silence and otherness...

I have been quiet over the last few days, one or two folk have e-mailed to see if I am OK, the answer is yes I am. I have spent the last few days polishing a Research Project for my MA. I looked into Mothering Sunday, bringing a hermeneutic of suspicion to what has become a curious tradition, and looking at what might be helpfully done to turn this exclusive celebration into an inclusive one. Don't get me wrong, as a mother of 5 I really don't object to being made a fuss of...I like cards and flowers and messages of appreciation, but I am also acutely aware that for some women ( and men) Mothering Sunday is painful, and often avoided.

More than anything I was trying to get away from the one size fits all model of the perfect Christian family where:

“Underlying patriarchal hierarchialism is exclusivism. There is one superior race: white Europeans. There is one exclusively true religion- Christianity- and one right kind of Christian: a born again evangelical Protestant. There is one right family model: a heterosexual monogamous marriage with a male breadwinner and a female housewife.” (Radford Reuter 2001. p. 206 SCM Press..)

I find that exclusivism is a constant barrier to people who are seeking, and that many within traditional congregations find it hard sometimes to embrace folk who are "different" from the expected norm , and when they do there is often an expectation that soon they will become as we are! Most of these good folk would be horrified if their reactions were mirrored back to them, and are acting out of sincere belief....

...but we must allow God out of our theological boxes and allow Her to challenge us in new ways... Janet Morley writes about her own experience of beginning to write liturgies naming God "She" or "Mother", initially uncomfortable she found that she soon delighted in being tipped out of her comfort zone, but there was another step:

“…it will not do for me to call God “she” only when I mean what is tender and unproblematic; this is a new kind of dualism. If I do this I am identifying God’s difficult otherness with the otherness I experience in relation to masculinity. This identification, of course is what traditionally male language has always allowed women to do, but it is a false parallel. It is the wrong kind of otherness.” (Morley. J . P. 162 in book by; Loades. A. ed. 1990 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge)