as that is the dimension of prayer I would like to speak about, and it is also, it seems to me, about friendship. It is a story you are familiar with, the story of Martha and Mary. The person that is missing in this is their brother Lazarus: he is sort of a silent presence in it.
Jesus is on His way to Jerusalem, and he stops at the house of his friends Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus whom he loved. We are told that Martha comes out of the house to greet Jesus. Mary, her sister, is at his feet and stays there listening to his words. Martha goes into the kitchen and starts to get the meal ready and, we are told, becomes distracted about her many tasks. Then she comes out to Jesus in a state, and she says to him: ‘Lord, don’t you see that I am doing all this work by myself; tell my sister to give me a hand.’ I think this is the only place in the gospels that anyone tells Jesus what to do. But we can sympathize with Martha: Jesus probably turned up unannounced with twelve of his friends and said ‘I’d like a meal’, so she starts rushing around and gets things out of the freezer and rushes down to the supermarket; she is really anxious to do a good job and it expresses her personality – she is a problem solver, she is the person who jumps up and volunteers at committees, she is the person who does the things that have to be done – and one can even sympathise with her attitude to Mary, rather gormlessly sitting at the feet of Jesus gazing up at him listening to his words. Perhaps if we had one more job for Martha to do now that she is in heaven we could make her the patron saint of stress. She shows all the typical signs of stress. She can’t cope, she is overwhelmed, she is not even doing her job well. That is the sad thing; she may be a very good cook and a very good housekeeper but she has really blown it.
So how does Jesus respond to her? This is where we really see that this story is about friendship at the deepest level. Jesus is her friend. So he is not going to condemn her. He is not going to blame her. He understands her personality. He knows what she is like. So he says to her: ‘Martha, Martha.’ When do we say that to each other? When you repeat the name of your friend it is to make contact with her, with the real person . It is to call your friend back into relationship with you. Jesus often speaks the name of the people that he wants to communicate with: Peter, Mary. At the Resurrection he opens the spiritual eyes of Mary just by saying her name. So he says: ‘Martha, Martha, you are fussing and fretting about so many things and only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken away from her.’
I told that story once at a Buddhist-Christian conference that I was taking part in and a friend of mine who is a Zen Jewish married Abbot (as you can tell, he lives in California!) wanted to know what happened next. And I said: ‘Well I don’t know – it doesn’t say in the gospel.’ But what happens next is what happens to us, as we see ourselves in the story and incorporate it: that’s what happens next. But this story has been used down the ages to justify, to defend the contemplative life, and clearly from the very beginning of Christianity, the contemplative life needed to be defended. Mary represents the contemplative life, Martha represents the active life. That is an interpretation, but I think it is a little bit more than two personality types. Two very different personality types are represented here. Although they have things in common, they are very different. So it is more than that. Some people will quickly volunteer and others have to be dragged into it. And so on. But I think what it really represents is what Jesus is indicating in his words to Martha ‘Only one thing is necessary.’
What has gone wrong in this story is that Martha and Mary, who are sisters, have lost their friendship. They are no longer in a relationship with each other. So the house is no longer going to be a happy home. It is going to be the scene of an angry, tense, domestic conflict. The friendship has been lost. Jesus restores that friendship, that harmony by bringing Martha who is at this moment the problem back into harmony with herself. But Martha and Mary are also two halves of the human soul. We are all Martha, we are all Mary, in different ways. We express it in different ways, but that one thing necessary – and Jesus does not define what that one thing necessary is: maybe that is what you’ve got to do and I’ve got to do in terms of our own personality, our own lifestyle, mine as a monk and you as whatever you do – each of us in our own way has to integrate the contemplative and the active, the yin and the yang, the male and the female, the positive and the negative, the dominant and the passive and all these different aspects of our personality that make up the human being. The one thing necessary, we might say, is to be one, to be integrated, to be simple, to be Christ-like.
Now I think that story is about friendship at the deepest level, and I’d like to come back to this idea of friendship towards the end. It is also about balancing the contemplative and active aspects of our being and of our life of the way we live. Because this in not just theory, or theology: it is about how you live with other people in the same house, in the same world, and how you live with yourself as well.
This contemplative dimension of prayer is what I would like to talk about. Now there are many ways of prayer. I am going to describe a dimension of prayer, one way of prayer. I’m not saying it is the only way of prayer, but I think it is a dimension of prayer that we have lost touch with in the Church over the centuries, particularly in the Roman Church. I think it has been integrated more fully into the life of the Orthodox Church in Christianity. But this contemplative dimension of prayer is very remote from what I was trained in as a child. I was brought up as a Catholic in London. I went to a monastic school and thought that monks were all very holy contemplative people before I became one. The contemplation that I heard about was very remote and abstract and very holy; it was what people that were very close to God did and I did not even want to do it or to be that close to God. But I think we need it today, and it is happening. There is a great contemplative renewal taking place in the Church today. We need to remember this dimension of prayer and then relate to it as we find ourselves called to do so.
Let me suggest one way of looking at prayer: as a big wheel. A wheel is a good image of prayer because it suggests movement. It is going somewhere. A wheel is meant to turn and take us somewhere on our journey of life. Where does our journey of life take us? To God, to wholeness, to our true self, to love, to the ability to love. And if that wheel is to turn, it has to touch the ground. If it does not touch the ground, it is just going to spin meaninglessly, theoretically, in the air, and not actually move anything. So prayer is something that we have to do, something that we have to give time and space to. It has to be grounded in daily life, and I am going to describe to you a way into contemplative prayer that is very practical. This afternoon will be the real teaching moment. We learn from experience. And this way of meditation that I am describing, which is a way into contemplation, into this contemplative integration, is experiential. It is not theoretical. It is not head-centred, it is heart-centred. It is, indeed, called ‘the prayer of the heart’ in the Eastern Church.
Think about this wheel of prayer and these different forms of prayer. Can you give me some of the ways that you pray? Intercession, petition, praying for other people, thanksgiving, praise, Scripture, sorrow (repentance), discursive, charismatic, singing, devotional, sacramental. The point of this is that there are many different forms of prayer. And we could add to this list certain types of non-religious prayer which may open up a deeper sense of what prayer is for us. For example running is a form of spiritual practice, it is a way of being in the present moment, which is what prayer is about. So are chanting, being out in nature, appreciation, working, carpentry, writing poetry, painting, and making your house look beautiful. These are all forms of being present to God in the present moment. The point of this is that there are many ways of prayer, and all of these forms of prayer are valid and useful and effective provided, of course, that we do them sincerely. If we just do them mechanically or out of a sense of guilt, e.g. that if I don’t go to Mass I’ll be sent to hell, then they are not quite so effective. If they are done from a sincere heart then all these forms of prayer work. And what do they do when they work? They move us along the journey of integration, of holiness, or wholeness, into that oneness that Jesus says is the one thing necessary. So these are forms of prayer. People – Protestants, Catholics, different types of Catholics – sometimes argue that my form of prayer is better than your form of prayer, or that this form of prayer is more important than that form. You might get hung up on a particular form of prayer and think it excludes other forms of prayer, but we have to say: ‘these are like spokes of the wheel and there are different spokes for different folks.’
Now these are all forms of prayer, so where do they meet? What is prayer itself? In the centre. In the hub of the wheel. And this is where I would like to get a little theological. What is prayer in a Christian understanding? Well, Paul was talking this morning about friendship with Jesus. Theologically and experientially, that is what our Christian identity, our Christian discipleship, means. Some union, some experience of oneness with Jesus as He is now, not as he was when he dropped in on Martha and Mary 2000 years ago, but as He is now with us in the Spirit, in our hearts, in our relationships with one another in the world.
In essence Christian prayer does not just mean how I pray, what I do in these different forms of prayer, but essentially, here in the essence, in the centre, it means the prayer of Jesus, that my prayer takes me into his prayer. There is a union here. There is a friendship, a deep friendship, and a lasting friendship: faithful loving friendship that is ultimately our union with God. So all these forms of prayer take us into the prayer of Jesus, and this prayer of Jesus, his experience, his human journey to the Father, where he found himself to be who he is. His journey then continues as he returns to us in the Spirit. ‘I am coming back to you’, he said, ‘and I am not leaving you bereft. It is good that I go away so I can send the Spirit and be present in each of you through the Spirit.’ This is the prayer of Jesus, the Spirit, this is Christian prayer, Christocentric prayer. This is the deepest meaning of all the forms of prayer we do. So his prayer, the Spirit, informs all these other forms of prayer, whatever they are, and when we practise them we are taken into his prayer. That is the friendship of the spirit.
Now that is what we find theologically at the centre of the wheel of prayer. What else do we find at the centre of the wheel? If the wheel is to turn and take the cart or the car somewhere, it has to be still. The axle has to be steady, hold firm, and that stillness at the centre of the wheel is what I’d like to speak about. That stillness at the centre is what gives stability and is the cause of the motion, of the direction of life. If you don’t have that stillness the wheel wobbles and you are trying to control it. This reminds of a time when I was driving into Glasgow and the wheel of my car came off. It was a very strange moment because you find yourself holding the steering wheel and you have absolutely no control of the direction of the car; but by some great act of providence (it was the middle of the rush hour) the car went across three lanes of traffic and stopped about five feet away from a telegraph pole. So if we don’t have that stillness at the centre of the wheel then we don’t have direction, we are confused, we are lost, we don’t know where we are going, and we end up like poor Martha all over the place, in internal chaos and confusion. However we may look on the outside, that is what we are like on the inside.
So what I’d like to talk about is this stillness and how we come to this stillness. This is what we really mean by contemplation. It is the ‘be still and know that I am God’ from the psalms. It is what the Orthodox tradition calls hesychia which gives us hesychast, the name of the Greek work of the prayer of stillness.1 [And it is actually the word that Jesus uses several times, when he speaks to us about giving us rest: ‘Come to me and I will give you rest’ (Matthew 11:28, anapauso umas), ‘You will find rest for your souls’ (Matthew 11:29, anapausin), ‘Set your troubled hearts at rest’ (?).] This word [‘rest’] is not just a happy hour kind of word, it is the rest of inner stillness that is dynamic, it is the force of directional movement in life, meaning purpose, sense of direction.
How do we come to this stillness? In my second year at University, when I was going through a lot of turbulence, and grief about various things, I went to see a monk who was my teacher and whom I had known for several years, called John Main. I went to see him and spent Easter with him to talk over the mess that I was in. It was a good moment, good timing, because John Main had just started again to meditate at that point in his life, and in my time with him over that Easter he very lightly and very gently introduced me to meditation.
