Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and I go to Mass

A couple of months back, I got a copy of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling (2003) and managed to start reading it in the last few days. For some time now I've also been doing a very common almost daily Mass at the cathedral in town. Because I've been working the last two to three weeks, I've been pretty much going to the evening 5.10pm Mass which is held in the little chapel. I must admit I quite like that chapel. It's a great place to stop during the day and just sit in the silence for a while. When I say silence, it's more a muffling of the sounds of the city but I can just sit there for ages and the muffling helps to give an impression of the city sounds almost as a musical performance. I must admit to a Brian Eno-ish ability at times to hear music in the day to day sounds of life. Sitting in the silence of this chapel provides a space to pick up on the music of the city. And often you can cut right through that to the silence underneath.

And so I enjoy Mass in the chapel because of the small scale and intimate quality of the place. And perhaps that intimate quality means that people get to know each other there in a way that wouldn't happen in the cathedral proper. The pews can seat four people closely but usually it's only three and often two in a pew. So you get recognised if you're a regular. I reached that stage a short while ago and as I'm there after work, mostly union work, I get the odd appreciative comments on my union T-shirts, especially those with a Your Rights at Work theme.

Last week I was at Mass with my flatmate and a mutual friend who is much younger than either of us. He's been doing theological studies and as I'm a biblical scholar we've had a few discussions on matters biblical. So last week we three were at Mass, three in the pew, young biblical studies friend between my flatmate and I. Come the sign of peace, my biblical studies friend and I hug. I will hug friends, often kiss them, at the sign of peace. One of the other regulars, who always sits in the pew in front, I recall commenting at the time about "the bear hug" as he put it. He had made appreciative comments on the union T-shirts so I didn't make too much of it at the time.

This evening, waiting for the Mass to begin, he approached me and offered me a flyer. I unfolded it and perused it; it seemed to be a list of events. He then said it was from Courage. Courage is a kind of Catholic ex-gay group. I say 'kind of' because it does not claim to try and change people into heterosexuals but rather to help people live a non-sexual life. Still, its goal is to get queer people to internalise official Church teaching on homosexuality and to try to live according to that. (Although, Courage UK underwent a complete change and is now a LGBT affirming organisation of Catholics, something yet to happen with Courage Australia) Consequently I gave it back saying that I knew of Courage and was not interested. And, of course, I'm not. His response was something to the effect of 'you can still dialogue with it'. To which I replied that I could dialogue but could not agree with it. At that stage the Mass started.

But I reflected on the fact that he had made an assumption based on the 'bear hug' he'd witnessed the week before, even though I generally assume that I don't look all that straight to begin with. The added irony is that my young biblical studies friend is not gay at all and is in a relationship with a woman, no doubt a fact that would shock my would be converter. Presumably he takes the 'bear hug' as a sign of erotic friendship, after all real men don't hug like that do they? And I was reminded of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had to say about homosexual panic, the fear that one's bonds might be homosexual, or perceived to be homosexual. She identifies this dynamic as one particularly applying to men (although I have no doubt it also applies with women) so as to prevent ties of affection and solidarity amongst men. It is a regime by which men police themselves and others and regime resting always on the threat of violence. It is the regime of the closet.

I have been planning a series of posts based on my Mass attendance which I would call My Adventures with the Daily Lectionary. And this piece is one that could fit that series. I must admit I was quite taken aback by this approach, this Courage proselytising move. It was like a kind of violation and also a breach of the intimacy of the chapel space, an intimacy that relies in large part, paradoxically on a type of anonymity. The weekday Masses in the cathedral bring together a fascinating array of people. The religious studies scholar in me is often fascinated into observing the people and their performances around me. Some of it can be quite strange, dare I say even a tad queer. But it is religion alive, often a religion not quite subservient to the official approved forms. It strikes me that there are some rather strange life journeys unfolding around me and no doubt there are those who think I represent a very strange life journey too. The anonymity provides a space where everyone can be at home with their own journey. And that being-at-home-ness feeds the sense of intimacy.

So this attempted intevention marked a rupture of the being-at-home aura, a rupture that represented an attempt at enforcing the normative, a normative that is always hetero. This heteronormativity was further reinforced when the Mass began. Unfortunately, the Cathedral has instituted the practice of the Leaven Hour, once a month. The Leaven Hour is billed as a "place for youth and young adults to experience growth and energy through the power of mass and adoration" I term it the Hillsong mass. The music is all from Hillsong and so it's designed to manipulate the emotions. Tonight there was a female guitarist and a not especially attractive young male on keyboards to support the singing. Quite downmarket compared to Hillsong's production values but enough to make a presence in the small space (a couple of people actually raised their arms in the air). Generally the Leaven Hour Mass is celebrated by a 'young' priest and the one tonight was a definite go-getter, confident in his male power. He sounded like he came from Hillsong and in his sermon even spoke of the need to have a deep 'personal encounter with Jesus Christ', a not very Catholic concept at all.

