The T(w)eenage Prayer Experiment

I'd like to invite you to have a look at my latest project, The Teenage Prayer Experiment

This week I tried to buy confirmation presents for a 10 and 13 year old from my church. I asked the Cathedral book shop for a book suitable for each age, that would help them to begin to develop a regular pattern and habit of prayer. But apparently, no such thing exists.

So, my son and I decided to write one.

Here's how it is going to work. I am meant to come up with a suggestion for a way of praying - a technique, a method, whatever you want to call it - each week.

He is going to try them. And then he is going to write a review of them, and give them marks out of 10 for ease of use, interest, and how close to God/religious/challenged/whatever they made him feel. Or those categories might change!

We'd love it if others tried them too, especially teenagers, and let us know through the comments how they were for you. You can give them marks out of 10 too.

If all goes well, we're hoping to write this up and compile a book in a year or so of the ones that worked best (and maybe the ones that were a disaster too). It seems to us that there really should be a book available out  there that can be given as a confirmation present to, say, 11-16 year olds, that shows and talks about different ways of praying, and developing a habit of prayer.

If you know of a such a book, or have suggestions for things for us to try, I'd love to hear from you. And do point and t(w)eenagers you know who might be interested to the project website, and encourage them to get involved too.

Synod voting and 2/3 majorities: A discussion paper

If we were going to turn down the Women Bishops legislation, we should have done so earlier. Here's how.

In the immediate aftermath of November's rejection of the Women Bishops legislation by General Synod, there were many mutterings about the voting system and the requirement for a 2/3 majority. I did not join in with these, as knee-jerk suggestions that we change the system to try to get the result we wanted are rarely the best reaction to a disappointing outcome.

I have, though, spent some time thinking about the whole process that had taken us to that point. And in particular, I have tried since November to analyse why people felt let down by the voting system, not just the result, and whether there are lessons to be learned for the future. My suggestion would not have changed the outcome, but I think it would have saved much wasted time.

It seems to me that the mistake in our procedures lay not so much in requiring a 2/3 majority, but in requiring that 2/3 majority in the wrong place in the process. There was a great sense of anger and disillusionment amongst members of deanery and diocesan synods, who had discussed and agreed the legislation, that it could then be rejected. There seemed little point asking the dioceses' opinion, if it were to be ignored in the final voting.

Presumably the purpose of requiring a special majority is to ensure that any changes command broad support. It means there is an inherent prejudice in favour of the status quo, on any issue, which some may find reassuring. However, I think the experience of the Women Bishops debacle has demonstrated that the Final Approval stage is the wrong point for that majority to be needed.

There were many stages that the legislation had to pass through. A each stage, other than the final approval debate, the legislation needed to gain 50% of the votes cast (in Houses, if such was demanded) if it were to proceed to the next stage. At the final approval stage, it needed a 2/3 majority in each House.

The legislation proceeded smoothly (albeit via some major and stressful debates) to the reference to the diocesan synods. This reference is required of any 'Article 8' business (business that involves changing Canons of the Church of England).The Reference stage is designed to prevent General Synod from passing legislation that does not meet with the general approval of the members of the church at a more local level.

Let's look at what happened at the most critical of these stages:

Revision Stage (July 2010): Synod voted to 'take note' of the Revision Committee report,  and then in a separate debate underwent detailed consideration of and voting on a series of amendments, which resulted in the legislation being substantially unchanged. The key vote was that 'Clause 2 stand part of the measure' - effectively, a vote on whether this legislation should be referred to the dioceses, and this passed:
Yes 373, No 14 (17 abstentions).

Article 8 Reference to Dioceses    Passed with 42 dioceses in favour, 2 against

Final Drafting (Feb 2012) Passed, in houses:
                             Bishops: Yes 28, No 0. Clergy: Yes 149, No 14. Laity: Yes 132, No 37.

Reference to the House of Bishops   Passed (with amendments, voting unrecorded)

Final Approval     Rejected, voting in houses and needing a 2/3 majority:
                             Bishops:Yes 44, No 3. Clergy: Yes 148, No 45. Laity: Yes 132, No 74.


What strikes me, looking at those figures, is that the serious anomaly came at the Revision stage. Many people must have voted then to send it to the dioceses, who later voted against it. This, it seems to me, is the root of the anger and disenfranchisement felt by 'people in the pews'.

It was unfair, misleading, and wasteful of people's time and church resources to commit the legislation for debate by Diocesan Synods, if a third of the members of any house of General Synod was prepared to disregard their views.

I suggest, therefore, that if we wish to keep a 2/3 majority requirement for Article 8 business, that we move it to an earlier point in the process.

One option would be to require a 2/3 majority in General Synod at the end of the Revision Stage. This would mean that legislation was only sent to the diocese if it achieved the 2/3 requirement for the support of synod.

A second option - and my preference - would be to require a 2/3 majority of diocesan synods. In this case, when General Synod sent legislation to the dioceses, if 2/3 of them accepted it the legislation would then be deemed passed. In the first case, only a simple majority of diocesan synods would have to approve it for it to be deemed passed.

A third option would require a 2/3 majority at both of the above stages.

There would be no need for a further Final Approval stage: or if there was, for technical reasons, it should be a technicality only and would only require a simple majority.

Finally, it is very important that no further changes (other than technical drafting amendments, perhaps) should be made to the legislation after it has been sent to the dioceses. I can well understand that, when Synodical government was first introduced, the bishops didn't feel able to relinquish full control over matters of doctrine. I feel that is now an outdated attitude, but even if the bishops wish to retain the right to make amendments, that too should be moved to an earlier stage in the process. Perhaps, for example, the bishops might wish to make changes after synod had approved the legislation but before it went to the dioceses, though I think this would be a mistake. The bishops of course will always retain a veto on any legislation, since by voting in houses a simple majority of bishops can always defeat any proposal.

