The Roman Catholic Caucus of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement held a meeting in St Anne’s Church, Soho on Sunday 3rd August 2003 to respond to the UK government’s proposals concerning same-sex partnership rights. The following was an impromptu theological/pastoral contribution by James Alison, put into writing after the event
I have been asked to talk to you about Worship in a violent world. As though there has ever been any other. There hasn’t. It is only because of the introduction into our midst of glimpses of a world, not yet our own, where all is peace that we are able to look at our world and refer to it as “violent”, rather than simply normal. The discovery that might is might, a frightening aberration for which we can take some responsibility, rather than right, a natural part of the order of things which just tends to run away with us, is a hugely complex insight whose consequences we haven’t yet worked out. What I would like to do with you today is to stand back and ask what it is that allows Christians to use a horrid word taken from the world of violence such as “worship”; what we mean by it when we do use it; and what indeed do we do that counts as “worship”.
It is difficult to think of any subject which has been more used and abused than ecclesiastical language about sheep and shepherds. To such an extent that the very language of the Good Shepherd seems coated in kitsch. And, in the light of recent events in this country and elsewhere, tinged with a sad, and sometimes appalling, irony. Nevertheless, I want to have a go in your midst at recovering some of the sense of this language as a critical tool with which we can begin to see our way forward and flex our imaginations a little as to what we might be doing in exercising ministry as gay and lesbian people, or for gay and lesbian people.
Some of you may have known Benjamin O’Sullivan, a Benedictine monk of Ampleforth Abbey who killed himself early in 1996. As far as I can tell, Benjamin was set up by a reporter from the News of the World, and the only thing which prevented his death from being a murder was that Benjamin himself consented to the voice of the lynch mob and became the hand that put him to death. I felt that his death was brought about because this extremely attractive, apparently self-confident, effervescent young man had been unable to stand up as an ordinary gay man to the voice of the lynch mob. And the reason he had been unable to stand up to them was because he was bound in his conscience. Shortly after his ordination he had expressed a fear to me that he wasn’t really a priest, because “if they had known” surely they wouldn’t have ordained him. That hardly anyone who knew Benjamin well can have failed to know that he was gay is of course not relevant: the person caught in the trap looks at the world through fear-coloured spectacles, and fear darkens rather than illumines what it projects. But this gives a hint of what I mean by a bound conscience: the sort of person who can’t stand up and be what they are, who can’t trust in the goodness of what they are being given to become, whatever the lynch mob may throw at them, the sort of person who labours instead in a world of half-truths, any belonging being a half-belonging, because always feeling that “if they knew” then “I wouldn’t really be allowed here”. Which translates into a permanent and deep feeling of “I’m not really allowed here”.
Who appears in our midst during midnight mass? I suppose most of us, nudged along by the ceremony of the placing of the babe in the manger, assume that it is the infant Christ. But the one who is present in our midst at midnight mass, as at every eucharist, is the crucified and risen Lord. We are, in fact, as at every holy communion, celebrating Easter.
Thank heaven for Jonah’s flight! Think how much more damage is caused by those who are not vulnerable to their own shame, who really do manage to fool themselves that their righteousness and God’s are cut from the same cloth. Something in Jonah’s being was vulnerable to the suspicion that the word of the living God would wreak havoc with his own carefully covered hatred and fear — the suspicion that that hatred of others and fear of himself were aspects of the same as yet unredeemed dimension of his own life. In that vulnerability was his flight, and through it, ultimately, he was reached so as to be taught how to be a bearer of God’s word.
I am going to take the readings which are usual for Good Shepherd Sunday, that is to say Ezekiel 34 and John 10:1-18, and see how we can allow ourselves to enter into what I have tried to outline as the eucharistic dynamic of our faith. First of all I would like to set out what I take to be the structure of Eucharist, and then see how we can allow these readings to come alive for us.
Are you saved? The only real answer to the question is not to answer, not to pre-empt the richness of the final judgement, when the astounding diversity of the wedding banquet of the Lamb will be seen, and we may even be surprised at detecting something of our hand in some of the minor decorations. It is rather to allow oneself to be sucked into that strange, dislocated story which starts with the realisation of being wrong, and patiently makes use of the stories, signs, examples, to nourish a creative imagination. It is this story, the story of how we became active participants in the subversion of the monotonous story of this world, that was opened up by Jesus’ death and Resurrection. This story is what we called the Church, and it is why salvation is intrinsically linked to the Church with its texts and sacraments. It is a dizzy story, to whose coat-tails we cling with a certain lightness of heart, because we have so little idea of what it might mean creatively to forge a story that has no end.
A series of coincidences in early 1985 led me to René Girard’s Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. As I staggered through its third part I found myself being read like an open book, feeling like the woman at the well of Samaria, as she returned to her compatriots to say: “Come and meet someone who has told me everything I ever did”. Eleven years on, I am still struggling to put into words the fecundity of what continues to be a completely unexpected and extraordinary access to Christ that is absolutely concentric with, and illuminating of, the central tenets of the Catholic faith.
There is one further dimension to the presence of the crucified and risen Jesus I would like to bring out, and that is a dimension which cannot be separated from the dimension with which we have just been dealing. At the same time as the crucified and risen Lord is the foundation of the new Israel, so it is his crucified and risen presence that is the basis of the holiness of this new people. What is traditionally called ‘justification by faith,’ is inseparable from the universality of the new community, or society, that the victim founds. There is no grace, no faith, that is not by that very fact immediately related to the new reconciled community. The new Israel is not tacked on to the making of humans holy, as an additional extra. Making us holy is identical with making us part of the new Israel of God.
