Showing posts with label Queer Scripture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Queer Scripture. Show all posts

Water into Wine: Jesus's Gay Wedding at Cana.

Posted On Sunday, 8 August 2010 at at 05:44 by Terence  

Yesterday I dipped into two books, and found ideas that amplified  each other with powerful effect, especially in the current context of advances for marriage equality and the bishops' opposition. "Take Back the Word" (ed Robert Goss) is a compilation of writings on Scripture designed to take us as queer Christians beyond battles with the "texts of terror", to an approach more in keeping with what it should be, a source of inspiration and value in our lives.  "Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body " (ed Gerard Loughlin) is a broader and more ambitious compilation, of writing on a range of dimensions of faith from a queer perspective.
Who was getting married?
In the introduction to his book, Loughlin reflects on the story of the Wedding Feast at Cana, (John 2: 1 - 11) which we usually think of in terms of the transformation of water into wine. Immediately I thought of this as a wonderful alternative image for Goss's "Take Back the Word". It is one thing for us to move beyond a fear of Scripture to a point where it is the "water" of life: but how can we go beyond even that, to the "wine" of celebration?  This, I thought, is what Elizabeth Stuart does in a short piece "Camping Around the Canon", which (as it happens) she ends with some thoughts on weddings. Stuart's point is that we need to be able to approach Scripture with laughter, which is too often absent from religious practice. After a concise exposition of the historical and theological justification for the approach, she offers just one illustration of what she means,  discussing Ephesians, 5:21-33 ("Wives, submit to your husbands"), which is so often used at weddings, and which for women can so easily become a text of terror. Hearing it read at weddings, she says, left her "churning with anger". But an analysis by Gerard Loughlin changed her reaction from tragic to comic, as the "heteropatriarchal" readings are
undermined and washed away in the deeper waters of the Christian symbolic, for insofar as as women are members of the body, they too are called to be Christ to others; so that they too must also act as "groom" and "husband"; to the "bride" and "wife" of the other, whether it is to a man or woman.  For it cannot be said that within the community only men are called to love as Christ does."
-Gerard Loughlin, "Baptismal Fluid", unpublished paper quoted by Stuar
Stuart comments:
Loughlin's reading of the text had transformed it into a queer text. The very incongruity of this reading with the "original" reading is enough to stimulate laughter. I find it funny that this passage should be read so often and do solemnly at weddings, the great ceremony of heteropatriarchy.
-Stuart, Camping Around the Canon, in Goss "Take Back the Word"
I remember a comparable insight and laughter from my own experience. Once on retreat, I found myself reflecting on the familiar image of the Church as the bride of Christ, and realized that as a gay man, I was spared the oddity (for straight men) of imagining myself as "bride", and instead was able to picture myself in my meditation as "groom" of Christ - a meditation that became extremely powerful. Looking  back on it later, I found satisfaction and humour in the realisation that my orientation had given me a unique advantage in my prayer.
This left me with a predisposed receptivity to Loughlin's main ideas concerning the wedding at Cana.  Instead of considering the miracle of transformation, he asks instead, "Who is it that was married?". He answers the question in stages.
First, he points out that the story should be read as a parable, with distinct anticipation of the Last Supper,  Passion and Resurrection. The wedding takes place on "the third day" (anticipating the resurrection) after He has talked with Nathanel (John 1:43 -51), and the transformation of water into wine anticipates the transformation of wine into His blood. In a liturgical setting, the Mass recalls these three days. So, it is a standard idea that symbolically, in the church's recollection of the story, we are all guests at the wedding, where Christ is marrying his Church.   At one level closer to the literal, it is Christ marrying his disciples. Loughlin then goes on to discuss a fascinating more literal idea from the early and medieval church - that it was indeed Christ who was married - to John, the beloved disciple. This idea was articulated in the apocryphal Acts of John, in which it is said that John broke off his betrothals to a woman to "bind himself" to Jesus. This was apparently a common strand in some German medieval thinking, right up until the Reformation, and is visually illustrated in some surviving art.  In a  "Libellus for John the Evangelist", a painting of the wedding feast is said to feature a bearded Christ seated next to a beardless, androgynous John - whom, says Loughlin, he appears about to kiss.  In the "Admont Codex" illustrated manuscript of  St Anselm's "Prayers and Meditations", an illustration in two parts shows John's story. In one, John is seen leaving his female betrothed. In the companion piece, he is lying on the ground with this head on Jesus's breast, while Jesus himself is tenderly caressing his chin.
Is this tradition "true"? We cannot know. Like so much much else in Scripture, it is impossible to get through the mists produced by unfamiliar language, a different literary tradition, and remote historical /cultural context to get close to the literal "truth" behind the text.   No matter. Even without accepting  this idea literally, it is enough for me to know that it was once widely accepted in the mystical tradition, and to incorporate it into my reader response.
It is when Loughlin moves beyond the "meaning" of the text to its multiple ironies that the fun starts. This where, in sympathy with Elizabeth Stuart, I found myself quite literally laughing with Scripture.  For if it is true that the consecration of Eucharistic wine into Christ's bloods is prefigured in the Cana transformation of water into wine, then we can see that in every Mass we are commemorating  Christ's own wedding with His (male) disciples. Every Mass can be seen as a mystical gay wedding.  That Mass is celebrated by a priest who has committed himself to celibacy, and so forswears procreation himself, but is expected to preach against gay marriage or others - because homosexual intercourse, being unable to procreate, is "intrinsically disordered". The priesthood in turn, is run by a a similarly celibate coterie in the Vatican which reproduces itself by recruitment not biological reproduction - and castigates the homosexual community for its own social, not biological reproduction.
The threat posed by gays and lesbians to family and society is often proclaimed by men - named "fathers"- who have vowed never to to beget children. The pope lives in a household of such men - a veritable palace of "eunuchs"for Christ  - that reproduces itself by persuading others not to procreate. Why us the refusal of fecundity - the celibate lifestyle - not also a threat to family and society?
-Loughlin, introduction to "Queer Theology"