These proposals would mean that only legislation that General Synod was happy to see passed would be referred to the Diocesan Synods, avoiding the wasted time, money and goodwill that has been involved in this process.

General Synod is a fairly young institution, and so we shouldn't be surprised if glitches in its systems are sometimes discovered. Standing Orders are revised quite often, and it would be a simple matter to make these changes, itself requiring just a simple majority in General Synod.

In making this proposal I am trying to be as neutral as possible on the presenting issue. That is, I don't think - and it isn't my plan - that the change I am proposing would have made it more likely that the Women Bishops legislation would have got through. Instead, it would have meant it fell earlier, wasting considerably less time and energy in the process.

Any suggestions for changing Standing Orders need to be thought through. If changed, the new rules would apply to all future debates, not simply this one. You will all have your own particular bugbears that you can test my suggestion on by asking how it might affect issues that you care about deeply. My personal test has been to think about the Anglican Communion Covenant debate. I don't want to suggest any changes that, applied retrospectively, would have got the Women Bishops legislation through at the cost of also making it more likely that the Covenant would have been passed. But I don't think this suggestion would affect the outcome of any votes, simply move the point at which a special majority is required to prevent another debacle like that of November.

I would be very grateful for any feedback on this proposal; and perhaps, if it is found helpful, for someone who is currently a Member to formally propose it to General Synod for debate.

Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth

Here is my sermon given at St Laurence Pittington this morning, on Acts 16:9-16:

The New Testament is full of walk on parts. Characters that we hear about briefly, maybe something amazing happens to them, or they have a conversation that we overhear, and then we never hear of them again. We have two of them this morning - the paralysed man by the pool of Bethzatha - and Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth and one of the earliest house church leaders.

I want to focus first of all on the story of Lydia. It is a brief story, but full of significance for us.

For someone with one of these walk-on parts in the New Testament, we actually know quite a lot about Lydia. For a start, we know her name: that might not seem much, but its quite a contrast with the story of the paralysed man in John, where we are told the name of the pool, but not his name!

We know what she did - she was a merchant, specifically a dealer in purple cloth. It wasn't particularly unusual for a woman to run a successful business in the ancient Roman world, and the writer of Acts doesn't make anything of her gender. Purple cloth was the elite fabric of the day, rather like being a dealer in silks or fine wine rather than just running a dress shop or off licence. The implication is that Lydia was a fairly wealthy woman.she was certainly well off enough to run her own household, and for it to be big enough to house Paul and his companions, and later be used as the local church meeting place. After Paul and his companions are imprisoned and then set free, at the end of this chapter we learn that they went to Lydia's house, and met with the still very new Christian community there.

We are also told that Lydia was a 'worshipper of God'. That is, although she was a Gentile not a Jew, she was one of the many gentiles who were attracted to the Jewish belief in one God, and worshipped with the synagogue without going so far as to formally convert to Judaism. Historians think that this was a very significant group of people at the time that Christianity began to spread. It may well be that the presence of so many people who believed and worshipped God, but without wanting to be part of the official religious institution that was Judaism, was a major factor in enabling Christianity to spread so far and so fast.

I wonder what this might mean for Christianity today? We certainly encounter a lot of people who say they believe in 'something out there', or God, or 'a higher power', but don't feel the need or desire to join the old established churches. Is this an opportunity, rather than a threat, just as it was for Paul and the other early Christian missionaries?

But back to Lydia.  On this particular day, a Saturday, the Sabbath, she had gone out to the riverbanks wand met there with some friends. We don't know what they were doing, but Paul finds them there because he supposes that there might be a place of prayer there. It seems that there weren't enough Jews or gentile adherents to Judaism in the town for it to run to a synagogue. Paul's strategy in Acts was normally to go to the synagogue to proclaim Jesus as the fulfilment of prophecy. In this case, in the absence of a synagogue building, he and his companions have put their heads together and thought - if there are some Jews, or some Gentile worshippers of God, in this city, where might they gather on the sabbath? And the first place they go to look is outside the city walls by the river, because such groups often apparently liked to meet near running water, and they strike gold. So the assumption is that Lydia and her group have indeed met for prayer and worship or some sort of spiritual discussion together in this spot. They presumably are delighted to welcome some Jewish visitors to their gathering, and Lydia at least listens with attention and enthusiasm to what they have to say.

And she takes it to heart. She and her household are baptised that same day, and she invites the missionaries to her house and wont take no for an answer. Within a few days or at most a few weeks, there is an established house church under her leadership, and Paul goes off to the next town leaving her to get on with it, as is his pattern.

There are two particular things that I think this story has to say to us today, two questions to ask ourselves. The first is about mission, the second about conversion.

The first thing that leaps from the page for me today is that Paul and the others went out to the river, where they thought there might be a place of prayer. When they got there, they sat down, and began to listen and talk with those they found there. Its the same pattern as Jesus follows throughout the gospels, and in our reading today: going to where people are interested in and hoping for healing, community, peace, though they certainly aren't expecting the version he gives them.

The question this leaves me with is, where are these places for us? Where in the places we live, or at work, do people go to talk, in the sort of conversations that might be open to faith being mentioned? Where and when do the people you know mention that they are worried about their mums cancer, or their daughters marriage, or discuss the reiki they saw on telly last night that Jordan had tried, and whether it works? All of those are the conversations of spiritual seekers but maybe without the vocabulary and concepts, certainly without the constraints of knowing what the right answers are meant to be according to the church.
Were do you hear those conversations, or where might you seek them out? Your kitchen table? The coffee room at work, or the water cooler? The gym? Smokers corner? The pub? On the golf course? At the knitting group?