First he listened very sympathetically to my description of the forms of prayer I was using at the time and then said: ‘Well, that is wonderful that you find time to pray in your busy life. But let me tell you about the way we pray. It is a way that we call meditation. We pray in silence, coming to a stillness of mind and heart. We leave words behind in this form of prayer; we are not speaking to God and we are not thinking about God, but we find the presence of God in our hearts.’ And then he quoted a passage from the Upanishads that struck him very deeply as a Catholic because it evoked a deep echo for him of his own faith. The passage said that in the human heart, we find the love of the one who creates the universe and in silence is loving to all. As John Main heard those words he was reminded of his own faith where Christ has sent his own Spirit into our hearts, the universal Spirit of love. Anyway he found himself listening with deeper and deeper attention to this holy man and then he said to him: ‘Well, how do you do this? How do you come to this stillness? How do you move from the mind to the heart?’ And the monk said: ‘We follow a very simple way and simple method. What we do is to take a single word, a sacred word, a mantra, and we repeat this word silently interiorly in our hearts through our time of meditation. And we let go of all the other thoughts, good thoughts and bad thoughts, all the other forms of prayer, we just let go of those as we move into the heart, into the essence. And again as John Main heard this he thought: this is familiar in a sense, it is repetitive prayer. The rosary, the Mass where we say the same words over and over again are repetitive prayer. We have many mantras in Christian prayer. But this had a simplicity to it that moved him deeply and also clarity and a practicality that attracted him.
So he said: ‘Will you teach me to meditate?’ And the monk said: ‘Yes, but you have to be serious.’ And John Main said: ‘How can I be serious?’ and he said: ‘You have to do this twice a day. If you like, come back and see me once a week; we will meditate together and we can talk about any questions that you have.’ So for the next eighteen months, while he was in Malaysia, this is what happened. He went back every week and tried to meditate every day morning and evening. He gradually learned the simplicity of meditation. Later when he was starting to teach this himself, in a Christian tradition that I will describe in a minute, the heart of his teaching and the heart of this tradition is simplicity. It is that simplicity that Jesus is talking about when he says ‘the one thing necessary.’ When he went back to his teacher he would sometime ask questions like: ‘O.K. I sit down, I sit still and close my eyes. I start to repeat my word, my mantra. I say it as well as I can but I get very distracted. How long is this going to take? What is going to happen next?’ And he said that his teacher would just look at him and sometimes smile and sometimes just say, ‘Say your mantra. Just say your word. Keep doing it.’ And gradually he learned from his own experience. He came back to Ireland, and became a Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin. He was still meditating, but not finding anyone who really understood what he was doing. This was the mid-1950s, a long time before meditation had hit the headlines. But he was doing it. But he was doing it because he understood that it underpinned his whole spiritual journey.
Eventually he became a monk himself and joined Ealing Abbey in London. He joined the year I entered the school in 1958. And when he spoke with his novice master, at the beginning of the novitiate he described this way of prayer and he thought: here is an expert, another monk, someone who really understands about prayer. He thought he would finally find someone to whom he could talk about meditation. But he found to his surprise that he was told to give it up, because the novice master said: ‘Well, O.K., maybe in the mysterious ways of God this has led you to the monastery, but this a pagan way of prayer, a pagan practice: give it up.’ In those days monks were still obedient, so he gave up his way of meditation, with difficulty, because after all this was what had brought him to the monastery. But later he said he came back to it on God’s terms, not on his terms. He went to Rome and was there during the Vatican Council, studied theology, became a priest, began work in a school, and was very busy.
There are ups and downs in the monastic life as in any other form of life, and he found himself some years later as headmaster in a school in Washington, D.C. It was then that a young student came to visit the monastery. He had been on a tour of Eastern monasteries and Eastern teachers in India and Burma and Japan. He came to check out a Christian monastery. So he asked the abbot if he could spend a few days and learn about Christian Mysticism. So the abbot said: ‘O.K., but I don’t know whether you will find what you are looking for here’ and asked John Main to look after him. John Main gave him a book, a big book as he was very busy at the time, a great classic of English Benedictine spirituality called Holy Wisdom by Augustine Baker.2 It is one of the great classics, but nobody actually reads it. So he was rather surprised when this young man came back to him about three of four days later and said: ‘This is fantastic stuff. The English is a bit weird but it is fantastic teaching. These desert Fathers, they were as great as the Zen Masters and East Indian gurus.’
So this young man aroused Father John’s interest again, and they began to read the desert Fathers together. Now the desert Fathers from the fourth century were the first Christian monks, which was a lay movement.3 St Benedict was not a priest. It was a lay movement arising out of a desire to renew the heart of the gospel experience in the church. The Church had become institutionalized when the monastic movement arose. The desert fathers were very practical: they weren’t theoretical theologians, they were not church people but they were devoted to the gospel and to the way of prayer as a practice. Anyway, through his re-connection to the early monastic tradition Father John was led back to one of the great teachers of the western Church, John Cassian. John Cassian was a teacher of Saint Benedict. Saint Benedict of course influenced western spirituality through the monastic movement. Benedict says basically in his rule for monks that this is a way for you to live together without killing each other. But if you want to learn how to pray, and rise to the heights of perfection, go to Cassian and the Fathers and Mothers of the Desert. So John Main went back to Cassian and in the tenth conference of Cassian on prayer he came across something that quite staggered him.4
Cassian was speaking about prayer and he says there are different forms of prayer, but all prayer has a movement towards the heart, towards a place of integration and union with the prayer of Christ, where our humanity and the humanity of Christ meet. In order to come to this we have to come to an inner stillness, but the great obstacle to this stillness is our distraction, the fact that our minds are all over the place. There is a long section in Cassian describing the distracted mind, a very simple and clear description of how the mind wanders from thought to thought, fears, desires, fantasies and anxieties. The first thing we discover when we meditate is that these mental states are recurrent. They just keep turning and turning around. If we did not do anything about it we would be just sitting there with our thoughts going round and round in circles. For getting out of this state, for getting from the mind into the heart, into the prayer of the Spirit, Cassian recommends us to take a single word or a short phrase in Latin. He called it ‘the formula,’ and recommended a verse from the Psalms. Then he says: take this little verse and repeat it continually over and over again in your mind, until by the constant repetition of the single verse you come to the first of the beatitudes – poverty of spirit.
Remember that Jesus says: ‘Happy are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.’ Abandoning all the riches of thought and imagination, Cassian says, you come with ready ease to that place of simplicity. So when John Main read this, of course he connected it immediately with what he had learnt many years before in the east, and realized that what had happened to him twenty or so years before belonged to the universal tradition of meditation, to which he was now re-connecting. For meditation is a universal spiritual practice. We find it in all the great religious traditions of the world, and there are certain elements in common to all of these traditions.
The first is silence. The practice of silence: not just external silence, but an inner silence, a stillness, that hesychia that the Greeks speak about. It is not the chattering mind. When we sit down to prayer, what do we hear? Sixteen different radio stations going on in our heads at the same time – or, if we have cable, 125 – skipping from one to another, surfing. So silence, the work of silence. Coming to silence; and the way to come to silence is to pay attention.
I am now reaching the limit beyond which I should not go to keep your attention, because by now you are desperate for coffee, but, because you are nice people, you are pretending to listen, though some are looking a little bit sleepy! Now I cannot force you to pay attention to me. I can strap you in the chair but I cannot force you to pay attention to me, because if you pay attention to me you are giving me something of yourself. To pay attention is to love. We love what we pay attention to. We pay attention to what we love. Prayer is about attention, attention to God. That is what poor Martha lost when she got distracted. She wasn’t paying attention to her cooking, she wasn’t paying attention to who Jesus was. She had lost attention to her sister. She had lost attention to herself. What do we give our friends? Attention. What does it cost to give attention? Self. You give yourself. That is why the contemplative tradition, contemplative prayer, is a work of love, and what we are doing when we meditate is that we are learning to be loved (this is something that you might like to take up in discussion if you like, as it is very relevant to our situation). It may not seem like that, as it is not a highly devotional form of prayer, and when we think about loving God we may have all these nice emotions, but love, as we know, is more than the romantic stage of love if it is going to deepen, if it is about sustained attention, friendship that lasts, reality of deep relationship. So this is the work of silence and attention.
If you give me your attention for the next ten minutes, it is because you want to. But even if you want to, you will find that your mind wanders. What is he talking about now? What are we having for lunch? etc. If you decide to pay attention, you are deciding to do a work. Only you can decide to do it. It is a spiritual work. And meditation is the spiritual work that is a discipline that we must freely choose for ourselves. No spiritual work is effective if it is imposed on us, only if it is freely chosen. Then the discipline makes us into a loving disciple, and the word ‘discipline’ means ‘to learn.’ So silence is an essential element of meditation. We come to it through the work of meditation. How do we do this work? By paying attention to the mantra.
What are the fruits of this? Why should I do it? We do it because, as the early Christians said, the way you pray is the way you live. The quality of your prayer is the quality of your life. The depth of your prayer is going to be the depth of your relationships. Where are we going to find the fruits of this work of meditation each day? We are going to find it first of all in our relationships, because relationships are the sacred ground of our life. If you were to say: ‘How are you?’ ‘How are things going?’ ‘How is your life at the moment?’ what are you really saying? Not ‘How much money are you making?’ Or: ‘Did you just get promoted?’ Or: ‘Did you just buy a new car?’ What you are really saying is: ‘How are your relationships?’ If your relationships are deep, loving and secure, real, meaningful, then does it matter if you just lost your job? Or if you just crashed your car? Your relationships are the sacred ground of your life: friendship.
Maybe the most important contribution to spirituality that gay people can make to the Church today is the theology of friendship, and it comes very much to the heart of the gospel and Christ’s self-revelation. ‘I call you servants no longer; I call you friends.’ So it is in our relationships above all that we find the fruits of our prayer, that we become more loving people. What else do we want to be, except to be people who can give and receive love freely, more joyfully, more freely, more passionately, more exuberantly, more creatively, more generously. What else do we really want?
The other elements of meditation are stillness, and as with silence there is an outer stillness and an inner stillness, which is the real work. We try to keep still when we meditate and when we meditate later I will ask Giovanni to prepare us with some physical preparation to help us come into that stillness of the body which leads us into that stillness of mind. More interiorly, when we practise an inner stillness, we are letting go of desire. That might ring some bells with you. I think it is at the heart of all love, that we transform our desire, that meditation frees us from fantasy and connects us with reality.
The last element of meditation, which I have already mentioned and which we find at the heart of John Main’s teaching, is simplicity. ‘Unless you turn and become like children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 18:3). But it isn’t easy to be simple, so I have described a practice of meditation that is simplicity itself. You sit down, sit upright (so you can stay awake), and you close your eyes lightly and then silently, interiorly, in your heart, you begin to say your word, your mantra. And you keep repeating your word through the time of the meditation as faithfully as you can, giving it as much attention as you can. It is important to stay with the same word so that it gradually takes root in your heart, because the deeper it takes root in your heart, the more stillness it will work. The more inner stillness you have, the more your life integrates and a sense of direction fills everything.
So what I am suggesting is very simple and practical. It is not theoretical; it is a practice. It is something that you do. It is a way of love. It is an act of love to meditate. All prayer is loving. This is a very intimate form of love. And as you first begin to meditate, you will find you are very distracted and your mind wanders, all over the place. But with practice if you stick with it you will find that you learn from your own experience what it means. The fruits will begin to appear.
