Found Out: Transgressive faith and sexuality.

Twenty years on from her ground-breaking book, Found Wanting, Alison Webster returns to advocate for a new language to fully represent sex and gender diversity in relation to culture, faith and to challenge the narrow views of the established church …

‘Tis mercy all, immense and free; For, O my God, it found out me.’ (Charles Wesley)

Walking through the city of Norwich, I encountered a preacher in the public square. Supported by others who were giving out leaflets from their makeshift stall, he was shouting to passers-by about the love of God. His tone was hectoring. He could not emphasise loudly (and to my ears, harshly) enough how much God loves people, and has given his life for them ‘in Jesus Christ’. I grimaced as I always do in these situations, embarrassed by the tone, the content, the very fact that this would be perceived by many as Christianity in action. As I hurried on by, hasty to be out of earshot, a young busker a few hundred yards further on struck up a song on his acoustic guitar. It was the famous ‘Hallelujah’ by Leonard Cohen. He sang, gently, about doing his best, about it not being much, of not being able to feel, but trying to touch; and declaring that even though it had all gone wrong, he could stand before the Lord of song, with nothing on his tongue but ‘Hallelujah’.

It seemed like a parable, and it brought tears to my eyes. The juxtaposition told the story of two very different ways of being in the world. One quiet, creative and humble, the other assertive and bullying, an invasion of others’ space. I felt encroached upon by the preacher – disregarded, depersonalised and objectified. Yet the musician’s gentle invitation to engage if I chose to; to listen if he was good enough, was moving.

My tears in that moment, though, also sprang from a reminder of my own sense of purpose; beginning, as I was, to work on my new book, Found Out: Transgressive faith and sexuality. My passion has been to give voice to the stories of those who are seldom heard. In 1995 I brought out a book called Found Wanting: Women, Christianity and Sexuality (1) because I felt that church sexuality debates at that time were almost entirely focused on male homosexuality, and that human experience was much wider than that. My concern was to dislodge the rigid cage that I termed, ‘the curse of complementarity’, which underpinned (and still does) all aspects of the church’s understandings of gender and sexuality, and had the effect of marginalising most women. Complementarity asserts that we find fullness of life in relationship with someone of the so-called ‘opposite sex’, which somehow makes us whole, and that this should be lived out in lifelong heterosexual marriage – the ideal life. Through the stories of women – single, married, partnered, mothers, lesbian, straight, clergy, lay, divorced, and survivors of abuse, the book explored the alienation and distress that many felt with the institutional church; the resulting ambivalence about embracing the identity, ‘Christian’, and the challenges and possibilities involved in continuing on a journey of faith as women of Christian heritage. Found Wanting was an attempt to carve out a creative space in the midst of an otherwise cacophonous, tedious, and one-dimensional debate about who we are, what we are worth and whether or not we can be allowed to belong.

Found Out is a different kind of book. My focus is on reconstruction, not critique. In the intervening twenty or more years, women have been getting on with living and loving; negotiating changing relationships; changes in our sexuality and sometimes our gender; finding a language to make sense of life, a language to speak of God and of our spirituality. These themes are what interest me.

~

In exploring again this terrain of faith and sexuality and gender, I have found it difficult sometimes to hold myself open, and not to retreat into a world-weary hardness of heart. In those times it has been the contributors to Found Out who have enlarged me and given me hope. In particular, I have returned often to a meditation by Phoebe which I will quote in full now. She captures a vision of compassion and generosity in the midst of the pain and discomfort of debate. She was inspired to write this piece by Sara Miles’ book, Take This Bread (2), and it is a precursor to much that follows about change, transformation, transition and liberation:

‘It’s all terribly inconvenient isn’t it – all this thinking, searching, hungering – exhilarating, but exhausting, confusing, and scary…I wish I were wiser, I wish we were all wiser… (body, blood, bread, wine poured out freely, shared by all). So we gather, sit, share in long and complicated conversations, honest disagreements, trying our very hardest to be love-bathed and authentic, grappling, wrestling… (the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the poor, the despised and the outcasts are honoured). We struggle with change, but ache for transformation, so we hope, persistently and passionately, that our gathering together – our drawing close – will stretch us somehow, widening what we think of as “community”, relentlessly challenge our assumptions about religion, and politics, and meaning (we are more than grand promises and petty demands, temptations and hypocrisies, ugly history and insufferable adherents)…breaking us apart, then grace-fully reassembling (food and bodies, transformed). Then here, maybe even here, we’ll find ourselves winding up not in what people like to call “a community of believers” – which tends to be code for “a like-minded club” – but in something wilder, scarier, more mundane than we could ever imagine: the suffering, fractious, and unbounded body of Christ (fed with this ordinary yet mystical bread). This is still my belief: that at the heart of Christianity is a power that continues to speak to and transform us – a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least (least qualified, least official, least likely), that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since we are one body: Christ’s. So we say, still say, and will continue to say, “Taste and see” (Christ’s body, broken for you).’

We should be in no doubt that this really matters. As I set out to put together Found Out, I occasionally doubted the need for it. Is the battle for LGBTI equality not all but won (at least, everywhere but in church)? But then suddenly there erupted a global backlash against all the gains we might have thought were secure; a kind of resurgent nationalism based on insecurity not confidence, bringing in its wake a passive-aggressive machismo, deep sexism, and so-called homophobia. (Most people use the word homophobia when what I think they really mean is a violent assertion of heteronormativity. The latter term may be a mouthful, but I prefer it for very important reasons. Homophobia takes away the agency of the one who performs it. It suggests a feeling of fear that one cannot help – like arachnophobia of agoraphobia. Being verbally and physically abusive to, denying the life experience of, and questioning the integrity of those who have an affectional orientation to someone of their own gender can be helped. It is a conscious choice.)

And the lived reality of persecuted LGBT people in many parts of the world serves to underline the fact that protecting the rights we have gained, and continuing to work for those rights where they have not yet been granted, is a life and death undertaking. One of the contributors to this book is Asma, who identifies as a Muslim with a lesbian identity. She is now living in the UK having been a refugee from an African country where being a lesbian is illegal, where there is strong societal discrimination against LGBT individuals, and where no LGBT organisations exist.

Growing up, Asma felt different. The way she felt inside was ‘really, really different’. But she hardly ever saw anyone gay, and the only sexual orientation open to her was heterosexual. The thought of marrying a man was to her, ‘the most horrible thing that they might put me through’.

Asma met a woman and fell in love. She found this amazing, ‘Like someone is pounding something on your chest’. They connected in a heartfelt and fun way. ‘Nothing really matters when she’s there, everything is brilliant for me, I could carry on walking twenty-four hours without resting because she’s there.’

But Asma was confronted first by her brother, then by the rest of her family. She was beaten. ‘They slapped me, and if I say a slap, it’s horrible, because, they’re men, they’re taller than me, I’m not built with strength, it feels like they’re hitting me with rocks, it feels like they’re hitting me with metal because they were angry and they weren’t going easy. It was with force.’ ‘In the end, I had to cover my head and sit on the floor. So now they had to use their legs to kick me.

I was kicked in my stomach, my ribs, my back. They stamped on my face. I was kicked in my neck, and that left me semi-conscious, so then I had to scream, “OK, OK, I’ll do it”. I had to agree to marry, just for them to stop, because it hurt. And the most painful bit was my mum. She just stood there, you know. She just stood there and watched.’

Let’s return to where we began this piece – with weeping. In her book, Seeing Through Tears, Judith Kay Nelson explores the notion of crying as a form of attachment behaviour. It is, she says, relational, not individual. Crying is a way to get close, and not just a vehicle for emotional expression or release. She says, ‘We do not cry because we need to get rid of pain, but because we need connection with our caregivers – literal, internal, fantasised, or symbolic – in order to accept and heal from our pain and grief. Crying is not about what we let out, but about whom we let in.’ (3) Later in the book she talks about ‘transcendent’ or ‘spiritual’ crying, which is the most mature level of crying in adulthood, ‘These tears are about something other than personal loss or pain. They are tears that represent oneness and love, closing the circle of attachment and loss by returning to connection.’ (4) As women we long to connect: with ourselves – to be in tune with and live out who we feel we really are; with others whom we love in diverse and glorious ways; and with our faith heritage – which often has to be redeemed for us and by us.