(Just spend a minute or so discussing with your neighbour where those conversations happen for the people around you, either in this village, or at work, or among your family and friends.)

The challenge for us is threefold. to deliberately decide, like Paul, to go to those places;  to listen and genuinely join in with the conversations we hear there, and to speak explicitly of how what we have experienced of Christ is relevant to them.

(The congregation were then each given a piece of purple velvet, to keep in a pocket or handbag, the idea being that when they come across it there it will remind them of Lydia's story and remind them to ask if there is an opportunity to speak of their experiences of faith.)

Secondly, Lydia's story gives us another question, focused on ourselves rather than on others.

Lydia hears the message, is baptised, and immediately invites - well nigh forces - the evangelists to come and base themselves at her house. Within a very short time she is running a house church, the church in that place, and Paul and his companions leave to start again elsewhere, trusting the new Christians to get on with it.

There are echoes here again, like a shadow, with the healed man in our gospel reading. As so often in Jesus ministry, he is healed without any or hardly any show of interest or engagement on his part. He then goes off and we hardly hear of him again, except that later we are told he recognises Jesus teaching and tells the temple authorities that is the man who told him to break the Sabbath, and so contributes in a small way to Jesus' becoming a marked man.

As soon as Lydia is converted, she starts shaping and changing the future of the church, as happens again and again in Acts. As soon as someone encounters Jesus they start being part of its future story. Lydia's story shows very clearly that there is no time-served qualification for being a Christian who makes a difference, no sense that it should be left to the professionals or those who have been around longest.

Which leaves us with the question: how is the church different because you are a Christian? How does the fact that you come here week by week change this community, this church, or the world? Or if you don't think it does, how might it?

Women theologians in Christian history

I gave a talk last week at the Oxford Graduate Christian Union, called 'What have Women done for Christianity? Women theologians in Christian history'.
They recorded it: so should you wish you can listen to it here.

Alternatively, if you would like the full text of my notes (not an accurate transcript of the recording), here is the text. I should warn you, it is around 5,000 words.



Let me begin with a (long) quotation.

One day as I was sitting alone in my study surrounded by books on all kinds of subjects, devoting myself to literary studies, my usual habit, my mind dwelt at length on the weighty opinions of various authors whom I had studied for a long time. …

[I] wonder how it happened that so many different men - and learned men among them - have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behavior. Not only one or two … but, more generally, from the treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators - it would take too long to mention their names - it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth.

Thinking deeply about these matters, I began to examine my character and conduct as a natural woman and, similarly, I considered other women whose company I frequently kept… hoping that I could judge impartially and in good conscience whether the testimony of so many notable men could be true.

To the best of my knowledge, no matter how long I confronted or dissected the problem, I could not see or realize how their claims could be true when compared to the natural behavior and character of women.

Yet I still argued vehemently against women, saying that it would be impossible that so many famous men - such solemn scholars, possessed of such deep and great understanding, so clear-sighted in all things, as it seemed - could have spoken falsely on so many occasions that I could hardly find a book on morals where, even before I had read it in its entirety, I did not find several chapters or certain sections attacking women, no matter who the author was. …

And I finally decided that God formed a vile creature when He made woman, and I wondered how such a worthy artisan could have designed to make such an abominable work which, from what they say, is the vessel as well as the refuge and abode of every evil and vice. As I was thinking this, a great unhappiness and sadness welled up in my heart, for I detested myself and the entire feminine sex, as though we were monstrosities in nature’

That was written by Christine de Pizan, in 1405. Christine was a court poet and author, sometimes identified as the first professional woman writer in Europe. Widowed at 25 she supported herself and her children by becoming a court poet in France, and wrote several bestselling books. This is from the beginning of ‘The City of Ladies’, which was published in 1405. It began life as a riposte to the famous ‘Romance of the rose’, which characterized women as essentially temptresses and adulterers, and which Christine identified as a deeply misogynistic text. She starts her ‘City of Ladies’ in true academic form with a literature survey, noting how widespread a deeply misogynistic view of women is in theology. And, she says, she is confused by this, as it doesn’t fit her experience of women – or her understanding of God, who does not create evil things.

The passage I began with goes on:

 ‘in my lament I spoke these words:

Oh, God, how can this be? For unless I stray from my faith, I must never doubt that your infinite wisdom and most perfect goodness ever created anything which was not good. Did You yourself not create woman in a very special way and since that time did You not give her all those inclinations which it please You for her to have? And how could it be that You could go wrong in anything?

Yet look at all these accusations which have been judged, decided, and concluded against women. I do not know how to understand this repugnance. If it is so, fair Lord God, that in fact so many abominations abound in the female sex, for You Yourself say that the testimony of two or three witnesses lends credence, why shall I not doubt that this is true? Alas, God, why did You not let me be born in the world as a man, so that all my inclinations would be to serve You better, and so that I would not stray in anything and would be as perfect as a man is said to be? …

I spoke these words to God in my lament and a great deal more for a very long time in sad reflections, and in my folly considered myself most unfortunate because God had made me inhabit a female body in this world.’

The rest of the book is then constructed around three mythological ladies – Reason, Rectitude and Justice – help her to construct a city made of women, collecting together stories of women throughout Christian history and classical legend who demonstrate how great and righteous women are indeed made, and how foolish it is to think the opposite. The illustration at the top of this post is from her book.

De Pizan’s book shows clearly that debate about the role of women in creation, and the role of women in theology, is not just a modern phenomenon.

It is also an excellent example of some of the issues surrounding the contribution that women have made to Christian theology over history. Women’s theological writing has often been in genres that have only recently been recognized as comprising theology. Women have, at least since around the twelfth century, been by definition laity not clergy, and so their writings have suffered or flourished with those by lay men, as spiritual fashions or ecclesiastical rulings have allowed, promoted or disallowed lay theology. Women have often discussed women’s issues and the role of women in theology, and to the extent that those have not been issues the mainstream theological or ecclesiastical establishment has wanted to discuss, their writings have been marginalized – either deliberately, or simply by the academic death of lack of citations because one has chosen an unfashionable field of enquiry.

The growth of feminist approaches to both history and theology in the last few decades - and perhaps also the need of a new generation of historians and theologians to carve out new niches for their phds! – has led to the revitalising of Christian theology by the recovery and critical appreciation of women’s voices from the past. 

An early and very influential book was Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s work ‘In Memory of Her’, which focused on the women who are either barely mentioned, or not mentioned at all in the Bible, but whose presence can be inferred. Since then it has become part of mainstream biblical scholarship and preaching to note the presence of women in the biblical texts, and to retrieve and publish the work of female theologians of the past. 

It is though still relatively common to see lists of major theologians, or anthologies of Christian writings, which include either no women at all, or only one or two examples, often Julian of Norwich or another of the medieval mystics. This is often defended on the basis that, sadly, the way the world was in the past meant that women simply weren’t given the education or the opportunity to write. The giants of Christian theology were indeed all male and there is not a lot we can do about that, runs the argument. 

Yet in mainstream history we have largely discarded the ‘great men’ way of doing history in favour of a much more nuanced and multi-vocal approach. Historians are very used nowadays to seeking out the stories and voices wherever possible of those normal members of society who were having history, in the old model, done to them. And as theologians have gone looking for women theologians of the past, they have found them, working away in whatever ways were just about deemed culturally acceptable and open to them at the time. 

To understand this marginalization, it is necessary to grasp the very fundamental changes that took place in church organization and in theology in the middle ages.  The development of universities and the new assertion of papal power all combined to professionalise and clericalise religious authority and the right of theological enquiry. (See Gary Macy, The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination; and my Essential History of Christianity pp.44-57).

The amazing role of the early abbesses, for example,has been rediscovered in recent decades. Double monasteries, containing communities of both monks and nuns, were relatively common in England before they were banned in the papal reforms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. And double monasteries were always headed by an Abbess, who was in overall charge of both communities; the most famous example, of course, being Hilda of Whitby.
These abbesses were until around the twelfth century, ordained to their posts and status as abbesses, which was understood as a particular vocation and order. 
 
This stature of the abbess Leoba von Tauberbischofsheim shows her with her crook, typical of the era.

There are several ordination rites for the post of abbess in the Vatican archives, for example (Macy). And they were considered of a status equivalent to bishops: they were invested with a mitre and crook at their ordinations, and they were responsible for many things that were later reserved to male clergy. Abbesses heard confessions, for example, both of their own monks and nuns and often of the local community; they pronounced blessings and they appear to have often also presided at communion. They also often held the ordinary ecclesiastical jurisdiction for an area, and in some places invested the bishops. Only with the twelfth century changes in the understanding of ordination that were imposed by the papacy to try to enforce a male celibate priesthood on the whole of Europe were abbesses effectively laicized, and thereafter increasingly marginalized.

Many of these abbesses were extremely learned theologians in their own right, as well as presiding over learned communities and acting as patrons of theologians. If we take Hilda of Whitby as an example: she is best known for hosting the Synod of Whitby, and as patron of the early English poet Caedmon. It seems likely that Whitby was chosen for the crucial Synod that decided the future direction of the English Church because Hilda had already established a great reputation as a thoughtful, learned and reflective community leader. Hilda herself is not known to have left theological writings, but it seems likely that her theological insights were crucial in determining the decision of the English king to follow Roman rather than Celtic customs, a decision that prevented early English Christianity from becoming a backwater.

Many other abbesses and nuns are known to have contributed to theology in their writings as well as their patronage and teaching, and these are increasingly being researched and published. An article by Paul Rorem in Theology Today – on your list of references – lists many of those who have recently being rescued from obscurity. An early and prolific example was Hrotsvit, a Saxon Benedictine from Gandersheim. 

Her literary output includes lives of the saints, histories, and ‘brief dramas of Christian martyrs and heroines’, in which ‘the early Christian women are noble, brave and wise, constantly outwitting the Roman men who are corrupt, evil and…foolish’ (Rorem: Theology Today, 2003).

Hildegard of Bingen was a twelfth century Benedictine abbess, and a visionary and polymath. She wrote saints' lives, poetry, philosophy and composed music, and also wrote down her prophetic visions, in three  books Scivias (‘know the way’) (1141–52) , Liber vitae meritorum (The book of Life’s merits or rewards) and Liber divinorum operum (the book of divine works). She also wrote a book of natural science, invented a new alphabet and a form of modified shorthand medieval latin for the use of her nuns, and founded two monasteries.

The picture shows Hildegard receiving divine inspiration.


Hildegard was also a prolific letter writer and preacher, and was fearless in pointing out abuses and seeking reform, unafraid of any authority with whom she disagreed. On one occasion she wrote to her own archbishop, over some dispute, ‘And so your malicious curses and threatening words are not to be obeyed. You have raised up your rod of punishment arrogantly, not to serve God but to gratify your own perverted will’! (Rorem).

She was a quite outstanding woman and scholar, and was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in the medieval period. Although the formal sainthood process was never completed, she has been referred to as a saint by several popes, and n 7 October 2012, Pope Benedict named her a Doctor of the Church, the fourth woman of 35 saints given that title by the Roman Catholic Church. He called her "perennially relevant", "an authentic teacher of theology and a profound scholar of natural science and music."

Another brilliant abbess was Heloise, of Heloise and Abelard fame. The very fact that she is known primarily for her youthful love for and illicit marriage to the equally brilliant Abelard, and not for her own contributions to the life and thought of the church, speaks volumes for how women theologians have been routinely dismissed and denigrated. It has sometimes been assumed that Abelard in fact wrote both halves of their famous correspondence, even though Abelard himself described her as possessing an outstanding intellect, and she led her community successfully and wrote significantly long after his death.

Most images and writings have focused on the romantic story of star crossed lovers, and show Heloise at best as distracted from her books by a handsome young man, at worst languishing! In fact they seem to have had an extremely equal relationship, esteeming each others intellectual abilities as much as loving each other, and their correspondence and other writings testify that each saw the other as an intellectual equal and academic partner.

Heloise was born in around 1090 and died in 1164. She was a brilliant scholar, accomplished in Latin, Greek and Hebrew and had a reputation as one of the leading minds of her day. She became a nun, prioress and then abbess, and her best known writings are her correspondence with Abelard, though she also made significant contributions to a theological ethics of intention and other areas, and was a notable monastic reformer. 

Another major reformer who changed the shape of the medieval church quite significantly was Clare of Assisi, and again her reputation has generally been eclipsed by a man with whom she worked closely, Francis of Assisi.

Clare of Assisi (1194 –1253), was one of the first followers of Saint Francis. She heard him preach one day and experienced a profound conversion, and soon after secretly left her parent’s noble house and took vows of poverty. She founded the Order of Poor Ladies, and wrote their Rule of Life—the first monastic rule known to have been written by a woman. Initially the order was under the direction of Francis, but Clare became abbess in 1216, and successfully defended her order against successive attempts by various bishops and popes to water down the vows of strict poverty that she felt to be the calling of her community. Two days before her death, she finally received a papal bull confirming that the Rule she had written was to be accepted as the governing rule of the Order. Following her death, the order she founded was renamed in her honor as the Order of Saint Clare, commonly referred to today as the Poor Clares. She was canonized as a saint only two years after her death, in 1255. 

Pope Alexander IV’s bull of canonisataion makes great play with the Latin pun on her name: ‘CLARE OUTSTANDINGLY CLEAR WITH CLEAR merits, in Heaven with the clarity of great glory, and on Earth with the splendor of sublime miracles, is clearly clear.’

He goes on to praise her gifts: ‘She governed her monastery, and the family entrusted to her in it, solicitly and prudently…in ministry studious, in exhortation attentive; diligent in admonition, in correction moderate, temperate in precepts; in compassion outstanding, discrete in silence, in speech mature, and well considered in all the things opportune to a perfect government’.

Many other women were also actively involved in writing theological and liturgical texts in the early medieval period. For example, stories and fables by Marie de France and saints lives and descriptions of visions by eg Elisabeth of Schonau and Hildegard of Bingen, enjoyed a wide circulation and were widely influential on popular belief and piety (Rorem). Women were historians (an example is the twelfth century Byzantine historian Anna Commena, whose Alexiad shaped the Orthodox understanding of the First Crusade), hymn writers, and so on. These roles could to some extent continue even when women’s roles as theologians per se became more circumscribed, as we shall see in a moment. 

Other women, of course, played important political roles in shaping the way in which the church and state interacted and developed. Two good examples of female politicians and negotiators whose role should be mentioned are Matilda of Tuscany, who ‘ruled vast stretches of Lombardy and Tuscany in the eleventh century with both military and political expertise’, and who was ‘the primary Italian political and military supporter of the reforming popes during the investiture conflict’. The investiture conflict was a major clash between the papacy, still relatively weak but trying to extend and consolidate its influence over the nascent nation states of Europe, and the rulers of those nation states who were jealously guarding their inherited rights and responsibilities for the church in their territories. Since the relative (though always in practice limited) success of the papacy in asserting its authority over ecclesiastical affairs throughout Europe was critical in determining not just church but European and in some ways world history over the medieval and early modern periods, Matilda’s intervention can be seen as extremely influential.

A later example is of course Elizabeth I.

Another aspect of women’s theological writing that has been rediscovered in recent years has been particular genres that were available to women from the middle middle ages onwards, when it was no longer acceptable for them to write academic theology as such, now narrowly defined and controlled by the new universities and the church authorities. 

The medieval mystics, of which Julian of Norwich is only the best known example, were very often women, and this was clearly a way in which women with great spiritual wisdom or theological gifts were able to use those in an acceptable – indeed, in a very highly valued – way.  Mystical and charismatic gifts continued to be a way in which women could play an important role in religion into the early modern period, when such gifts were considered appropriate (women were very promininent for example in some of the prophetic and radical groups that emerged during the English commonwealth period). But for much of the post medieval Christianity, such mystical visions were considered rather suspect. Some genres remained as avenues for women’s theological contribution, however.

The most well known of these genres is poetry. Women writing poetry was very widely accepted, and with the invention of printing women’s poetry could even be published acceptably and enjoy a very wide readership. Some of these poems, are in fact carefully argued theological treatises, simply arranged in poetic form. such as those by Aemilia Lanyer – who is best known as being identified, rather tenuously it must be said, as being a candidate for being Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’. Lanyer (1569–1645) wrote a single book of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail God, King of the Jews).(1611). As the title suggests, the poems are of great theological interest, and are also of great interest for the history of women’s theological reflection on women. The title poem is a long narrative piece depicting the passion from the point of view of the women surrounding Jesus.