Now to follow up on the story. John Main introduced me to meditation in 1971. He came back to England in 1975 and, realizing that this was something of great value and importance for people, he started a small lay community at the monastery. I joined it originally for six months; because I am a very slow learner and a very undisciplined person, I had to become a monk to do this. People from all over London knocked on the door and said: ‘Do we have to go to the Buddhists or to Transcendental Meditation? If there really is a Christian practice of meditation, can we not do it as well? And do we have to give up our work and our families and our life in order to do this?’
So we began to teach meditation at the Centre there, and eventually this blossomed. We went to Canada in 1975 at the invitation of the Bishop of Montreal to establish a small Benedictine community that would teach and practice meditation as its primary work. When John Main died in 1982, I was left holding a little baby that was the community that had just started and which began to spread around the world by itself. In 1990 I came back to England, and formed the World Community for Christian Meditation. It is now a community of friendships, not a big organization. I think there we have groups in 115 different countries, small weekly groups that meet in all sorts of places. They are simply small groups of friends, spiritual friends, who come together to meditate once a week to reinforce that daily practice of meditation that they are doing in their Martha-lives.
That brings us back to the idea of friendship with which I began. John Main believed very deeply that meditation creates community, and the last 20 years have proved this to me. Out of this contemplative experience something quite surprising happens. In the solitude of the meditation we experience relationship. And that seems to be very relevant to who we are and what we have been talking about. In the solitude of the meditation you discover deep loving relationship. There is one thing that transforms life, and that is to discover that you are in a loving relationship. If we discover that, at the very core of our being where we discover that we are essentially good, we discover a friendship with ourselves, a capacity to be friends with others, that is what friendship really means. It is through friendship that we recover our innocence, and discover friendship even with our enemies. To love our enemies means to turn them into our friends. It is not easy and we can only do it if we have learned to be friends with ourselves, because we have learned that friendship is what God offers us.
DISCUSSION
Chair: We have half an hour for discussion and since it is my prerogative to introduce it I will start with some relevant autobiographical detail. I became a Catholic because of this tradition of prayer. At school I was required to study French history and read Aldous Huxley’s book Grey Eminence, which is about Cardinal Richelieu’s secretary Father Joseph, a Franciscan who tried to combine contemplative prayer with power politics. He, in turn, was a disciple of an English Franciscan, Benet of Canfield (William Fitch), author of The Rule of Perfection5; this introduced me to Christian writing on contemplation, though I have not read John Cassian. I’m afraid I did not persevere with the practice of meditation, and my experience was that it is very difficult to persevere. Having no feedback was a problem. I have since also met the suggestion (in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience) that some people may be closed to this sort of experience; I have never had anything that I would call a religious experience, no altered state of consciousness; that I am a Catholic Christian is through intellectual pursuit and not though any religious experience So my question to you is: this all sounds splendid, and a lot of people will no doubt start to meditate after hearing you, but if you get no sort of feedback where do you get the motivation to continue?
Fr Laurence: This kind of prayer is ideally suited for the kind of person you describe, who isn’t concerned with dramatic experiences of altered states of consciousness. But if that is what you are looking for, then I would go for something else, and if you find it satisfying, fair enough. I think what the whole of spiritual life and in fact any human life is about is transformation, change, evolution and development. St Paul says: ‘I appeal to you therefore … by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship… be transformed by the renewal of your mind’ (Romans 12:1–2). So it is about change, about transformation. If you have been meditating for 20 years and you could really say at the end of it: ‘I haven’t changed at all’, then you could justifiably ask for your money back. There are different ways that this change, this transformation expresses itself. My advice to you and the advice that I was given (and I was able to persevere with it was because of the way I was taught) is: don’t look for anything to happen during the meditation period itself. What John Main used to say to me was: if anything happens, ignore it. When I first joined the monastery I was totally in love with everything about the monastery and my new life, my meditation that I had discovered; I went into a peak experience and I was in a blissful state for a sustained period of time. I had a couple of little experiences, which I was rather proud of, but I didn’t want to speak even to Father John about it although he was my teacher. But one day I did and he looked at me with a certain smile that absolutely brought me down to earth, punctured this bubble of ego that I was building up. So I described this blissful state I was in and he said: ‘Well, you don’t really think that is going to last for ever, do you?’ It was the best kind of way of approaching this kind of experience.
If you were to ask me why I continued meditating, then I would say it was because, to put it negatively, I have lost some things that I wanted to get rid of. I have become less fearful, more free, more open to love (I think), freer in giving and receiving it. One of the benefits of this way of prayer, that Cassian describes, is that we have a more direct experience of scripture, that the meaning of scripture comes alive to you. He says that when you read scripture, after you have begun to practice this form of silent prayer, you read it as if you were the author of it. In other words you are in touch with the experiential dimension of it.
Here’s a story about the effects of meditation. There was a woman who started to meditate, but her husband was very anti-meditation, because he felt she was going off into some mystical path and he was being left behind. So he said: ‘Well, you meditate, but don’t talk to me about; it I don’t want to hear about it.’ So for a year she meditated and then after a year he said to her at breakfast: ‘Have you meditated yet?’ and she replied: ‘No, I’ll meditate later’ and he said: ‘I think I’ll join you.’ She thought he was making fun of her, so she said ‘Why this change?’ and he said: ‘I have been watching you carefully over the last year and you have become much easier to live with.’ So when I speak to a lot of people they say: ‘Nothing happens in my meditation’. But why do they continue? They know that something is changing in them.
Here’s another story that appeared on the front page of our newsletter. A young prisoner in Ireland wrote to me. He is 25 and doing 10 years for a violent crime; he has been in constant trouble since he was 14. When in prison he was always being put into solitary confinement because he was violent. One day he was put into solitary and he was at breaking point. He was sitting there, facing the wall, his whole mind was crumbling and he remembered – and this was just grace – he remembered when he had learned about meditation at a talk given by Father Tom Feely at a meditation group that his brother had taken him to. It was while he was sitting there, staring at the wall, that he suddenly remembered something that the priest had said about how to meditate, and he started to do so. Then he began to get himself in physical shape, working out, and put a bit of order and balance into his life in the prison. And he kept meditating, though he wrote to me: ‘I don’t know why I was doing it because nothing ever happened. Then I suddenly noticed that the guards were treating me differently, and I knew something had changed.’ And I think that is rather like the woman in the first story: you often see the deeper interior changes that are happening to you through the mirror of your relationships with other people.
For many people, other forms of prayer also begin to take on more meaning. The Eucharist, the scriptures, other forms of prayer that are appropriate to them, take on a richer meaning as well.
A member of the audience: I have used this method of prayer for quite a long time, and it is always the very first thing I do in the morning. And if for some reason I don’t do it, then somehow I don’t feel the same. You are quite right in saying, Father, that nothing happens, but I think that is one of the problems that we have with prayer, that we go into it hoping that something will happen. But I now feel that I can’t make a relationship with God. God can make a relationship with me and it is in this form of prayer, when I am doing nothing but I am present in some way to Christ. Sometimes I think: ‘Well, that was a waste of time, meditating and thinking about God knows what’. But he is never distracted while I am giving him that time. It is a fact that during that time you don’t think that anything happens, but you begin to realize: hang on, my relationship with Jesus is being transformed and I haven’t done anything. I think that is the thing that we have to hang on to. And the mantra becomes a presence in my life. If I’m harried during the day, the mantra comes into my mind and I calm down. You may think I’m a fairly extravert sort of bloke, and I am; but where does that energy come from? I think it comes from this form of prayer. I really do. And I recommend it even if you feel you are not the sort of bloke who can cope with it. Try it and don’t give up and you’ll find that something does happen: you haven’t done it; it is the Lord that has done it. And that is the most wonderful thing.
Fr Laurence. Thank you. People often ask me: is there a certain personality type that is suited to meditation? I can't answer that question except to say that some of the people that you think of as the most contemplative and the most interior, the Mary type of person, they don’t make good meditators. They can be very introspective!
The same member of the audience: There are quite a few Marys here! (laughter)
Fr Laurence: Everyone has been apologizing to me for being a Martha. So I think you are right. One of the things that changes is your image of God. Even if intellectually we may change our image of God, emotionally we may have deeply rooted in us an image of God as something we learned in childhood, up there like a CCTV camera, watching and judging everything we are doing, and ready to punish when we make a mistake. Emotionally, that image of God may be still very active in us. It also feeds into a certain self-image that we have of ourselves, which may be that we are excluded, or that we are unworthy, or that we are sinful or perverted or guilty or whatever – all the different images of self that we may have been given or introjected. Through this silent work the image of God and the image of self are transformed gently by love, just as in a loving human relationship you change. It is a relational change. The image that I like from the parables (the parables of the kingdom are very helpful in understanding about meditation), is the one about the kingdom of heaven being like a seed that a man planted in the ground, left and went away, went to bed and got up in the morning and did his work, and all the time the seed was growing, how he did not know. This movement of the prayer from the mind to the heart, if you are interested in the technical language is called ‘apophatic.’ It is the way of un-knowing rather than a way of knowing. Rather than a rational use of the mind, it is the way of love. The fourteenth century Cloud of Unknowing,6 which describes the mantra in the Christian tradition, says ‘by thought we will never know Him, by love we can know Him.’ And I think that this is what happens.
A member of the audience: There was a Glasgow gangster called Jimmy Boyle who wrote a powerful autobiography in which he asks: ‘When does innocence end?’ That stuck in my mind. At the end of your talk you made two very large statements about the effects of meditation: one was the recovery of innocence, the other loving our enemies. Could you enlarge on both of these claims, because I find them both (especially the last) very large benefits?
Fr Laurence: Recovering your innocence means remembering that you are essentially good. And that is something we may have been told. You know we are created in the image and likeness of God; therefore we must essentially be good. But that is not what we feel. And if you have been bought up with a certain guilt-laden religion, or society has ostracized you in a certain way, then it is not something that you feel or experience about yourself. Recovering this sense of goodness is what recovering of innocence means. In the tradition on virginity in the eastern tradition in the fourth and fifth century, they used to talk about recovering your virginity, which is the same idea, I think. Recovering our primal innocence that we have as a child. I think that is one thing that happens in meditation. But I don’t think you can separate meditation from life, and that is why we have to see that the way you pray is the way you live. The way you pray is to be who you are, accepting who you are and not playing a role: not dramatizing yourself, not presenting yourself as a great sinner or the prodigal son or the great saint, not dramatizing yourself with God. Being who you are and accepting yourself, as you are – which may be as very distracted in the morning, or full of fantasies, or full of fears. But in the Christian understanding of it, it is not just you going towards God; it is also God rushing towards us. That experience is an objective experience.
