“Prayer seeks change, prayer expresses the conviction that pain or disablement is not in accord with God’s purpose, yet a spirituality of healing that encourages us to say, ‘This is not me, this is not real,’ about our situation is deeply dangerous. As anyone who has had any involvement in this should be well aware, the recognition and acceptance of the material reality of injury, disability or trauma is the beginning of a restoration of that inner image of oneself as an integral system without which no serious healing can occur; and what follows from this in terms of organic change is a good deal less important. A spirituality of denial or a spirituality that insists on the transformative power of the will and imagination over the suffering body is liable simply to increase anger and guilt.

The same applies to any project for change or reform. I long for the Church to be more truly itself, and for me this involves changing its stance on war, sex, investment and many other difficult matters. I believe in all conscience that my questions and my disagreements are all of God. Yet I must also learn to live in and attend to the reality of the Church as it is, to do the prosaic things that can be and must be done now and to work at my relations now with the people who will not listen to me or those like me — because what God asks of me is not to live in the ideal future but to live with honesty and attentiveness in the present, i.e., to be at home.

What if the project in question is myself, and not some larger social question such as war? At the end of the day, it is the central concern for most of us. We long to change and to grow, and we are rightly suspicious of those who are pleased with the way they are and cannot seem to conceive of changing any further. Yet the torture of trying to push away and overcome what we currently are or have been, the bitter self-contempt of knowing what we lack, the postponement of joy and peace because we cannot love ourselves now — these are not the building blocks for effective change. We constantly try to start from somewhere other than where we are. Truthful living involves being at home with ourselves, not complacently but patiently, recognizing that what we are today, at this moment, is sufficiently loved and valued by God to be the material with which he will work, and that the longed-for transformation will not come by refusing the love and the value that is simply there in the present moment.

So we come back, by a longish detour, to the point to which Mark’s narrative brought us: the contemplative enterprise of being where we are and refusing the lure of a fantasized future more compliant to our will, more satisfying in the image of ourselves that it permits. Living in the truth, in the sense in which John’s Gospel gives it, involves the same sober attention to what is there — to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see — with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in that kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended. Our immersion in the present moment which is God’s delivers the world to us — and that world is not the perfect and fully achieved thing we might imagine, but the divided and difficult world we actually inhabit. Only, by the grace of this living in the truth, we are able to say to it at least an echo of the ‘yes’ that God says, to accept as God accepts.”

— Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgement (via wesleyhill)

excerpts:

“As the passage above from Rowan Williams indicates, our assumptions about the revelatory character of sex are so deeply ingrained that we simply assume (against all evidence) that the New Testament writers were also preoccupied with questions about the meaning of sex, or that they must have some answers to our own pressing questions about sex.

I think this can be especially hard for Christians to grasp, since a very deep part of our moral formation has been the belief that human identity is ultimately wrapped up in the suburban bliss of family life. (On which, see the TV series ‘Mad Men’…) This is also why our churches are often so strangely inhospitable to ‘single’ (read: pre-married) people. We simply can’t really believe that these people are fully formed human beings. And so we treat them with all the sympathy or suspicion or indifference that their estate demands; our charity might even compel us to subject them to the peculiar indignity of a ‘singles’ social event, all in the hope that the bright truth of sex will at last dawn in their dark lives.”

“I think Christians ought to take much more seriously the category of friendship, while thinking a good deal more critically about the unbridled theologisation of marriage and the so-called ‘family unit’. Is it at least possible that the idle carefree banter of friendship might tell us more about ‘what it means to be human’ than any anxious confession of one’s darkest sexual longings or secrets? Might friendship itself – so lacking in anxiety, so free and undemanding – provide a much-needed critique of our culture’s profound sexual anxiety, an anxiety which is simply part and parcel of the dubious (and ultimately theological) doctrine that the truth of our humanness is disclosed in the truth of sex?”

“What is baffling and sometimes outrageous to the modern reader is just this assumption that, in certain circumstances, sex can’t matter that much. And I want to suggest that the most important contribution the New Testament can make to our present understanding of sexuality may be precisely in this unwelcome and rather chilling message. We come to the NT eagerly looking for answers, and we meet a blank or quizzical face: why is that the all-important problem? Not all human goods are possible all the time, and it would be a disaster to think that there was some experience without which nothing else made sense. Only if sexual intimacy is seen as the last hiding-place of real transcendence, to borrow a phrase from the American novelist Walker Percy, could we assume that it mattered above all else.”

— Rowan D. Williams, “Forbidden Fruit,” Intimate Affairs: Sexuality & Spirituality in Perspective (edited by Martyn Percy)

“It is impossible, when we’re trying to reflect on sexuality, not to ask just where the massive cultural and religious anxiety about same-sex relationships that is so prevalent at the moment comes from. In this final section I want to offer some thoughts about this problem. I wonder whether it is to do with the fact that same-sex relations oblige us to think directly about bodiliness and sexuality in a way that socially and religiously sanctioned heterosexual unions do not. When we’re thinking about the latter, there are other issues involved, notably what one neo-Marxist sociologist called the ownership of the means of production of human beings. Married sex has, in principle, an openness to the more tangible goals of producing children; its ‘justification’ is more concrete than what I’ve been suggesting as the inner logic and process of the sexual relation itself. If we can set the movement of sexual desire within this larger purpose, we can perhaps more easily accommodate the embarrassment and insecurity of desire: it’s all in a good cause, and a good cause that can be visibly and plainly evaluated in its usefulness and success.