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Queering the Song of Songs

Posted On Sunday, 1 August 2010 at at 03:06 by Terence  

Gay men and women could be excused for feeling more than a little ambivalent about the Song of Songs as recommended reading.  On the one hand, it is very emphatically and clearly a frankly erotic love song between two unmarried lovers. It is a celebration of physical love, and an important counter to the common religious view that sexual expression must be confined to procreation. The Song is the strongest possible proof that Scripture does not support that view (there are others, too.)


On the other, it is equally clearly an expression of heterosexual love -at least as known and commonly published today.( There is an out of print book which argues that the earliest texts described two men, and that one set of pronouns was altered by later editors. For an account of this, see the Wild Reed on "The Bible's Gay Love Poem". However, I have not seen authoritative support for this view elsewhere, and for today I shall stick with the better known version. )   

So how is a lesbian or gay male reader to respond to this text?
One simple remedy is simply to use it as a starting point, and ignore the details of gender, as I have done myself in the past – but this is not entirely satisfactory.

Christopher King, writing in “Take Back the Word”, has another approach, which strikes me as instructive and useful. (“A Love as Fierce as Death: Reclaiming the Song of Songs for Queer Lovers”). The starting point for his reading, which sets it apart from others and makes it come alive for me, is that he recognises in the Song much more than just  the expression of love, but its fuller story.

He reminds us that the text stresses that the woman, whom he calls the Shulamite, is both Black and an outsider. As such, this is not just about love, but about forbidden love – love survives and conquers resistance.
“I am black and  beautiful,
O daughters of Jerusalem” (1:5)
The Shulamite recognizes that because of her relationship to the Beloved, she has become the subject of a discourse that intensifies her experience of marginality. Having become merely an outsider, she has become a taboo person.
King also describes how the “official” church interpretation of the Song has changed dramatically over the centuries: in the Classical period, for instance, her blackness was taken to represent sin.  That view has changed.
Not only is the Shulamite an “outsider”, she has suffered for it. She is hounded by the law, as represented by “the sentinels”, an beaten up for it.
“Making their rounds in the city,
the sentinels found me;
they beat me, they wounded me,
they took away my mantle
those sentinels of the walls” (5:7)
The very men who ought to protect the Shulamite have savagely attacked her. Not only have they thrashed , bruised and perhaps raped her, they have also stolen her outer garment, exposing her body to the physical elements, and more seriously, unveiling her shame to the elemental forces of public scorn.
It really doesn’t take a great deal of imagination here to make the obvious parallel with the violence and persecution that sexual outsiders  have suffered, just like the Shulamite foreigner, and often similarly at the hands of those who should be protecting the weak – the church and the police.

But – she’s a survivor, and love conquers.

A further important point, worth carefully stressing, is not just the joy of their love, but also it’s absolute equality and reciprocity.

My beloved is mine and I am his
he pastures his flock among he lilies (2:16)
I am my beloved’s and he is mine
he pastures his flock among he lilies. (6.3) 
This mutuality and equality within a relationship is commonplace in queer relationships, but less so (probably rare, to this degree), in conventional marriage.

And so, although the relationship that is celebrated in the Song of Songs is not a same-sex one, it is indeed a queer one. The biological sexes are different, but at this level of equality, gender and gender roles fade into insignificance. “Queer” is more than a descriptor of same-sex attraction, but also includes all manner of sexual outsiders. An outsider the Shulamite most certainly is, and like us, has suffered for it.

But still, she can celebrate her love for her beloved, as he celebrates his for her.   Most important of all for me, is that this has been quite literally celebrated in the most public way possible – written down in a book of Scripture, read by those who followed over the following thousands of years.

No secret closet for their love, then.


Source:

King, Christopher:  "A Love as Fierce as Death", in Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible, edited Robert Goss.


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