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I recall a woman sat opposite me on the tube train, crying. Tears were running down her face, and she had no tissues. She seemed to be in so much pain, and was trying to suppress it. I had tissues in my bag, I knew it. I located them. Should I offer them? Should I ask if she was OK? Would it help, or would it makes things worse? I was getting off at the next stop. I needed to decide.

In that moment of indecision I began to remember. I remember sitting on a train out of the city, heading away, for the last time, from someone I loved – so deeply, but not straightforwardly. Loved, not as a lover, but as one crucial to my self-understanding, my creativity, my livelihood. Now gone. I was desolate. The tears ran down my face. The train was crowded, and I wanted so badly for nobody to notice me. I wanted to be with my sorrow in a private place. I wanted to be alone with my mixture of incomprehension, powerlessness and disbelief that this brutal separation was the only way.

And I remember Paddington station. Crouching, animal-like in a toilet cubicle, rocking with a pain so acute I could hardly breathe, having to suppress sobs because you don’t sob uncontrollably in public places/toilets, even behind a closed door. It was a whirlwind argument with someone with whom I was deeply connected. Over a seemingly trivial thing, but it felt as though the connection was torn irreparably at its heart by angry words. Words uttered minutes before the departure of his train. We were ripped apart by the unavoidable finality of an external timetable, with no possibility of resolution. Would there be a reconnection? How and when? In that moment it felt like we were riven forever.

Because of my memories I wondered, what if this woman was just holding it together enough to make it to her destination? What if my empathy made that impossible? But what if she was desperate not just for tissues, but for a kind word, an act of compassion. Crying disrupts the order of things. I did nothing.

~

Tears are both purifying and transgressive. Chemically, they contain those things which would cause us harm: ‘emotional tears evolved to eliminate certain chemicals from our bodies and to help restore our equilibrium after stress. The popular notion that it is good to “cry it out” takes on new meaning…if it turns out that tears are literally excreting the chemicals that our bodies secrete when we experience stress.’(5) Anthropologically speaking, though, tears are in the category of stuff that traverses the boundary between the internal and the external. When bodily fluids flow, they represent the threat of pollution. It’s better that it doesn’t happen in public.

That tears run through Found Out should be of no surprise. Many of us have transgressed boundaries and been considered abject when all we have done is attempt to embrace our identities as spiritual, sexual and gendered people; identities that go as deep as it’s possible to go. Violation of who we understand ourselves to be is the deepest violation. People will become refugees, literally or metaphorically, because of it. So the tears here are sometimes the tears of separation – of distress, isolation, exclusion. But they are also the tears of connection – of joy and discovery, of solidarity, of finding new spiritual homes, and a life-affirming sense of God, the ultimate caregiver. They are the tears of purification as we set aside the distress of life as supplicants, saying ‘please’, and embrace our agency as prophets and pilgrims building something new. They are the tears of having been found out by the mercy and freedom of God, and the tears of having found out new directions, new habitations, and new forms of language. They are the tears of deep calling to deep.

This is an edited extract from Found Out: Transgressive faith and sexuality by Alison Webster, available now in paperback, priced £12.99.

1.    Webster, A. (1995) Found Wanting: Women, Christianity and Sexuality, London: Cassell.

2.    Miles, S. (2012) Take This Bread, London: Canterbury Press.

3.    Nelson, J. (2005) Seeing Through Tears: Crying and Attachment, New York and Hove: Routledge, p. 6.

4.    Nelson, J. (2005) Seeing Through Tears: Crying and Attachment, New York and Hove: Routledge, p. 195–6.

5.    Nelson, J. (2005) Seeing Through Tears: Crying and Attachment, New York and Hove: Routledge, p. 136.