Same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is — in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process, such as the peopling of the world. We are brought up against the possibility not only of pain and humiliation without any clear payoff, but, just as worryingly, of non-functional joy — of joy, to put it less starkly, whose material ‘production’ is an embodied person aware of grace. The question is the same as the one raised for some kinds of moralists by the existence of the clitoris in women: something whose function is joy. If the Creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether ‘he’ was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy …?

The odd thing is that this sense of meaning for sexuality beyond biological reproduction is the one foremost in the biblical use of sexual metaphors for God’s relation to humanity. God as the husband of the land is a familiar enough trope, but Hosea’s projection of the husband-and-wife story onto the history of Israel deliberately subverts the God-and-the-land clichés of Near Eastern cults: God is not the potent male sower of seed but the tormented lover, and the gift of the land’s fertility is conditional upon the hurts of unfaithfulness and rejection being healed.

The imagery remains strongly patriarchal, unsurprisingly, but its content and direction are surprising. Hosea is commanded to love his wife ‘as I, the LORD, love the Israelites’ (Hos. 3:1, NEB) — persistently, without immediate return, exposing himself to humiliation. What seems to be the prophet’s own discovery of a kind of sexual tragedy enables a startling and poignant reimagining of what it means for God to be united, not with a land alone, but with a people, themselves vulnerable and changeable. God is at the mercy of the perceptions of an uncontrolled partner.

John Boswell, in his Michael Harding Address, made a closely related observation: ‘Love in the Old Testament is too idealised in terms of sexual attraction (rather than procreation). Samuel’s father says to his wife — who is sterile and heartbroken because she does not produce children — “Am I not more to you than ten children?”’ And he goes on to note that the same holds for the New Testament, which “is notably nonbiological in its emphasis” [Rediscovering Gay History]. Jesus and Paul equally discuss marriage without using procreation as a rational or functional justification. Paul’s strong words in 1 Corinthians 7:4 about partners in marriage surrendering the individual ‘ownership’ of their bodies carry a more remarkable revaluation of sexuality than anything else in the Christian scriptures. And the use of marital imagery for Christ and the church in Ephesians 5, for all its blatant assumption of male authority, still insists on the relational and personally creative element in the metaphor: ‘In loving his wife a man loves himself. For no one ever hated his own body’ (5:28-29, NEB).

In other words, if we are looking for a sexual ethic that can be seriously informed by our Bible, there is a good deal to steer us away from assuming that reproductive sex is a solitary norm, however important and theologically significant it may be. When looking for a language that will be resourceful enough to speak of the complex and costly faithfulness between God and God’s people, what several of the biblical writers turn to is sexuality understood very much in terms of the process of ‘entering the body’s grace.’ If we are afraid of facing the reality of same-sex love because it compels us to think through the processes of bodily desire and delight in their own right, perhaps we ought to be more cautious about appealing to scripture as legitimating only procreative heterosexuality.

In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures. I suspect that a fuller exploration of the sexual metaphors of the Bible will have more to teach us about a theology and ethics of sexual desire than will the flat citation of isolated texts; and I hope other theologians will find this worth following up more fully than I can do here.

A theology of the body’s grace which can do justice to the experience of concrete sexual discovery, in all its pain and the variety, is not, I believe, a marginal eccentricity in the doctrinal spectrum. It depends heavily on believing in a certain sort of God — the trinitarian Creator and Savior of the world — and it draws in a great many themes in the Christian understanding of humanity, helping us to a better critical grasp of the nature and the dangers of corporate human living.

It is surely time to give time to this, especially when so much public Christian comment on these matters is not only nontheological but positively antitheological. But for now let me close with some words from a non-Christian writer who has managed to say more about true theology than most so-called professionals like myself.

It is perception above all which will free us from tragedy. Not the perception of illusion, or of a fantasy that would deny the power of fate and nature. But perception wedded to matter itself, a knowledge that comes to us from the sense of the body, a wisdom born of wholeness of mind and body come together in the heart. The heart dies in us. This is the self we have lost, the self we daily sacrifice [Susan Griffin, in Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature].

I know no better account of the body’s grace, and of its precariousness.”

— Rowan D. Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings (ed. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.)

“[T]he body’s grace itself only makes human sense if we have a language of grace in the first place; and this in turn depends on having a language of creation and redemption. To be formed in our humanity by the loving delight of another is an experience whose contours we can identify most clearly and hopefully if we have also learned, or are learning, about being the object of the causeless, loving delight of God, being the object of God’s love for God through incorporation into the community of God’s Spirit and the taking-on of the identity of God’s Child. It is because of our need to keep that perspective clear before us that the community needs some who are called beyond or aside from the ordinary patterns of sexual relation to put their identities directly into the hands of God in the single life. This is not an alternative to the discovery of the body’s grace. All those taking up the single vocation must know something about desiring and being desired if their single vocation is not to be sterile and evasive. Their decision (which is as risky as the commitment to sexual fidelity) is to see if they can find themselves, their bodily selves, in a life dependent simply upon trust in the generous delight of God — that Other who, by definition, cannot want us to supply deficiencies in the bliss of a divine ego, but whose whole life is a ‘being-for,’ a movement of gift.

Sebastian Moore remarks [in The Inner Loneliness] that ‘True celibates are rare — not in the sense of superior but in the sense that watchmakers are rare.’ Finding a bodily/sexual identity through trying to expose yourself first and foremost to the desirous perception of God is difficult and precarious in a way not many of us realize, and it creates problems in dealing with the fact that sexual desiring and being desired do not simply go away in the single life. Turning such experience constantly toward the context of God’s desire is a heavy task — time is to be given to God rather than to one human focus for sexual commitment. But this extraordinary experiment does seem to be ‘justified in its children,’ in two obvious ways. There is the great freedom of the celibate mystic in deploying the rhetoric of erotic love in speaking of God; and, even more important, there is that easy acceptance of the body, its needs and limitations, which we find in mature celibates like Teresa of Avila in her last years. Whatever the cost, this vocation stands as an essential part of the background to understanding the body’s grace: paradoxical as it sounds, the celibate calling has, as one aspect of its role in the Christian community, the nourishing and enlarging of Christian sexuality.

It is worth wondering why so little of the agitation about sexual morality and the status of homosexual men and women in the church in recent years has come from members of our religious orders. I strongly suspect that a lot of celibates indeed have a keener sensitivity about these matters than some of their married fellow Christians. And anyone who knows the complexities of the true celibate vocation would be the last to have any sympathy with the extraordinary idea that homosexual orientation is an automatic pointer to the celibate life — almost as if celibacy before God is less costly, even less risky, for the homosexual than the heterosexual.”

— Rowan D. Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings (ed. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.)

“If we bracket, for the moment, the terminology of what is normative or ideal, it seems that at least we have here a picture of what sexuality might mean at its most comprehensive. And the moral question, I suspect, ought to be: How much do we want our sexual activity to communicate? How much do we want it to display a breadth of human possibility and a sense of the body’s capacity to heal and enlarge the life of others? [Thomas] Nagel’s reflections [in Mortal Questions] suggest that some kinds of sexual activity distort or confine the human resourcefulness, the depth or breadth of meaning such activity may carry: they involve assuming that sexual activity has less to do with the business of human growth and human integrity than we know it can have. Decisions about sexual lifestyle, the ability to identify certain patterns as sterile, undeveloped, or even corrupt, are, in this light, decisions about what we want our bodily life to say, how our bodies are to be brought into the whole project of ‘making human sense’ for ourselves and each other.

To be able to make such decisions is important. A purely conventional (heterosexual) morality simply absolves us from the difficulties we might meet in doing so. The question of human meaning is not raised, nor are we helped to see what part sexuality plays in our learning to be human with one another — to enter the body’s grace — because all we need to know is that sexual activity is licensed in one context and in no other. Not surprisingly, then, if the reaction is often either, ‘It doesn’t matter what I do (say) with my body, because it’s my inner life and emotions that matter’ or, ‘The only criterion is what gives pleasure and does no damage.’ Both of those responses are really to give up on the human seriousness of all this.

They are also, like conventional ethics, attempts to get rid of risk. Nagel comes close to saying what I believe needs saying here, that sexual ‘perversion’ is sexual activity without risk, without the dangerous acknowledgment that my joy depends on someone else’s, as theirs does on mine. Distorted sexuality is the effort to bring my happiness back under my control and to refuse to let my body be recreated by another person’s perception. And this is, in effect, to withdraw my body from the enterprise of human beings making sense in collaboration, in community, withdrawing my body from language, culture, and politics. Most people who have bothered to think about it have noticed a certain tendency for odd sorts of sexual activity to go together with political distortion and corruption … .

But how do we manage this risk, the entry into a collaborative way of making sense of our whole material selves? It is this, of course, that makes the project of ‘getting it right’ doomed, as I suggested earlier. Nothing will stop sex being tragic and comic. It is above all the area of our lives where we can be rejected in our bodily entirety, where we can venture into the ‘exposed spontaneity’ that Nagel talks about and find ourselves looking foolish or even repellent, so that the perception of ourselves we are offered is negating and damaging (homosexuals, I think, know rather a lot about this). And it is also where the awful incongruity of our situation can break through as comedy, even farce. I’m tempted, by the way, to say that only cultures and people that have a certain degree of moral awareness about how sex forms persons, and an awareness therefore of moral and personal risk in it all, can actually find it funny: the pornographer and the scientific investigator of how to maximize climaxes don’t as a rule seem to see much of the dangerous absurdity of the whole thing.”

— Rowan D. Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings (ed. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.)