I’m reading a book at the moment about mysticism and the new physics and what is very clear from this anthology from scientists is the view that the great scientists of the modern era have all developed a mystical understanding or attitude about reality. They see it as an objective reality, not as a subjective thing but an objective thing; so I think this is an objective reality that we enter into through the practice of being, just coming into touch with our own true nature. That is not easy because we are going to have to go through some turbulent weather, turbulent experiences maybe. One of the things that we are going to have to face for example is anger, or grief, or sadness or negative self-images or high levels of developed fantasy, all of which will be difficult to do. As far as anger is concerned, I think you discover that forgiveness of your enemies, which is central to the gospel, does not mean that you excuse your enemies for being unjust. I think if you look at the great prophets of the modern period, you will see that they often came out of a strong contemplative spirituality, and the contemplative experience can make you more courageous in opposing and confronting injustice or lack of truthfulness, wherever you find it – in the Church, in society or in your own life. But I think it also makes you realize that there are also levels and stages of forgiveness, that forgiveness is not just about giving absolution but it about passing through states. First of all, you accept your own feelings honestly and you don’t try to cover them up; secondly, you choose to free yourself internally from the effects of that injustice. If you are the victim of an injustice then you must free yourself from those effects before you can confront or prophesy against that injustice. So you have to work on your own feelings. Then I think that forgiveness really happens when you can look at the person or institution that is acting unjustly and you can ask yourself: why are they acting like that? where is it coming from? how could people say or do that? When you begin to try to see it from their point of view, I think you are really free; then what is released is compassion, which is loving your enemies, having compassion for them. And coming back to that idea of innocence, and what your Glasgow gangster was experiencing, they were what the young Irish prisoner experienced. He got back into touch with his own true self, and it was a moment of true crisis and possible destruction of his own personality, but at that moment grace came into his life and he was able to reconnect, to know himself. In this contemplative tradition, self-knowledge is a pre-condition for knowing God. Knowing yourself means you have to know yourself as good, and that your true nature is innocent, loving, forgiving and compassionate. We don’t have to try to be forgiving, you just have to be yourself.
A member of the audience: Does one have to use a mantra or can it be an image or a feeling?
Fr Laurence: There are different ways of meditation and some use images, But in this tradition, which is an ancient Christian tradition and a Jewish tradition too, a word has the advantage of taking you out of the imaginative level of activity. The trouble with an image is that images are powerful and connect with emotions, so they can keep us at the mental level of consciousness. Choosing the word is important because you listen to a word as you say it (though listening to the word, not thinking of its meaning). For example, the word that I would recommend is maranatha, a beautiful Christian mantra; it is in the language that Jesus spoke, Aramaic, and means ‘Come, Lord’. St Paul ends the first letter to the Corinthians with it. It is the earliest Christian prayer – but you are not thinking about the meaning of it as you say it.
As you say ‘ma-ra-na-tha,’ repeating the syllables, giving it your attention, not visualizing it either, gradually, as Paul says, it takes root in your heart, and you will find it accompanies you during the day – when you are walking down the street or when you are sitting in the dentist’s waiting room or wherever you happen to be. And it opens up for you the experience that the early Christians were really focused on, which was praying without ceasing, releasing the prayer of Christ in your heart continually. But in order to do this you have to move from the head to the heart, to silence. So the Mantra leads you to silence. But this is a particular tradition and there are other approaches as well.
A member of the audience: You said towards the end of your remarks that the theology of friendship is particularly appropriate for the position that Gays and Lesbians find themselves in at the moment. I wonder if I could ask you to expand on that a bit, because it is an interesting thesis and I don’t see it necessarily flowing organically from the whole process of meditation?
Fr Laurence: I think meditation lead you into self-knowledge. And you don’t come to self-knowledge just by analyzing yourself, by thinking about yourself. Of course we need to know why we tick and why we relate the way we do and that we like that kind of person and we don’t like that kind of person. That is important. In contemplative theology a lot of that psychological self-awareness comes as a natural by-product of contemplative prayer. It is the psychological self-awareness that comes from self-knowledge. Self-knowledge itself is not self-analysis, it is not reflection it is about being yourself. It is not objectifying yourself, thinking about yourself; it is about being yourself. And that is what friendship is. The work of meditation leads you at the first level into a friendship with yourself; acceptance is a very vital part of the spiritual journey, and self-acceptance is a very difficult thing to achieve when society may reject you for being a particular type of person or having a particular sexual orientation. So if we have introjected, absorbed into ourselves, images of self that are unfriendly, or rejecting, then we are not friends with ourselves. It is also a fact, mysterious really – I don’t understand it – that when you meditate regularly with other people, the social and psychological defences that we naturally have, based on images of each other, usually come down or are temporarily reduced, and you find yourself at ease with other people. I believe, and it has been my limited experience, that you can look at other people, even strangers, without fear, without being over-critical or over-judgmental of them, and you trust them more. You trust their essential goodness; they are basically non-threatening. Of course you may make mistakes, but basically you give people the benefit of the doubt, even strangers. I think a friendlier attitude develops in you as lose some of those negative dynamics of self-rejection, suspicion and so on.
Friendship then (and I don’t exclude sexual expression, which is a necessary healthy part of humanity) is the higher mystery, because the very first philosophers wrote about friendship. The Greeks said that life without a friend is not worth living. The bible says it is not good for man to be alone. Friendship is natural and necessary. The nature of friendship is that it is based on equality. You cannot be friends with someone if you see them as either superior or inferior to yourself. You may have different gifts and you may admire the friend. The Greeks admired their friends; there is still equality there somehow. The other element of friendship is that it has to be a concern for the well-being for the other. You must genuinely want your friend to be well. And there must be honesty and truthfulness with a friend. If you lie to a friend you do not trust him or her. Your friendship has been damaged when you lie. This is why, I think, Jesus (in John, which is the most human of the gospels, also the one where Jesus’ humanity is most obvious) shows us and speaks about friendship. At the Last Supper, the great sign of that friendship is the washing of the feet. That would be a wonderful sacrament for the gay world, and the lesbian world, to adopt. John Vanier says it is the forgotten sacrament of the world. It is the only thing that Jesus says specifically in the gospels: do what I have done, exactly what I have done to you. When we do the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday, it is a formal thing – in New York they won’t wash the feet of women because the disciples were all men, and so on. So we have turned it into a very antiseptic experience. But it is a wonderful sign and it is in doing that act of service and love that Jesus says: ‘No longer do I call you servants… but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my father I have made known to you’ (John 15:15). So friendship is the sharing of oneself totally with another; that is exactly what the Greeks said. A friend is another oneself. And for the homosexual (same-sex), that has a particular meaning, does it not? The friend is another oneself. That does not exclude heterosexual friends, but it does have a particular resonance.
A member of the audience: Was this pearl of great price lost or was it hidden?
Fr Laurence: If you look at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, the torturers, the secret police, when they were confronted with their crimes by their victims, very often they broke down, and what you saw was that they themselves had been victims of the state, and this was the end of the evil that had been released, the end of the evil that was apartheid. Desmond Tutu says that homophobia is a crime equal to apartheid. I think we have to a bit careful about conspiratorial theories like those in The Da Vinci Code; on the other hand there is malicious intent around and one should expose that, but I don’t know if it is exactly a conspiracy theory. I think that the reason that this pearl of the gospel has been lost is to be found in the gospel itself. Who does Jesus get angry with? The only people that he gets angry with are not the sinners, it is the religious hypocrites. I think there are cultural reasons too perhaps, e.g. the increasing split in western culture between science and religion, the defensiveness over many centuries in many sectors of the church about defending the truth as a kind of deposit with which it was entrusted and failing to see that it was a living experience of a person, a truth. Then came the Reformation and increasing suspicion of personal experience, a need for authority, the intellectualization of the Western mind and the loss of the sense of wholeness, alienation from the body. Meditation is a very incarnate way of prayer. It is the whole person who meditates, in his physical, mental and spiritual dimensions. We have reduced prayer to a mental activity and therefore other aspects of the body including sexuality have been viewed as dangerous, threatening. It needs to be re-integrated.
So I think there is an institutional element in the story of how we have lost it. The fact that it was not taught in the seminaries meant that the official teachers of the church did not know it from experience. The laity were not supposed to know about it either. And if they did know about it they were suspect because they knew more about it than the priests. All these dynamics come into play.
I think what is happening today – it began about 40 years ago with the council – is that when the mind of the institution became so closed, so unreal, so out of touch, with the world and with the gospel, it cracked open in that moment of grace; with the 78 year old Pope John saying: ‘We will have a council,’ Pandora’s box was opened. When you look at the documents, one of the things that came out of that is an awareness of the holiness of the people of God, that regardless of rank or status they are called equally to the fullness of the Christian life. This is a massive change of attitude, in the same way that the church changed its official teaching on its relationship to other religions. ‘The church rejects nothing that is true and holy in other religions’: this is a massive paradigm shift, almost like day and night. One of the words that keeps coming up in the document on the liturgy for example, is ‘contemplation.’ In revolutions people will try to pedal backwards because they realize how much has changed, but I don’t think you can turn the clock back and I think what has been happening and with growing momentum is a change of movements in the church at many levels; I’m not saying this is the only one, but it is a very important part of it. There are at least two big movements: one is inter-religious dialogue, which forces us as Christians into a deeper experience of faith, because we are dealing with contemplative religions, Buddhism or Hinduism, so we have to get back to our own contemplative traditions if we are to meet them in any serious equality. The other is recovery of the sense of friendship in Christian life. We are disciples together. If the hierarchy of the church exists it is like the committee of Quest. It is a way of service. But there is an equal service and ministry in the service of the gospel. That equality is impossible unless you can share with other people at a deep level of prayer. And to put this in practical terms, in parishes where people have introduced meditation, it is often a lay person who will go to the priest and say: I have started to meditate and this is part of our tradition. May I introduce it? Sometimes the priest says ‘No.’ Sometimes he says: ‘Yes, O.K., but you do it by yourself.’ Sometimes he says – and this is perhaps more rarely – ‘Can you tell me about it, because I have been wanting to improve my payer life?’ Then, when you get a meditation group going and the priest comes to join you, it changes the whole dynamic of the shared life of the parish community. So I think that contemplation is being recovered, with a new outlook by the Church on other religions; that transformation of consciousness of the Church is happening, from the grass roots, from the laity upwards.
Chair: It is nice to end on an optimistic note. So thank you, Father Laurence.
Desire and Faith
Richard Finn, O.P.
Blackfriars, Oxford
Fr Richard read English at Cambridge before joining the Dominicans in 1985, and is now Vice-Regent of Studies at Blackfriars, Oxford.
It’s a delight to be back at a Quest conference. I know that you deserve far better than I am able to deliver, but I also know that I am among friends. You have asked me to speak on the topic of ‘Gay and Lesbian Spirituality’. So, is there such a thing? I doubt that I have an adequate answer, though I hope to spark a discussion in which we can improve on my first thoughts.