The most famous poem now is an astonishing piece of feminist theological polemic, ‘Eve’s Apology’, Lanyer points out that if, as the theologians say, Adam

‘was Lord and King of all the earth, 
    Before poore Eve had either life or breath.’

Then surely he cannot put all the blame for the fall on Eve. If man is stronger and wiser than woman, then Adam’s sin in accepting the apple must be the greater:

 ‘Her fault, though great, yet hee was most too blame; 
What Weaknesse offerd, Strength might have refus'd, 
Being Lord of all, the greater was his shame’.

In an audacious move, Lanyer goes on to point out that the apple was the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and that therefore man should thank woman if he is to be proud of his suprerior knowledge.    

‘Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke 
     From Eves faire hand, as from a learned Booke.’ 

The furious thrust of the poem is that although Eve might have initially taken the apple, men condemned Jesus to die; how dare they then claim to be the superior sex?

  Her weakenesse did the Serpents words obay; 
     But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray. 
Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die, 
Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit; 
All mortall sinnes that doe for vengeance crie, 
Are not to be compared unto it:                                       
….
Then let us have our Libertie againe, 
And challendge to your selves no Sov'raigntie; 
… Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine 
Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?                     
     If one weake woman simply did offend, 
     This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end.’

This poem is an extraordinary piece of feminist theology, and makes one wonder how many other women were saying or thinking similar things that we are unaware of in our limited view of history through the lens of the male writers with whom we are more familiar.

Another genre that was particularly available to women in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was the ‘Mother’s Legacy’. This was a book of theology written, or supposedly written, whilst a woman was pregnant. It took the form of a letter to her unborn child, the idea being that, if she were to die in childbirth, this is the substance of the faith that she would otherwise have taught the child in infancy. These were often substantial theological treatises, and again were frequently published and enjoyed wide sales. They were often published with a foreword pointing out that since the initial composition of the letter, the mother had found that other mothers of her acquaintance had found it helpful in teaching their own children, and that on the advice and entreaty of the local bishop it was now offered to a wider public. 

This form of literature has a long pedigree. In the ninth century, a woman called Dhuoda wrote a ‘Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for her Son’, a treatise on theology, prayer, society and morality. Such treatises circulated relatively widely for their day in hand-copied forms, but the genre really took off in the seventeenth century, when there was widespread access to cheap printing and a much larger audience of literate and pious women eager to purchase and read such books.

This genre is only recently becoming more accessible and more widely studied. Jennifer Heller, ‘The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern England’, was published by Ashgate in 2011. 

Heller used around 20 printed and manuscript texts composed between 1575 and 1672, and explores how legacy writers used the genre to secure status for themselves, as perhaps all writers do:  of course to shape their children's beliefs and behaviors, but also to intervene in the religious and political upheaval debates that characterized the early modern period. As she says, ‘a woman who assumes maternal authority [particularly in the emotionally charged situation of potential deathbed advice] challenges no gender hieararchy, but rather fulfils her religiously sanctioned duty to raise her children’. They were often keenly aware of religious and political nuances, and comment on a range of issues from the proper way to pray ‘to the doctrinal underpinnings of the Eucharist’, Church-State relations, and how the Church should be governed.

So,  the lens of Christian feminism, which has inspired historians and theologians to look back over the history of the church and see whether and what women did contribute, has led to a rapid realization that women have indeed done a great deal for the Church. And not simply as faithful Christians, good mothers, teachers of the young and doers of good works – women have, we realize when we look, been active theologians, reformers and commentators throughout Christian history. At some periods – mainly what we now call the dark ages – they have found this easier than in others, but the extent to which women’s contributions have been marginalized over history is astonishing. Even when it was least acceptable for them to do so, women were writing theology, they were simply having to use alternative genres to achieve acceptance and publication opportunities. 

As academics now, we know from our own experience and interests that women have minds as able, as incisive, as analytical as mens: and that some women have minds that are much more able, incisive and analytical than most mens! The same has of course been true throughout history, and where there social and economic circumstances have made it possible, intellectual women have always sought not just to follow Christ but to follow their vocations to think, write and influence the Church. I hope, whatever your field of academic enquiry, you will be inspired to do the same.

 

Champagne and Fireworks?

This is an article I wrote about five years ago: an edited version was published in the Church Times in February 2007.

For several years now, I’ve been bothered by the contrast between how much I love Christmas and how low-key Easter seems by comparison. ‘We are an Easter people!’ was a favourite phrase in Church circles a few years ago. I agree in theory. But I can’t help wondering why, if that is the case, we don’t celebrate Easter better.

Christmas is commercial. Around the central religious festival, the Feast of the Incarnation, there are massive cultural accretions. Christmas means a red, green and gold colour scheme (despite the attempts by John Lewis to sell purple this year); it means cinnamon and raisins in pies and cakes. Christmas means presents, office parties, shop window displays and town centre lighting schemes. It means sending cards and an annual letter, making contact with all the people you have acquired in your address book over the years. It means tinsel, fairy lights, nursery parties, carol singing, school Christmas shows, visits to Santa, visits to relations. Christmas is a social event.

The Church is often quoted at this time of year complaining about all this. Fearful that all this razzmatazz distracts from the central nativity story. I may be unusual in being a priest in the Church of England who loves Christmas. I love the trees, the lights, the food, the drink, the parties, choosing and buying and wrapping present, as well as the nativity (both the school play and the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity).

