Author: <span>James Alison</span>
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The pain and the endgame: reflections on a whimper (Alison, 2009)

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You wrote to me to say how overwhelmed you were with the various incidents in the public domain relating to being Catholic and gay which piled up over the last few weeks of 2008, and wondered if I had anything to say. I asked you for some time, since I too have found it all somewhat overwhelming, and wanted to avoid immediate commentary, which tends to be reactive and not helpful. However, I’ve been trying to work through it all, and have sort of got a handle on it – one which is odder than I had expected.

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Letter to a young gay Catholic (Alison, 2008)

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Normally whenever there is a discussion about matters gay in Catholic publications, the style very quickly becomes stiff, and a mysterious “they” appears. This “they” seems to inhabit another planet from the one you inhabit. Whoever is talking about “they” is, in fact, on another planet, one where a strange lack of oxygen makes it impossible to use the pronouns “I”, “you”, “we”. If someone does start to use those pronouns, you quickly sense that the only thing that gives them the freedom to do so is that they are heterosexual, and are honest enough to say that they don’t really understand what it’s all about.

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Navigating uncharted waters: the gift of faith and growing up LGBT (Alison, 2007)

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The first point which I’d like to make, in a sense, is a big sigh of relief. And the sigh of relief is as follows: if faith were an ideology, and gay were a pathology, how easy this conference would be! Because if faith were an ideology, it would merely say “nyet” to us, and if being gay were a pathology, then we would merely go “oh poor little me”; and the matter would be over. Unfortunately for people who try to present things in the way that makes faith into an ideology, and being LGBT into a pathology, this world has collapsed. The world in which faith is an ideology, and ‘LGBT’ is a pathology, has collapsed. Our ability to have survived into what might pass as adulthood in some of our cases, seems to have borne witness to this. We’re no longer run by the world in which faith is an ideology, and being LGBT is a pathology. But getting out of some of the tracks of thinking, to which many of us have got used, which did rather regard it as though we were perpetually stuck between those two, has taken time.

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The shape of daring imagination: coming out and coming home (Alison, 2007)

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I’d like to go back to the little boy, or little girl, and share with you what I have learned to pray for. It took me a long time to be able to pray for this, but I think it’s the prayer the little nine-year-old wanted to pray. It’s a prayer for four things: a home; a heart; a husband; and a ministry.

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Strong Protagonism and Weak Presence: The Changes in Tone of The Voice of God (Alison, 2007)

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My motive for beginning with a grammatical niggle is that it points towards something more properly theological. If we start with “For God so loved…”, then all our concentration and effort goes into imagining the emotional intensity which lies behind the manifest activity. What is really interesting is not so much what happened, about which we can satisfy ourselves with the briefest of enquiries, describing it in very spare terms. What would really be interesting is the degree in which the act was intended, the push behind it, the emotional force with which the principal agent of this activity carried it out. If, on the other hand, we begin with “It was in this way that God loved”, then we have no prior access to some supposed interior life of God, modelled on our own. Instead it is that which is visible, that which is manifest in the activity itself, which becomes the lure for our fascination. And it is only in the degree in which we allow ourselves to be pulled inside that activity, and what we can discover starting from it, that we begin to get some notion of God’s love.

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Advent and Christmas Lectionary Meditations (Alison, 2007)

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We are used to the imagery of God communicating by God’s word, and so think of our responses to God as aural: listening, and obedience (from ob-audiens – intense hearing). Yet how much of the religion of Ancient Israel was a priestly religion of Presence! We forget that one of the central images of God’s communication in the Scriptures is that of the Shining face. From the Priestly Blessing of Numbers 6 to the continuous references in the Psalms, it is expected that worshippers will see the radiance of God’s face, and in its light, they too will shine.

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Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self (Alison, 2007)

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In passages like the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was not teaching something called “morals”. He was making available an anthropology of desire, and one that presupposes an understanding of who we are, how our selves are constituted, which seems to have a great deal in common with what we are now learning from the scientists.

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“He opened up to them everything in the Scriptures concerning himself” (Lk 24, 27b): How can we recover Christological and Ecclesial habits of Catholic Bible Reading? (Alison, 2007)

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I propose to do two things with you this evening. The first is to read a passage of Scripture, in the rich sense of “offering a reading” of it. And the second, if time and your patience permits, is to draw out some of the consequences of the method which I shall have used in order to come up with this reading. I’m aiming at making a contribution to something which I intuit as being important for the future of our Catholic life: the recovery of the habits necessary for a reading of the Scriptures which is both Ecclesial and Eucharistic. The route to this recovery winds through the filling out of our sense of how it is that the Anointed One of God, the “Χριστός”, makes available for us a fulfilled reading of the texts which we have received.

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How do we talk about the Spirit? (Alison, 2007)

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And the first point of that, is that we’re talking about God. We’re not talking about an add-on, we’re not talking about – as Brenda said, we’re not talking about something ‘tacked on’ in the wake of God – when we talk about the Holy Spirit, we are talking about God. And one of the greatest temptations for us when talking about God, which we fall into ever so easily when talking about the Holy Spirit, is talking about an ‘it’ – which is why I think sometimes, in the New Testament, and particularly in the Lucan writings, the word is not ‘the Holy Spirit’, but simply ‘Holy Spirit’. There’s no article. And it’s worth remembering how easily we are betrayed by tiny little bits of grammar; we’re not talking about an ‘it’, we’re talking about ‘I AM’ – a ‘quality’ of ‘I AM’ – and I just wanted to bring that out.

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God and Desire (Alison, 2007)

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Well, I’ve started here, not because I really wanted to talk to you about Original Sin (though no Catholic discussion about God and Desire can bypass the issue), but because it is my claim that the doctrine of Original Sin is an important piece of the grammar of how we talk about God. It is, or should be, a permanent reminder that we humans do not come to talk about God from a stable, fixed, starting place which we can dominate by our discourse. On the contrary. If God is true, then the starting place for our discourse is always as those in the midst of undergoing something. We always start as those who, having thought of ourselves (depending on our self-importance) as minor or major protagonists, in a narrative which we thought we understood, are always having that narrative blown apart by the emergence of another narrative in which someone else is protagonist, and we are peripheral in a way which turns out to be surprisingly reassuring. Or, in other words, the kind of “we” that has brought each one of us into having the unsteady and instable thing we call a “self”, an “I”, over time, that “we” is being radically restructured, and each of us is finding ourselves losing a certain sort of self so as to be given a quite different one in relationship to quite a different sort of protagonist.