The main thrust of his sermon was about sex and controlling sexual drives. It was a rah rah heroic exhortation to the young to be strong in the Holy Spirit and not give into the pagan ways around us. It was based on the first reading of the day from 1 Thessalonians 4.1-8, in which Paul warns his community not to be like the pagans around them and give in to lust. The priest really overdetermined the binary of lustful pagans, sex drive out-of-control, over against pure in-control Christians. The reading and the sermon seemed to follow on from the initial approach I had received, almost to intensify the effect. One part of me was thinking 'is this a set up'? But of course today is the feast of St Augustine and no doubt someone determined that the old erotophobe's day should be marked with that reading from Paul. Perhaps even without any sense of irony.

But for a moment then I could see the dynamics of homosexual panic at work in a very direct way and, in the context of the Hillsong songs and the Hillsong mode of address that the priest had used from the start of the Mass, the heteronormative was put front and centre. This is one appropriation dynamics that I hope fails. Excruciatingly the Mass was followed by exposition accompanied by more Hillsong songs and so I beat a hasty retreat into the reassuringly at-home gloom of the Cathedral proper to light some candled prayers before heading off for the evening walk home along the river, my other cathedral space.

Radio National's Encounter Programme on St Mary's

Last Sunday's Encounter programme was a special feature on the St Mary's dramas. In a sense it promised more than it delivered but then I'm not certain if Encounter is the right sort of programme to cover the current imbroglio. It's mostly a series of interviews with Archbishop Bathersby, Peter Kennedy and some of the congregants interwoven with some sound grabs from a recent Sunday service at St Mary's. So it gives more of an impressionistic account rather than an investigative one and, given that most of the interviewees are from St Mary's, with Bathersby the only speaker with an opposite stance, one could say that the programme is heavily weighted towards the current 'orthodoxy' at St Mary's.

Two things strike me about the programme. Firstly, the lack of any theological depth or even understanding by any of the speakers, and I include here the Archbishop. I personally think Bathersby is someone with a better heart than mind, his sermons really are endurance tests, at least the ones I've had to sit through. In his interview, Bathersby mostly goes over the history of the dispute: he does touch on some theological issues such as the Trinity, Eucharist and Mary but not in any specific way. The most specific he gets is about the power dynamics of the Roman Church:

I mean, it’s a structure that comes from the Pope through the bishops, through the priests and then to the members of the church, and the priest is the leader of the community, he’s the pastor, he’s the teacher of that community.

Particularly since the second Vatican council we are encouraged to bring laypeople
into the life of the church. Certainly laypeople didn’t have a great say within the life
of the church and many would say they still don’t have enough say within the life of
the church. But nevertheless the second Vatican council was on about reaching out to
the world, and because of that therefore laypeople came into it. But it was still a
structure in which the priest would consult the laypeople, would seek advice from the
laypeople, if possible would seek a consensus about decisions and then to follow
through on that decision.

What Bathersby is presenting is a sacralised version of the corporate hierarchy at a time when the corporate world is so much in disrepute. Besides this is his weakest point theologically. This historic model that he describes only came into in existence in the late medieval period and was heavily contested especially at the Reformation but did not come into full flower until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And this top-down model of authority in the Roman church is really a stultifying blight. It represents the imperial ambitions of the Papacy whereby the office is configured as a type of secular ruler or more recently as the ruthless CEO a la the former Telstra boss, Sol Trujillo, or even as a sacral form of the Leninist democratic centralism which dictators like Stalin and Mao used to ruthless advantage. Was the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union modelled on Vatican ambitions for the Church? Did Stalin maintain a tacit admiration for the Pope's apparat?

So speaking in this way Bathersby has essentially alienated people who don't know or understand the real issues at St Mary's and maybe Bathersby doesn't understand them himself. He won't go there to check it out lest his presence be seen as an endorsement but surely he could get copies of the weekly service sheet or even send a delegation to observe the Sunday service? Bathersby would have been on much stronger ground affirming eucharistic theology but then the danger is that there are radical implications of such theology that not only challenge what has been done at St Mary's but also challenge the Archbishop's on top down model of church. However I think he was spot on when he says:

Now you’ll even get people over there who very strongly don’t agree with what
Father Peter is doing. It’s been said to me he’s going to drag this whole show down
and it will go through the plughole. And they’re not happy about that, and they would
say, with all due respect to Father Peter, that the authority lies with him and you better believe it, they say to me. I think there is a very strong authoritarian aspect in Father Peter himself, but you talk to him and he says no, the authority is out there with the people.

I've received similar complaints and have been told stories about Kennedy coming down in quite a strong authoritarian way to ensure his position is unchallenged by anyone at St Mary's.