I (was until recently) a university chaplain. A student came to see me recently, and our conversation turned to the Christmas lights that Durham council were beginning to put up. Suddenly she said, ‘Why can’t Easter be more like Christmas?’ She went on to say that she loved the family focus of Christmas, the cooking that went on, the colours, the lights, and the atmosphere of excitement that marked out Christmas as something special. She wouldn’t describe herself as religious, but said that of course, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without going to church on Christmas day. By contrast, she complained, Easter is much more downbeat, ‘a bit depressing’ with its focus on death and with no buzz about it except that associated with chocolate. The bunnies and lambs and chicks are twee and infantile. Easter comes at a time of year when it is still cold and gloomy and everyone needs cheering up with a good festival, and we give them Lent and Good Friday processions.

When a young, intelligent, occasional church attender bothers to tell us what she would like from the Church, we should listen and take it seriously. Our conversation made me revisit my thinking about the disjunction between how we celebrate Christmas and how we celebrate Easter. My conclusion is that we should welcome with open arms the cultural accretions, the ‘commercialism’ of Christmas. We should learn from the excitement generated by them, and try to replicate that in distinctive forms for Easter. The cultural iconography of Christmas – red, gold, lights, candles, stars, spices – is far richer and more attractive than that of Easter – daffodils, crocuses, bunnies, chicks, chocolate. We need to try to reinvent Easter as a richer, a more culturally resonant, above all a more exciting festival.

None of this is to denigrate the central, spiritual importance of the theological truths affirmed by both Christmas and Easter. But the Christmas story, the Incarnation, is not hidden or threatened by the baubles of Christmas. On the contrary, the trimmings draw all eyes to the central story. They create a sense of expectancy, a true spirit of Advent. Every other year, Christmas stamps portray a religious theme. Every other year, the famous Fenwick’s window display in Newcastle upon Tyne is a nativity. Many schools alternate between nativity plays and pantomimes for their Christmas production. Many people, like the student who came to see me, feel that Christmas wouldn’t be complete without going to church. Everyone will hear Christmas carols at some point in December. The nativity is central to Christmas. It is there in the background even when it is not mentioned explicitly. It is proclaimed to many more people than it would otherwise be because of, not despite, the cultural baggage and festivities surrounding it.

I want us to make the Easter story just as ubiquitous, just as loved, just as owned by so many as the Christmas story. Here are a few suggestions for starters:

1. Let’s make more of Shrove Tuesday. It comes at a cold, dark, miserable time of year. Lent is still a widely recognised and owned cultural phenomenon, but the Church looks depressingly pious unless we balance fast with feast. In the parish of St. Gabriel’s, Heaton, where I was a curate, we built on the expertise and contacts developed through a summer holiday club week by introducing a Mardi Gras weekend. On the Saturday before Lent we held a Mardi Gras children’s activity day, and on the Sunday morning a Carnival Eucharist. Pancake parties are better than nothing, but in this age of foodies they may need to become a bit more sophisticated in some social contexts.

2. I first came across Easter trees in the Netherlands over a decade ago. A few bare twisted branches are decorated with blown and painted eggs, small birds, or anything you like. Ideally the branches are of pussy willow so they already have their catkins, but the decorative twigs you can buy now would also work well. This would make a good family or Sunday school activity for Easter weekend. Decorations could be devised which reinforce the story and are cheerfully bright and attractive (perhaps Mexican crosses and butterflies).

3. I have heard of a cathedral letting off fireworks from its roof at its dawn liturgy. This is a great idea. Fireworks are ideal imagery for Easter. They literally lift your gaze and heart, exploding into dramatic and exultant life. Dawn could be problematic with noise in many locations. Also, the core audience attracted by fireworks, families with youngish children, are unlikely to attend at 5am. But fireworks on the Saturday evening could be a winner.

4. Finally, our Easter morning Eucharist should be seriously distinctive. A note of extraordinary celebration needs to be struck, preferably at the heart of the Eucharistic liturgy. My suggestion is that on Easter day we use champagne as our communion wine. Champagne is part of our cultural shorthand for celebration. Its use chimes perfectly with the Easter message of the reckless extravagance of God’s love, and with imagery of the wedding feast.

Easter Resurrection

This is the sermon I will be preaching at 8am at Belmont and 9.30 at Pittington this Sunday. 10.30 at Belmont is an All Age Eucharist with Baptism, so will be a bit different (and won't have a full text to blog!).

A few years ago, when Noah was about Zoe's age now, just 4 and a half, and Toby was a baby a few months old, we went on holiday to Malta for February half term. While we were there we visited the cathedral. It is fabulously decorated, with a floor full of tombstones with pictures of skeletons in marble mosaic. The ceiling is covered with huge paintings of scenes from the life of John the Baptist. The church is most famous for a huge painting of the beheading of John the Baptist by Caravaggio. But the first thing that caught our attention as we entered through the turnstiles and down the first side aisle was a huge wooden cross, with a massive stone Christ hanging there, with real iron nails through his hands and feet, holding him to the cross. 

Noah stood there for a long time, appalled. We tried to explain why people had killed Jesus. As then, as we finally walked away into the main part of the church, Noah said ‘but it was OK, mummy, because God raised him from the dead’. Yes! It is all going in somewhere. I was very pleased with my parenting skills!

We spent some time looking round the church, greatly enjoying all the skeletons – and then Noah asked to go to see Jesus again, and Phil took him off. They came back after a few minutes, and I noticed that Noah was unnaturally quiet. Phil whispered with that parental urgency  - ‘we need to find a resurrection scene. Noah wants to see Jesus raised’. Well, we were surrounded by paintings, and statues and marble relief panels, so we started looking. 