We have to begin with the obvious prior question: what is a ‘spirituality’? The word is much used, but I am not sure that its meaning is at all clear or agreed upon. Think, if you will, of ‘Celtic Spirituality’, a form of Christianity supposedly practised by the Celts of Britain and Ireland during the Dark Ages, in which love of nature, art, and poetry were combined with freedom from the shackles of Roman church thought about sin, especially sexual sin, and where liturgical creativity was able to draw on the pagan past, as yet unsuppressed by the dead-weight of later doctrine and ritual. This spirituality purports to be a set of interrelated beliefs and practices peculiar to a given people who share a common time, place, or cultural tradition. It is, you might say, the purported embodiment of Christian faith within communities who share a specific way of life. It is a particular ‘take’ on Christianity, a version which arises in interaction with that culture. In a similar way we speak of Navaho Spirituality, Jesuit spirituality, not to mention that rare beast Dominican spirituality. This is a definition of spirituality which is prima facie acceptable to the historian or sociologist. But could we even begin to speak of Lesbian and Gay spirituality in this way? I don’t think so. For better or worse we have, as yet, no such common culture, though Gay and Lesbian Christians may belong to such strange and various sub-cultures as the BBC, the NHS, and the David Beckham Fan Club. Homosexual, yes; homogeneous, no.
Of course, if we give further thought to ‘Celtic Spirituality’, it turns out to be in small part fiction, in large part the clever editing and marketing of a past we do not fully understand, the product of modern disenchantment with the contemporary Church, so that what we have is a set of interrelated beliefs and practices (as it happens a set which is ‘theology-lite’), acceptance of which is legitimated through projection back into a misty, romanticised past rather than by a process of theological argument – indeed we have a spirituality which is attractive to some precisely because it is dissident, a way of cocking one’s nose at perceived ecclesial oppressors, those whose hold on theological argument is seen as one form of oppression.
Gay and Lesbian Christians may sympathise with this move. We know what it is to be disenchanted; we know what it is to be on the receiving end of a theological discourse which is highly demoralizing, not only in popular sense of sapping the good will and commitment of many gay and lesbian Christians to play their full part in the life of the Church, but in the literal sense of damaging the moral reasoning, the conscience, which Church teaching should illuminate and build up, because this discourse both contains poor argument and untruths, while being conducted in maladroit, insensitive, ways of speaking. Whatever the motivation of those who speak in this way, they are not heard as speaking with that fraternal charity and compassion which is the necessary context of, and authority for, effective teaching within the Body of Christ. So, should we imitate the advocates of Celtic Spirituality? Should we market as a brand of spirituality a vision of the Church we would prefer? I believe we would be unwise to act this way. We do not want a spirituality of the ghetto – we have everything to gain from theological debate, while dissident antagonism only excuses the failure of our pastors to engage with us, furthers the illusion that they are exercising their genuine, ecclesial magisterium, when they are not in reality teaching us but merely talking past us – at times uncharitably talking about us rather than with us. They are to be recalled to their duty, not absolved from it.
Let me now, however, offer an alternative theological meaning for ‘spirituality’ – as nothing more or less than life in the Holy Spirit, a life which is therefore fired by the love of God for God, a life which is being drawn by God out of the damage wrought by original sin, that violent disorder of self and society into which we are born and which we are prone to exacerbate, drawn into the peaceable company of heaven. Given our understanding of God and His creation, this life in the Spirit has certain necessary characteristics, such as a call to self-knowledge and gratitude for God’s gifts; it has recurrent patterns of conversion, elements in the stages of spiritual growth, ascetic practices as we master and leave behind selfish habits in the acquisition of virtues, the difficult business of growing old gracefully as we wrinkle, crumble and forget ourselves. These things are common to all Christians, but the varying circumstances of our lives mean that for different Christians at specific times, these characteristics have distinct features given by who we are in relation to where we find ourselves. It is in this sense, I think, that we can talk sensibly of a Lesbian and Gay spirituality for the present day.
At the start of her ‘Dialogue’ St Catherine of Siena invites the reader to enter the ‘cell of self-knowledge.’ There can be no truly Christian life that is not one of deepening self-knowledge. This is more than a matter of introspection, a looking within, though it will include some such reflection on heart and mind. It also involves the fundamental recognition that I am made by God, made in His image and likeness, and I am made for God. And this making of who I am in every moment of my being is an act of God’s love for me. I am to know myself above all as a child beloved of God. I am indeed invited to see myself through God’s eyes, with his delight. Only then will I also learn how to see others in this way, and myself as a sinner whom God calls to repentance. The twelfth-century Cistercian, Aelred of Rievaulx, wrote that “that love of God is, so to speak, the soul of the other loves. It lives of itself with perfect fullness, its presence communicates to the others their vital being, its absence brings about their death. That a person may love himself, the love of God is formed in him; that one may love one’s neighbour, the capacity of one’s heart is enlarged.”7 We might think that it is out of our prior experience of being loved by family or friends that we know what it might be for God to love us, but for Aelred it is only our conviction that God loves us unconditionally which then emboldens us to see ourselves in our true light.
What does self-knowledge mean for those who are gay or lesbian with respect to their sexuality? It clearly calls us to be honest with ourselves about our own desires, our own orientation. That sounds simple, and perhaps it is becoming simpler than it once was, but there are still powerful forces within the Church that put obstacles in the way of such self-knowledge: the discouragement of self-disclosure, the presumption in official discourse that homosexual men and women are always ‘off-stage’, always other than the people to whom this discourse addresses itself, and certainly never to be numbered among those who enunciate Church teaching. In such a forum people have shied away from an identity associated with shame, with loss of face. The problem has not been that of simply admitting to myself that I am gay or lesbian, but of doing so without internalising the negative charge which other Christians have placed on this identity, without losing sight, God’s sight, of my infinite worth as his child.
Self-knowledge is the acceptance of how profoundly my orientation enters into my psyche: we should not think that our sexual desires are superficial, or mistake them as necessarily or essentially selfish, as only a craving for this sort of pleasure, for those sorts of sexual activity; these are the kind of mistakes which might encourage in us a futile hope to alter our orientation through prayer or psychotherapy. Such false hope leads to its opposite: despair. We must rather recognise these desires as revelatory for us of the beauty and goodness of other human beings, as expressions of our thirst and capacity for intimacy, inclinations drawing us out of solitude, so that we attend to others in particular ways. How I find myself attracted to some, and not to others, these are inclinations which enter into the construction of virtues I hope to possess – these virtues will not be found over and against my sexual desires, though no virtue is simply the possession of desire or giving desire free rein. They may ease my friendship with those men I am attracted towards; they may make me a safe person to confide in for those women to whom I am not sexually attracted. In particular my sexual desires must enter into what temperance and prudence I possess, so that my desires are fully integrated in a life in which I love my neighbour as myself, something to which I shall return.
Self-knowledge is also a matter of accepting that others may find me desirable and of not being frightened by their desire as such. This is not to say that I shall necessarily choose to enter into a sexual relationship. There may be reasons why such a relationship would be wrong for me or for my prospective partner. It is not to preclude from moral judgement and discipline the particular ways in which we attend to others whom we find sexually desirable. Not all attention is welcome or appropriate. Plato in the Phaedrus long ago recognized the predatory nature of some sexual interest: “As wolves to lambs, so are lovers to boys”. But we are not to think that homosexual desire is sinful.
I guess that what I have just outlined has been important for most gay Catholics in this country of a certain vintage. I suspect that it remains true for some gay Catholics in this country and for many more elsewhere in the world. I would argue, however, that the call to self-knowledge increasingly poses a different challenge to younger gay and lesbian Catholics for whom Catholicism has not provided the all-embracing or dominant cultural setting which their parents and grandparents knew, often as immigrants: these younger Catholics know their sexual orientation; they are not ashamed of their desires; but they perceive their gay or lesbian identity as being incompatible with being Catholic. This may stem from their experience of a certain schizophrenia or split identity, a growing divorce between the self who is ‘out’ amongst friends and the edited self disclosed in church settings. It is fuelled by the journalism which makes no distinction between the Church and the teachings of the Church, which readily casts the Church as the oppressor. In the gay press you sometimes find a lamentable mirror image of official church discourse, only here it is the Christians, and above all, the Catholics, who are frequently presumed to be ‘other’. The challenge is perhaps now to see within my many desires, and in the strength of my desire, my restlessness, a desire that in fact runs so deep that only God can answer it, that who I am is only fully discovered and fulfilled in relationship with God. Where is the next generation of Quest?
Knowing oneself as a child of God called by ‘Him’ into relationship with ‘Him’ (I use the traditional pronouns, though God is neither male nor female) leads to a second characteristic of life in the Spirit – gratitude towards God, that loving thankfulness which stems from the recognition that this world and our place in it are the free gift of a loving creator. St. Basil wrote in his treatise On the Holy Spirit how “an abundant supply of goods” flow to us from the Father through the Son and how the Son apportions these goods “according to the measure of each one’s need.” God is not stingy; the creation is an expression of his utter generosity towards us. Some gifts are already in the past, still more lie hidden in the future. Time is itself a gift, swollen with the hope of our redemption and sanctification by grace. Time doesn’t just drop through the hour-glass for Christians, leaving one less grain behind, but is the gradual and providential unfolding of God’s good purposes:
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.8
All this is God’s gift and elicits our gratitude. The interesting thing is how we show our gratitude. I wish to argue that we show our true gratitude not in some kind of elaborate or mealy-mouthed ‘thank you’, but first and foremost in the real enjoyment of this or that gift. There is a proper worship of God in really enjoying life. We ought to have an inspired delight in all that is genuinely good. Gratitude in the enjoyment of something should be one element in a more basic appreciation of how we praise God for the gift of our lives in being the creature we were created to be. Recall what the Bible has to say about the praise of God given by the natural world itself:
Praise the Lord from the earth, you water-spouts and ocean depths; fire and hail, snow and ice, gales of wind obeying his voice.9
In what sense can we say that water-spouts give praise to God? Their being speaks of their being created. In their existence, living out their nature, flourishing, they speak of God as the eternal creator. They give praise because their perfections derive from the perfection of God – the divine mind. Now, what’s true of fire and hail, gusts of wind, is true of us too. Our flourishing, the living out of our God-given humanity is a sacrifice of praise. Of course, for us, being what we were created to be is a more complex, unfinished, and imaginative business than being a water-spout.