Turning to Peter Kennedy's interview, I can only say how sad it was to listen to it. I remember him giving really interesting sermons once many years ago but it seems that he has completely lost his way theologically. Not only that but doesn't even understand the old heresies. Peter seems nowadays to hold a mixture of Protestant Unitarian perspective whereby Jesus was simply a very inspired man, a kind of wandering guru or first century Palestinian hippie, or in a more sophisticated version a kind of Jewish Socrates, but also blended with a little New Age theosophical notions of Jesus as an avatar of the divine. So Peter makes an appeal to Arius:

If I’m going to be true to myself here, I would say that I would rather believe that Jesus was a human person rather than what the church teaches that Jesus is a divine person with a human and divine nature. I would tend rather to agree with Arius that Jesus was a human person.

But that's not what Arius taught at all. It would appear that Arius taught that Jesus was either a kind of subordinate divine figure but not part of the Godhead or possibly that he was some sort supreme angelic figure. But Arius never taught that Jesus was just a human person. Islam teaches that, as do Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christadelphians and it's a strain in forms of liberal Protestantism. Many Protestant fundamentalists when getting over their fundamentalism adopt this sort of Jesusology, one example is the late Robert Funk who kicked off the Jesus Seminar. Funk wouldn't have bought the Jesus the avatar business but he certainly had a similar religious imperialism agenda, whereby the rationalist/hippie Jesus could be the focus for a new religiosity that would absorb all the world's religions - a kind of liberal counterpart to that good old-time evangelical missionary fervor.

Citing Arius, Peter Kennedy then calls on some vision of the 'pre-Constantinian Church.' It's an old Reformation trope - to get back to some pure original Christian experience. It's pretty common on many evangelical Christian sites, especially the Rapture-ready, to decry Constantine as the evil genius who set up the Catholic Church and destroyed Christianity by paganising it. While Constantine was responsible for the Roman Empire appropriating the Church, the Church was quite happy to be appropriated and was also busy, itself, appropriating the Roman Empire. Appropriation is a two way street as evidenced today by the push for same-sex marriage by LGBT people. And I should add that the Arians were just as keen on the Constantinian church too. Several 4th century Emperoros were Arians themselves and tried to exert imperial power to make Arianise the Church. The Arians themselves were great missionaries and Christianised many of the barbarians. Indeed the barbarians that detroyed the western Roman Empire , the Vandals, Goths etc, were themselves Arian Christians and these Arian churches were just as much Constantinian churches as the Roman Empire one. And if Peter Kennedy really wants to go back to the pre-Constantinian Church, he'd better be sure he keeps clear of Ignatius of Antioch, to cite just one example.

But even worse than the poor theology was the faux humility, masking an incredible arrogance and elitism. He says of his congregation

And we’ve always done that with our people at St Mary’s, they’re adults, for God’s sake, they’re professional people, they’re far more educated than most priests.

That's certainly true. St Mary's is very much a white upper middle class congregation, despite all the claims about its outreach to the homeless. In all my years there, I rarely saw anyone wander in from the St Vincents hostel next door (or indigenous people either for that matter). And while Kennedy's congregants might be more educated than most priests, those interviewed for the programme showed no more theological sophistication than Peter Kennedy himself. And I come back to Bathersby's point

It’s been said to me he’s going to drag this whole show down and it will go through the plughole. And they’re not happy about that, and they would say, with all due respect to Father Peter, that the authority lies with him and you better believe it, they say to me. I think there is a very strong authoritarian aspect in Father Peter himself, but you talk to him and he says no, the authority is out there with the people.

I have heard similar complaints. And while most might not complain, although they are more educated than most priests, they are still prepared to follow what Father says, in this case what Peter says. There is much more I could say about the content of the programme and the interview transcripts but time and space don't allow.

What I do want to conclude on is the incredible wasted opportunities by the makers of the Encounter special feature. Granted Encounter is not an investigative programme but it would have been a lot more interesting exercise if someone had tried to seek out those critical voices from St Mary's, the Archbishop refers too. Given Encounter is a religious programme they might also have tried to explore in greater depth the theological issues at play at St Mary's, especially those to do with the Eucharist. There is another glaring omission amongst the voices of St Mary's, namely the other priest, Terry Fitzpatrick. Given that Terry's status was one of the main issues raised in Bathersby's letter to St Mary's back in August, I'm amazed that no one thought to interview him. In the sound bites of St Mary's sunday service you can even hear him leading the congregation in prayer. So why was he not interviewed? Why the focus on Peter Kennedy? That's been the real problem with media coverage of the whole drama - it's been superficial and hasn't bothered to get into substantive issues at all. Instead it runs a simplistic people versus the hierarchy trope which draws on long traditions of sectarianism in this country whereby you have a moribund reactionary hierarchy versus plucky democratic congregation like the rest of us and who just want to be like the rest of us. And unfortunately the Roman hierarchy seem all too willing to live up to such expectations. And yet the same media organisations are very much moribund reactionary hierarchies themselves, including the ABC, as evidenced by its handling of the Religion Report last year.

I still plan a further post on the overall media coverage of St Mary's which will go into greater detail about some of the issues arising from Encounter's treatment of the story and how the rest of the media have similarly covered it; but not tonight.