The church was full of scenes from John the Baptist’s life. No help there. Noah was still eerily quiet. So we went into the museum. Toby was asleep in the pushchair and there were no lifts, so we struggled to carry the pushchair between us up four or five marble staircases. And we glanced around the galleries on each floor with increasing desparation. There must be a resurrection scene somewhere in this church. Noah was very solemn. Phil and I were focused with a kind of intensity, scanning round each room in a matter of seconds. And finally, at the end of a long corridor out in a modern extension, in a room full of huge late medieval tapestries, we found a tapestry of the resurrection. I’ve rarely been so relieved, and the tension just went from all three of us.

That really brought home to me how essential it is that the crucifixion and the resurrection go together. Without the resurrection, Jesus’s death is just meaningless nonsense. It’s just another piece of mindless violence.

Jesus’s disciples didn’t have the comfort of knowing about the resurrection in that first Holy Week.

Good Friday and Easter Saturday were times of utter desolation. Jesus died – deserted by most of his friends, taunted by his enemies, and at the very end he even felt himself to have been deserted by God. His friends and followers went into shock, a kind of numb survival mode.

When I imagine the disciples on Easter Saturday, I always imagine them in total silence. I just can’t imagine them talking. 

Holy week has always seemed to me to be quite wordy, quite chatty, up to Good Friday. Starting from Palm Sunday, we have crowds of people cheering and shouting. I imagine the disciples caught up in the crowd, laughing and shouting, and walking home later that day animatedly talking over the events of the day. And all through that week the bible records Jesus talking, conversations with interested bystanders, Jesus telling parables, and again I can imagine the passionate conversations and earnest discussion that must have gone on between his disciples all day and long into the night. 

But  watching Jesus’ body being taken down from the cross, walking away from the scene, and then all huddled together in the upper room on Easter Sunday morning, I can only imagine them silent. Numb. And the silence growing and growing, taking on a life of its own, until nothing that anyone could say seems important enough to break it. In silence, some of the women got up very early in the morning on the Sunday. In silence, they gathered together the spices and embalming oils that they would need. In silence, they left the house where the disciples were hiding away, and in silence they made their way to the tomb, where they had silently watched Joseph of Arimathea burying Jesus on Friday. 

They weren’t looking for the resurrection. They were going to find a dead body and wash it and wrap it, to feel that they had at least done what they could for him.

I imagine the other disciples stirring and waking as dawn breaks. Remembering as they came fully awake what has happened. The heavy silence continuing, as if it must continue for ever. And then -  the sound of running footsteps. Perhaps a frisson of fear going round the room as they wonder if this is it, is this the guards coming for them? A door crashing open into the courtyard, panting breaths  and thundering feet on the stairs. And then the women burst into the room, panting and shouting and laughing and crying all at once. A sudden confusing torrent of sound and movement – ‘he’s alive!’, ‘we’ve seen him!’ ‘an angel told us’ ‘there were angels there!’ ‘ he’s gone’ ‘he told us to tell you’, ‘he’s alive!’.

Astoundingly, incredibly, the women came back from the tomb that first Easter morning to tell us that Jesus was alive. Most of the gospel accounts agree that the other disciples just couldn’t believe it at first. It didn’t make sense. No-one comes back from the dead. But in the end, they had to believe the evidence of their own eyes. Jesus had somehow broken through death. Death wasn’t able to hold him. Even a huge stone tomb wasn’t strong enough to keep him down.

Jesus’s resurrection brings hope, and joy. The elation and noise and excitement, the excited note of hope of Easter morning contrasts strongly with the silent hopelessness of Friday and Saturday. The resurrection gives us hope that even the most desolate situations in life can be transformed by God into something sparkling and new, something exciting and lifegiving, either in this life or the next.

This is where we can never fully get back into the minds of those first disciples, however much we try to imagine the scenes from the bible. We are always looking back with the benefit of hindsight. For us, Good Friday is good. However much we try to imagine it, we know how the story ends. For us, the cross has become a symbol of hope and faith. We decorate our churches with crosses, we wave palm crosses and stick them on the fridge at home. The first Christians rarely used the sign of the cross. Crosses were still being used regularly to kill people, and were far too painful to be adopted as a badge.

Like Noah and Phil and I in that church in Malta, as Christians we are constantly searching for the resurrection. We see resurrection everywhere. When we look at a cross, it reminds us not so much of Jesus’s death as of his resurrection. We see the message of resurrection in springtime, in a daffodil bulb, and in autumn, in the harvest of all that corn that had to fall into the ground and die in order to grow and multiply. We live life expecting resurrection. Our eyes have been opened, and everywhere we see signs of a God who works through resurrection.

This is the kind of God we believe in, a God who dies and is raised. And because we believe in this kind of God, we have a very realistic faith. We know the depths of evil and cruelty that the world can sink to. But because of the resurrection, we have faith that good will ultimately triumph over evil. Because of the resurrection, we know that nothing, not even death, can separate us from God’s love.

Because of the resurrection, when we look on the darkest moments of life, we have hope that they can be transformed. And that hope gives us the strength to start working to transform them, to work with God to bring resurrection to life here and now.

Mary Magdalene ran from the tomb to tell the others the good news. And through the ages, the church has never stopped doing that. That is what the church is, in essence: not the building, certainly not the institution. We are in the direct line of that movement, that running to tell others, that Mary started that first Easter morning. And down the ages the news has been passed from door to door, from family to family. We are the group of people who like Mary, run from the empty tomb to tell others the amazing news that the God who died for us is also raised for us; that death is not the end; that nothing can separate us from God’s love.

Faith in women

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An article I have written for Guardian Belief, on Justin Welby's new chaplain appointment.