One issue here for lesbian and gay Christians will be the need to resist mistaken views of what it might be for us to flourish as we have been created to flourish, views based upon mistaken readings of the Genesis creation myth. I am not meant to find my flourishing in a sexual relationship with a person of the other sex. I will say no more of this other than to direct you to the discussion of Genesis 1 and 2 in Gareth Moore’s book A Question of Truth.10 What else might be particularly important for us when it comes to the enjoyment of our bodily and social nature? There should be a theological presumption grounded in the goodness of the creation and the gift of reason that God wishes us to enjoy what we find enjoyable, and to be imaginative in where we find our pleasures – on the dance floor, at the gym, in the pool, around the table, you name it. We are not to start off from some position of radical distrust when it comes to bodily and social pleasure. We are told in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing (3:5). We are the kind of creatures for whom to be properly bodily and social includes finding something of our happiness in the loving embrace of others, to enjoy one another’s mutual presence, one another’s touch, to caress and to be caressed, though clearly much of this activity is not sexual in nature and belongs in a more elaborate body language of relationships, parental or familial, of nodding acquaintance, agreements sealed with clasped hands, greeting and taking leave of friends with a kiss. There may of course be strong reasons why it is wrong to enjoy some things, why some pleasures are to be eschewed: I am certainly not to find my kick in cruelty to others or self-harm. But the onus is on those who wish to rule things out to give good reason why this or that way of behaving is harmful for oneself or others. When it comes to erotic pleasure, our enjoyment of sexual activity, we should expect that some of our actions will be apt to express meanings partly shaped by that wider body language I mentioned earlier. But the same rule applies, that the onus is on those who wish to rule things out to give good reason why this or that way of behaving is bad for others or self-harming.
What I have so far said is only part of the picture. It is, for example, not always easy to appreciate the reasons why some acts are generally judged to be deleterious. There is sometimes scope for debate about the morality of this or that act. In addition, much that is morally significant in our Christian life, for good or ill, is not determinable in this way. I need to know more than whether this or that act is generally loving and morally permissible. I need to know what act my behaviour amounts to in my current circumstances. This is because much of what we do falls under more than one description. You see me making a phone call – an apparently harmless act. On investigation you discover that I am talking with a friend – an apparently praiseworthy act. It then transpires that we are discussing you – at which point you will probably feel an upsurge of interest. Just what are we saying about you? What game is this conversation part of? Could I be said to be slandering you or bitching about you? Singing your praises for purposes of my own? To be jockeying for position and surreptitiously displacing you? If my actions could be said to fall under one or more of these descriptions, how many of them am I myself aware of as I chat? We return to the difficult business of self-knowledge with respect to how we treat others.
As a result of original sin, and whether we are homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual, we are prone to what Augustine recognised as disordered desires. This may include the desire for political or institutional power to order others around for the very pleasure of so ordering them around, the security thereby offered to our shaky self-worth; this is what Augustine described as the libido dominandi, a desire to lord it over others. But we more commonly manifest our propensity to sin in subordinating others to the service of our more varied desires, using as means people who deserve to be regarded as ends. We fail to regard their needs and claims in justice. When this happens we have lust, whether that is greed, ambition, or sexual lust, which is not to be confused with sexual attraction or pleasure. It is rather the placing of my desire and pleasure above your good, taking my pleasure at your expense. Hence the observation made by Rowan Williams in his book Lost Icons that
there is a joy or a confidence that can come from being desired – but only lastingly or securely, perhaps, if the desire opens on to more than the meeting of a need; when it has what a religious person might call a contemplative dimension, a gladness that the other is not ‘used up’ in gratification.11
Unfortunately human beings are frequently manipulative in their dealings with others and blind to this trait which reduces others to commodities, resources in the production of our own gratification. We can see this trait in others, pick on the mote in someone else’s eye; we easily miss this beam in our own. Christians are traditionally called to address this problem in a number of ways: in the examination of conscience; in sacramental confession; in fraternal correction; and in the practice of voluntary obedience which has been central to Benedictine monasticism in the Western Church. We counter this skew in our nature by practising attention to others, attentiveness to their words and needs. We are invited to practise a regular asceticism in food, drink, and sexual activity, all of which reveals to us the otherwise hidden strength of our own desires.
It is important to be clear that gay and lesbian Christians are as such no more or less prone to manipulative behaviour than their straight sisters and brothers. The interesting question is whether the circumstances in which gay and lesbian Christians today find themselves reveal particular forms of manipulative behaviour, whether practised upon us or by us. I can at least see an argument to be had about whether the treatment of gay men and women within the Church is not itself unintentionally manipulative, one brick in the symbolic edifice of gender politics, the construction of roles for men and women within the Church and the restriction of hierarchical authority to celibate males like myself. I have not the time nor wit to know whether this is actually so. Something is certainly wrong when some gay and lesbian Catholics are made to feel that they are at Mass ‘under false pretences’, have to hide their sense of self and self-worth from their fellow Christians. Quest, and its liturgies, are of course an important corrective to this experience.
Who is manipulating whom, so to speak, in the heterosexual and homosexual pornography which is now endemic in our secular society? Does pornography de-personalize its so-called models, actors, and actresses, turn them into passive objects while purporting to turn them into ‘stars’? I readily admit that the definition of pornography is a philosophical nightmare, and that what counts as pornography in a given culture is subject to convention and debate. I grant that gay and lesbian pornography is prima facie unlikely to face specific charges levelled against pornography aimed at heterosexual men, in which, to judge by the spam I used to receive, the denigration of women, their violent subjection to male power, is a recurrent fascination. But whenever sexual behaviour is abstracted from a significant exchange to become a pornographic pose for the viewer or reader, and when sexual intercourse is abstracted in representation from genuine social intercourse, it seems that pornography rewards inattentiveness. On viewing an image there is no requirement to be responsive, no moderation of my will in respect of yours. The image of the other is wholly for my use and wholly disposable. It is of course only an image, not the person portrayed by the image, but are we encouraged in this way to treat real people in like fashion? In Queer as Folk Stuart sums up a certain way of thinking about his partners when he exclaims “Nathan, I’ve had you.” Stuart collapses ‘having sex’ into ‘having Nathan’ where to talk of ‘having sex’ is to reify sex as a commodity, and is again to de-personalize a way of relating between people. Or as Nathan sadly puts it later: “I was just a shag.”
There is much comedy to be found in how we edit our own identities. You may remember how a few minutes earlier Stuart has selected from the internet his partner for the night, who goes by the cybername of ‘Goodfucker’. But ‘Goodfucker’ is not so pleased to be introduced to Nathan by this sobriquet, admits that he is actually called ‘Colin’ – at which point Stuart reintroduces him as ‘Colin Goodfucker.’ But within the humour is a recognition that some identities belittle the person to whom they are given or who adopts them. They are not foundations on which friendship can be constructed. And we know that for all his many partners Stuart is on the run from love.
Maybe it is the person who looks and fantasizes, for a price, who is being used, fleeced as a paying voyeur? Take Gay Times, which amongst good articles and much else promotes pornography as a healthy form of entertainment. It is not accidental that it is published by the Millivres Prowler Group who, as their own web-site explains, own Prowler Stores and publish the Zipper brand of books, videos and erotic magazines. They present all this as a single ‘service’. Others might regard it as a lure to win addicts which is motivated by the lust for higher profits. I was also sorry to discover that Attitude is now owned by Remnant Media, owners of the many heterosexual porn mags once found in Richard Desmond’s Augean stables. If all Christians are called to a necessary asceticism, a deliberate restraint of desire, avoidance of pornography looks like an appropriate form of asceticism for gay and straight Christians.
I wish to end, however, on a more positive note: the importance of friendship in the Christian life, its place in drawing us closer to Christ. This is a theme of particular importance in the work of Aelred of Rievaulx whom I quoted earlier. Aelred argues that true friends have a common care for each other’s good, delight in and nurture each other’s virtues, in a loving relationship which matures and deepens over time to become an extremely close bond. This is not just a good in itself, Aelred argues, but has its origins in Christ’s grace and draws us more closely into friendship with Christ. He wrote in his treatise On spiritual friendship:
friend cleaving to friend in the spirit of Christ, is made with Christ but one heart and one soul, and so mounting aloft through degrees of love to friendship with Christ, he is made one spirit with him in one kiss. Aspiring to this kiss the saintly soul cries out: ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth’ (Song of Solomon, 1:1).12
Friendship, we may say, is an education in the love of God made man. All Christians are urged to spiritual growth through the perfection of their ordinary human friendships, whether this deepening of friendship flowers between partners in marriage, between celibates, or within the context of a sexually active gay relationship, though the final term of this friendship, for those who are presently sexually active or celibate, lies beyond any sexual relationships we may know in this life, has as its final and eternal expression, our participation in the beatific vision of God among the company of heaven.
St Augustine once exhorted his congregation: “Let us not block one ear with our tail, and press the other to the ground.”13 This, it turns out, was not a repudiation of yoga or comment on tantric sex, but a call to keep our eyes fixed on God’s future for us. The asp reputedly put its tail into one ear and pressed the other to the ground to avoid the lure of the snake-charmer. In Augustine’s view, the tail symbolised the past we drag along with us, and which can become something that holds us back. The ground stands for all earthly and immediate pleasures. We are to be charmed by Christ to rise up to future glory. For many gay and lesbian Christians the past which threatens to hold us back is one of discrimination and homophobia, of alienation in the very Church which is meant to grace our redemption from all forms of alienation. Like any Christian we may be distracted or absorbed by present pleasures, but that is no reason to eschew a proper zest for life. Rather, reflection on all that we properly enjoy as God’s gift directs us in our continuing quest for Him.
EVANGELISATION AND PASTORAL CARE
How not to Evangelise14
Timothy Potts
After decades in which the Catholic Church in Britain was largely concerned with maintaining its parishes and other structures and ministering to committed Catholics, it has now begun to think of its mission to the wider public. The Bishops’ Conference (for England & Wales) has set up a new Department of Evangelisation and Catechesis. This belated change of tack is prompted by falling congregations and the almost total loss of the younger generation. One has only to look round in most Catholic parish churches these days to see that the great majority of the congregation is middle-aged or elderly, that men of 18–45 are almost entirely absent and there are not many women in that age-range present either. The priests, too, are mainly over 60 and in short supply. The Church is visibly in decline and within a generation will be a shadow of its former self.
Pre-eminent among the absent faithful are lesbian and gay Catholics: after thirty years of hostile attention from the Vatican and, at best, neglect from the British bishops, most lesbian and gay Catholics have given up the unequal struggle to find a place in an unfriendly Church and have either abandoned Christianity altogether, gone elsewhere or, while still thinking of themselves as Catholic Christians, find the prospect of Catholic parishes in Britain too depressing to be endurable. A small minority struggles on in spite of the obstacles put in its way at every turn. This is a generalisation, admittedly, but it is an informed one: in thirty-five years as an ‘out’ gay man who has taken an active part in gay Christian groups, I have heard innumerable gay people’s stories of their experiences with churches, priests and bishops.
Recently, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor has appointed Father Jim Kennedy, a parish priest in the King’s Cross area of London, to be ‘a point of reference’ for the pastoral care of homosexual persons in the Archdiocese of Westminster. This appointment is of wider concern than just to those living in that Archdiocese, because what is done there is likely to set a precedent for the rest of the country. Indeed, the bishop in charge of the new Department for Evangelisation and Catechesis, Malcolm McMahon of Nottingham, has endorsed a call for ‘a common vision for evangelisation at all levels throughout the Church’.
It is estimated that at least 5% of the population is lesbian or gay. The Catholic Directory gives 460,000 as the estimated Catholic population of the Archdiocese of Westminster, with 150,000 as the estimated weekly Mass attendance. The former figure is likely, if anything, to be an underestimate of the number of persons baptised as Catholic Christians, but even using it as a base, there must be at least 23,000 lesbian and gay Catholics in the Archdiocese, and that is not to mention the non-Catholics, to whom, presumably, evangelisation is also addressed. But if most of these people never come to church, how are they to be contacted? If there is no contact, there can be no evangelisation and no pastoral care. So that is the very first question.
It is clear that this is a task far beyond the competence of a priest or priests. Father Kennedy, in any case, has made it clear that he is merely ‘analysing and researching the situation with a view to making recommendations to the Pastoral Board and the Archbishop’s Council’ and that ‘The gay and lesbian issue is not a priority of my life’ (He makes it sound as though he is doing the job rather reluctantly, certainly not at all enthusiastically). Well, you would have thought that at least he would want to talk to people who have been involved, often for many years, in pastoral care and evangelisation for lesbian and gay people. But not at all: ‘I’m not inviting people to come and see me because that is not what my job is about’. Instead, ‘I’m looking at what other dioceses have done’. If that means British dioceses, his job will soon be concluded, because the answer is ‘Nothing’ – indeed, less than nothing, because in some dioceses initiatives have been positively discouraged.
There are currently three groups in the UK for lesbian and gay Catholics. The first, Encourage, has an entry in the Catholic Directory but presently amounts to little more. The second is Quest, which has just under 300 members and a number of local groups throughout the country. The third, the Catholic Caucus of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, is principally active in London, where it has organized a monthly Mass for Catholics at the Anglican church of St Anne in Soho, with a rota of priests as celebrants. In this connexion, it is to be noted that one of the stated aims of Father Kennedy is ‘To have an authorised Diocesan Mass to fulfil the Sunday Obligation, to establish a sure welcome and to be a template of good practice’. The implication here, of course, is that the monthly Masses at St Anne’s are not ‘authorised Diocesan Masses’ and attendance at them does not fulfil the Sunday obligation. But what a depressingly legalistic approach to the Mass! In this view, it is just there so that, by attending it, people can fulfil an obligation laid down in Canon Law. There is no thought that there should be a Mass of a kind that lesbian and gay Catholics would enjoy participating in. Father Kennedy does not seem to know that most Catholics today who go to church do so because they think the services have something to offer and because they like going to church. By stressing the obligation, he is more likely to put them off, not to attract them: ‘here you go again’, as President Reagan used to say, trying to bully people by wielding the heavy hand of authority – but it’s an authority that can no longer claim implicit obedience, and must justify itself if it is to win assent.
The Mass, Father Kennedy claims, ‘is in place’, but the arrangements that have been made so far support the suspicion that the real aim of instituting ‘an authorised Diocesan Mass’ is to wrest back the initiative from the Caucus in order to capture its following. Thus the first Mass was arranged on the very same afternoon as the Mass at St Anne’s. The thinking, it would seem, is that a Mass that ‘fulfils the Sunday Obligation’ will be more attractive to people than one that does not. However, the initiative badly misfired. First, it attracted the criticism of another priest of the Archdiocese, both for its bad timing (Father Kennedy had a whole month to choose from) and because it was designed to cater also for HIV-positive people, a distinct, if overlapping, constituency. Second, it attracted just 12 people (a subsequent Mass notched up 14) – and we do not know how many of these came because they are lesbian or gay, and how many because they are HIV-positive – whereas the Caucus Mass at St Anne’s was attended by 80. Our Lord is reported as saying that a house that is divided against itself will not stand; the very last thing that a true evangelisation should be doing is to try to sabotage an existing and successful initiative, and lesbian and gay Catholics will do well to be wary of such ‘provisions’. If the Archdiocese of Westminster genuinely wants to offer pastoral care to lesbian and gay people, let it co-operate with and build upon what the Caucus has done already.
Father Kennedy summarises the pastoral guidelines in An Introduction to the Pastoral Care of Homosexual People, a pamphlet produced under the auspices of the Bishops’ Conference in 1979 and now virtually unobtainable, inviting comment upon them. But the invitation is hedged by a warning that ‘responses must be in line with current Church teaching’ and this is repeated twice more in the specific questions asked: ‘Do you agree with these guidelines? If you disagree, what would you change, within Church teaching? Is there anything, within Church teaching you feel should be added?’ And in an interview, after saying what his job is not, he adds: ‘My job is to uphold Church teaching… the Cardinal wants someone … who will uphold the Church’s teaching which I will certainly do’.15 In spite of this obsession with Church teaching, Father Kennedy uses it without either adverting to its ambiguity or explaining the sense in which he intends it.
The Church teaches some things infallibly and other things fallibly. This is something that every priest and bishop should know, because there is an unbridgeable logical gap between them – ‘never the twain shall meet’, as the poet said of East and West; there is no way in which a teaching can be half-infallible. If the Church teaches something infallibly, then it follows logically that it is true; and if it is not true, then the Church cannot teach it infallibly. Of course I am not thinking primarily here of what the Pope teaches infallibly – that is a very small, almost negligible, part of what the Church teaches infallibly; most of the Church’s infallible teaching is contained in Scripture, the Creeds and the Canons of Ecumenical Councils. The Church also teaches fallibly, and this accounts for much Church teaching; it is quite properly called the teaching of the Church, because it is taught by Church officials, from the Pope downwards, acting in their official capacity on behalf of the Church. It is, one might say, the Church’s ‘party line’: it can be wrong and it can be changed, but while current, it is enforced so far as it can be and, like dissident Communist party members, critics are given a hard time. Anyone who knows a modicum of Church history knows that it has very often been wrong and frequently changed, to the extent of teaching the opposite of what was previously taught; this has happened since the earliest days of the Church – some striking cases are documented in the New Testament – and continued ever since. Catholics owe this fallible teaching their careful consideration and initial respect, but if, at the end of the day they find the arguments by which it is supported unconvincing, they are bound by their own consciences and their disagreement with the party line does not in any way impugn their status as Catholic Christians.
Precisely because they themselves are Church officials, it pays priests and bishops not to distinguish sharply between these two types of Church teaching. They try to elide one into the other and endow fallible teaching with the aura of infallibility. We must therefore ask Father Kennedy whether he is talking about fallible or infallible Church teaching. His use of the phrase ‘in line with current Church teaching’ would suggest that he has the former in mind as well as the latter. Well, he is of course quite entitled to say: ‘My brief is constrained by the party line; if I put up anything beyond it to the Pastoral Board and the Archbishop’s Council, they won’t wear it’. Yet in the present context it has to be asked whether this is a viable strategy for evangelisation, whether this is a framework for evangelisation that has any chance of success. Can there be any meeting of minds between Father Kennedy and the 23,000 lesbian and gay Catholics out there in the Archdiocese of Westminster on this basis?
At the very least, this approach appears to be a tactical disaster. It is an old adage of evangelisation that the evangelist must take people where they are, not where he would like them to be. Probably most of the 23,000 do not even know the Church’s party line on homosexuality, apart, perhaps, from a vague idea that it is pretty negative and unfriendly to lesbian and gay people, which in turn may be an extrapolation from its much better known line on contraception. So to hit them over the head with ‘current Church teaching’ right from the start is almost certainly going to be counter-productive, and at this point the evangelist should remind himself that he probably has only one chance; if he starts off on the wrong foot, he can put people off for life, and will have to wait until the next generation for another opportunity. If he can’t get the approach right the first time, then he had better not make an approach at all, because he is likely to do more harm than good; as the gospel tells us, we should count the cost before embarking upon an enterprise. It is worth reflecting that, while only God can give someone the gift of faith, we can create obstacles to evangelisation, and perhaps the greater part of true evangelisation is simply removing those obstacles. But this is a painful business, because we are often emotionally wedded to them and are not prepared to surrender them.
Now it may well be said that these reflections are pretty obvious and banal and that anyone setting out to evangelise will have thought of them already. So when we encounter a case in which the person concerned is apparently quite oblivious to them, we should suspect that evangelisation and pastoral care are not his real agenda, and that there is a hidden one that provides his actual motivation. Now priests and bishops are under a strong temptation to make loyalty to the Vatican their first priority or, in the case of priests, loyalty to their bishop. Criticism has not been welcome in the Catholic Church; to criticise the party line is a sure recipe for ending an ecclesiastical career. The pressure on diocesan priests is stronger than on members of religious orders, who have rather more independence and fewer ambitions. So it may be more expedient to give lip-service to evangelisation as one’s priority, while toeing the party line remains one’s real priority.
This is not necessarily bare-faced hypocrisy. Many priests and bishops genuinely think that loyalty to the Vatican is always a virtue, forgetting that ‘my Church, right or wrong’ is no less vicious than ‘my country, right or wrong’, and that loyalty does not feature in any traditional list of Christian virtues. The Christian owes unquestioning loyalty to God alone, because only God deserves it; unquestioning loyalty offered elsewhere is idolatry, as the Bible reiterates again and again. But the mistake is reinforced by frequent confusion between Christ and the Church, so that what the Church requires is seen as what Christ requires. The Church, however, like Christ himself, has a human as well as a divine side; but unlike Christ’s, the Church’s human side is not exempt from sin. So sometimes it scales the heights, at others it plumbs the depths of human behaviour: corruptio optimi pessima. Evangelisation, consequently, can sometimes come into conflict with fallible Church teaching and policy. When it does so, the evangelist’s real motives are put to the test. If there is one aspect of morality at which the younger generation today are adepts, it is detecting hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious. Perhaps this is not so far from our Lord’s own values, if the gospels are any guide. At any rate, the loyalty that we owe to the Church is always a critical loyalty, not an unquestioning one.
An individual may, of course, agree with all of the fallible teaching of the Church and, if so, has every right to defend it. Father Kennedy, however, speaks of upholding the teaching of the Church, and that sounds like something more than merely defending it. It suggests imposing it upon others, of refusing to entertain or discuss objections to it. It is precisely this aspect that is likely to alienate them. Moreover, with respect to the fallible teaching of the Church, although that is the way in which the Vatican treats bishops and priests, it is morally indefensible. It is, to put it bluntly, bullying: an attempt to bludgeon their consciences into submission by threatening, even imposing, sanctions. To modern man, this is the (morally) unacceptable face of the Church and, when Church officials are guilty of it, they bring the Church into disrepute.
A Dominican theologian who has carefully examined the arguments of Church officials concerning homosexuality concludes:
it is irrational for serious, reflective Christians … to accept church teaching on homosexuality… The only rational course at the moment for such Christians is to continue to believe in the possible goodness of homosexual relationships. This is not a matter of dissent or materialism; it is simply that the church at the moment produces no good arguments to assent to. Regrettably, in this area, the church teaches badly16.
Those who disagree with this judgment must be prepared to engage with the arguments upon which it is based; its contention is that the fallible teaching of the Church on homosexuality is false. Anyone who hopes to offer pastoral care to lesbian or gay people or to evangelise them must be prepared to meet them at this point and argue his case; moral bullying will be counter-productive. It is, of course, a different matter with the infallible teaching of the Church; some doctrines are non-negotiable for a Catholic Christian, but even here, he still has a duty to show that they are taught infallibly by the Church. This applies especially in the present case, as many would hold that the Church has not taught anything infallibly regarding homosexuality.
The Pastoral Guidelines that Father Kennedy takes as his starting point come at the end of An Introduction to the Pastoral Care of Homosexual People,17 after a section on Human Relationships that takes up over half of the pamphlet and sets homosexual relationships within the context of human relationships as a whole, for
It is only when the pastor has presented this total meaning of inter-personal relationships that those seeking his guidance can understand the special forms which these relationships can take and appreciate their appropriate expression.
These words should be pondered: one cause of the trouble in which Church officials now find themselves is that they have tried to treat homosexual relationships outside the wider context of personal relationships as a whole (in spite of protestations to the contrary). The last of the guidelines (16) returns to this wider theme, in which the pastor’s role is described as being ‘to introduce people to Christian life in all its fullness’. Father Kennedy adverts to this when he says: ‘We must stop being trapped in this whole thing about sexuality’.18 I am not quite sure what he means by this, but one thing might be that sexuality tends to loom too large in the spiritual life of Catholics, and sexual scruples often blind us to aspects of our moral behaviour that are in more urgent need of attention.
The Introduction goes on to dispel eight misunderstandings about homosexuality then widely believed, to say a little about the causes of homosexuality and to outline the Christian tradition. Only then are the sixteen pastoral guidelines set out. They are a hotch-potch, i.e. there is no discernible logical progression to them. While they were enlightened for their time, some of them have, not surprisingly, also been overtaken by events; in twenty-five years, society has moved on, while the Catholic Church in Britain has in the meantime done nothing to offer pastoral care for gay and lesbian people and is dusting off these guidelines as if they had been proposed yesterday. There is little in the guidelines to which to take exception, but much now needs to be added. To see this, we need to review the guidelines in turn.
1&3. The first and third of the guidelines belong together. Initially, the first does not look like a pastoral guideline at all. It notes that some ways of classifying people incorporate value-judgments. An example would be the Victorian term ‘vagrant’. But then follows a non-sequitur: it is unfortunate that ‘homosexual’ classifies people by their sexuality. Perhaps, but if so, this is a completely separate point. ‘Homosexual’, unlike ‘queer’, ‘pouf’, ‘faggot’, ‘ponce’, etc. is almost clinically descriptive. If one wanted to pick out judgmental overtones – and they are no more than overtones – in the use of ‘homosexual’ it would be in talking of ‘homosexuals’, ‘the homosexuals’, even ‘the Homosexual’ rather than of ‘homosexual people’, with the suggestion that lesbian and gay people are ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’, almost an Untermensch. The Introduction largely avoids these usages, but they have crept back in Father Kennedy’s summary. If there is indeed any judgmental overtone to ‘homosexual’, it lies not in the term, but in the minds of some of those who use it. Lesbian and gay people themselves have objected to it as too clinical or pedantic; their preference is for ‘lesbian and gay’.
As to the other point, classifying people by their sexuality does not seem objectionable per se. We classify people in many different ways for different purposes; a person may belong to one classification for one purpose, to another for a different purpose. What one might object to is the purpose. Thus Hitler’s classification of some people as homosexual and badging them with pink triangles in order to pack them off to concentration camps was indeed objectionable, but it is perfectly reasonable to classify people into groups deemed to warrant distinct pastoral care as, indeed, the Introduction itself presupposes.
A more subtle objection to ‘homosexual’ is that, as contrasted with ‘heterosexual’, it suggests a dichotomy: everyone is either heterosexual or homosexual. In fact, however, there is a continuous spectrum of sexual orientation, ranging from the exclusively heterosexual at one end (a person who is only attracted sexually to members of the opposite sex), through the mid-point of ambisexuality (equally attracted to both sexes) to exclusive homosexuality at the other end (only attracted to members of the same sex). ‘Homosexual’ versus ‘heterosexual’ does not, therefore, to justice to the complexity of the reality: this is the point made by the third guideline, which does not come across at all from Father Kennedy’s summary, which simply quotes its second sentence out of context:
3. It is difficult to categorise people as simply heterosexual or homosexual. Empirical evidence suggests that sexual orientation in a limited number of individuals is totally exclusive. In those individuals in whom heterosexual disposition is dominant, there seems to exist a latent potentiality for homosexual interest of which the person may not be aware.
In other words, many people who are predominantly heterosexual are nevertheless capable, sometimes, of sexual attraction to members of their own sex and thus to understand from their own occasional experience what it is like to be predominantly homosexual – if only they would look at themselves honestly. This is a suggestion that can still give offence, and it was quite brave of the Catholic Social Welfare Commission to state it explicitly; as we have seen, Father Kennedy has shied away from repeating it. But it is of great importance, nevertheless, in removing any empirical support that a ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality might rely upon.
The spectrum of sexual orientation partly explains popularity of ‘LGBT’ as a designation today: lesbian, gay, bisexual (=ambisexual) and transgendered (tranvestites and transsexuals). Still, life is too short to spell out the full details on every occasion, and we are sometimes justified in simplifying, so if someone wants to summarize as ‘homosexual’ all those who deserve special pastoral provision because they do not fit into the picture of exclusively or predominantly heterosexual people for which the Church has hitherto only catered, let us not argue the matter. What is important is the pastoral provision, and if this is what the first guideline is trying to say, however ineptly, we may concur. However, if the pastoral provision is envisaged as extended to LGBTs as a whole, the earlier estimate of the size of the constituency was ridiculously small; we should be thinking in terms of about 100,000 people baptised as Catholic Christians, especially when we also take into account the well-known tendency of LGBT people in Britain to gravitate to London (for a variety of reasons).
2,4&7. The second, fourth and seventh guidelines also belong together: the second and fourth are about the conditions that a pastor must fulfil if he is to undertake this work and the seventh is about a service that will test him. The second says, in effect, that he must understand what it is like to be lesbian or gay. In practice, this is often no problem, since the best guess available is that about 50% of priests in Western Europe and North America are themselves gay19; so there should be no difficulty in finding gay priests to undertake the pastoral care of lesbian and gay Catholics.
However, the fourth guideline says that the pastor must be aware of his own limitations, especially of unconscious prejudice resulting from a biased social tradition. This is perhaps one place where the guidelines begin to look out-of-date. Certainly, there has been a long homophobic tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries, but it has been greatly ameliorated in the last twenty-five years. Lesbian and gay people are much more visible than we were then, and other people can see that we are not so different from themselves. Consequently there is much more tolerance for us in society at large. The problem is now seen to lie much more with the three Abrahamic religions than with lesbian and gay people, so we might now substitute ‘religious’ for ‘social’ and say that the pastor must be aware of unconscious prejudice resulting from a biased religious tradition. It is easy to underestimate the difficulty for a priest or bishop of looking critically at his own religious tradition. Most were brought up in the ‘ghetto’ climate of Catholic parishes fifty or sixty years ago, where ultramontanism (more accurately, idolatry of the Vatican) reigned and any hesitations about the party line were branded as disloyalty; clerical life tends to preserve these features, because priests talk mainly to the older ‘pillars of the parish’, bishops mainly to priests, and both have career prospects to consider. Consequently it is difficult for a priest or bishop to acknowledge to himself that he is gay, never mind to admit it to others. Yet one’s sexuality, even if one is celibate, permeates so much of one’s life and attitudes that a failure to be honest with oneself on this matter is a basic failure of integrity that can make any kind of pastoral care for lesbian and gay Catholics virtually impossible. That Catholic priests and bishops have a special problem here is shown by the much higher incidence of child sexual abuse among them than among the ministers of any other denomination – a fact that has never been satisfactorily explained by those who have rightly pointed out that, overall, the incidence of such cases is low and certainly much less than in families. So these two guidelines are still of the greatest importance: pastors should not take on this ministry lightly, e.g. just to please their bishop or religious superior, for it will certainly shine a spotlight into their own secret places.
The seventh guideline says that pastors can especially help lesbian and gay people to ‘come out’, i.e. admit openly to their sexual orientation: he is an ‘obvious person’ with whom to share this knowledge ‘and his own response must be sensitive and sympathetic’. An important corollary must be added to this, however. It presupposes that the pastor is himself happy with his own sexual orientation and equally open about it – hence the connection with the second and fourth guidelines. What hypocrisy it would be for a priest or bishop who cannot bring himself to be open about his own sexual orientation to presume to advise others on this matter! For this reason, it is much better for a lesbian or gay person who thinks of coming out to go to a happy heterosexual priest for advice than to an unhappy, and closeted, homosexual one. But, today, he is unlikely to go to a priest for advice anyway: since the guidelines were written, the spate of priestly (and even episcopal) child abuse cases has made priests and bishops the last people to whom the faithful would now turn for advice on sexual matters. This is doubtless a very unfair consequence of the failings of a small minority, but is not entirely the result of disproportionate publicity. It also has a basis in a real fear that the bishops and the Vatican have not yet faced up to the causes of priestly child abuse in the conditions of clerical life. Here we begin to see that the Catholic Social Welfare Commission’s original insistence on setting the pastoral care of lesbian and gay people in the context of inter-personal relationships as a whole has ramifications that were not seen at the time but are even more relevant now.
5&6. The fifth and sixth guidelines are perhaps the most outdated. The fifth dwells upon the social manifestations of homophobia, the sixth upon its effects on lesbian and gay people:
In a society that can see them as objects of cruel jokes and contempt, homosexuals commonly suffer from lack of self-esteem and a loneliness that heterosexuals find difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend. In ordinary mixed society, homosexuals feel like strangers. They are shunned and despised by people who may have an inaccurate or distorted knowledge of the homosexual person. Many homosexuals are reserved and even withdrawn, not anxious to draw attention to their difficulties.
It would, however, be going too far to say that these considerations do not apply any longer today at all, and there is one place in which they are still very much to the point: schools. There is considerable evidence of homophobic bullying in schools, and that teachers turn a blind eye to it. Can we suppose that Catholic schools are exempt? The failure of a school to do anything to educate its pupils in a more humane attitude to homosexuality – indeed, in the very principles here enunciated by the Bishops’ Conference – could and does play a major role in turning its lesbian and gay pupils away from the Church and even from their faith. Here is one of the obstacles that we place to evangelisation and could remove. It would certainly be a welcome and much overdue application of these two principles if the Catholic Education Service were to issue a statement recognising the prevalence of homophobic bullying in schools (perhaps after an exercise to gather accurate and up-to-date evidence) and determining to take measures to put an end to it as energetic