Clarifying

At the end of Telling the Truth about God, I suggest that Quakers – and maybe other people who struggle with these issues around religious experience and how we express it, but are committed to remaining a community – should “try, cry, and clarify”. The idea is that you have to say something, but it will fall short in some ways and you or others may be hurt by that, but then you try and work out what went wrong so that you can try again. In this post, I want to explore some more practical things which might be meant by ‘clarify’. If you’ve got to that stage, what can you actually do?

Listen to find out where the questions are.

Is there a misunderstanding? Is someone else in the conversation using the same words or metaphors, but in a very different way? (‘Lamb of God’ might be a gentle, rural image; it might suggest a vicious killing; or call for mint sauce!) Are you making a reference that not everyone gets?

Try telling your stories about the words you use.

By telling your personal story about a word – where you learned it and how you use it, what historical and cultural touchstones it brings to mind for you – it is sometimes possible to help others see the word in your way. Even if they can’t use it themselves (especially if it reminds them of very different cultural and historical connotations), knowing why the word is significant to you can help a lot.

Try a different word from the same framework.

If you’ve tried expressing your theology – here understood very broadly, your understand of God and the world – in one way, but it didn’t seem to work, you could try using different terminology. Within the Christian theological framework, for example, I hear Quakers switching between Christ and Spirit (perhaps to the confusion or annoyance of careful Trinitarians!).

Try a different framework.

Not everyone will feel comfortable doing this, but some people who have experience with more than one faith tradition feel able to switch between ways of thinking: to redescribe God Within as the Inner Buddha Nature, for example. This sort of move is encouraged by some of the lists of apparent synonyms which I discuss in Telling the Truth about God, and it fits with some versions of the Quaker universal approach to truth.

Try inventing a new word (or repurposing an old one).

This might not be an approach for every day, but sometimes it’s possible to coin a new phrase, pull a new word out of thin air, or take a noun and verb it, or something similar. If the words you have all seem to lead to confusion, clarity is sometimes achievable by making up something fresh. The trick is usually to use it: use it often and consistently so that others can learn the pattern you have in mind for it.

Listen some more.

Even when you’ve improved the clarity and all involved in the conversation have a greater understanding of each other, there’s bound to be something else to work on. Taking time in silence can help – but silence can’t be the last word. In my experience, we will eventually be led to try again.

Bodging

Here’s a word I remembered recently: to bodge.

Bodging can be a problem, an approach, or a skill. The English word ‘to bodge’ has, as far as I’m aware, three uses: it can used as a short form of chair-bodging, the skill of making chair legs and other items from green wood; it can be used to indicate a repair which has been done badly, as in a bodged job; and it can be used to suggest something in between, something which uses the skill of improvisation to bodge together a functional, if not elegant, solution.

This latter meaning is not, I think, just a skill. It is an approach which takes the skills involved with whatever craft would be needed to do the job from scratch – to bodge together a repair in a piece of clothing, you need a basic level of sewing skills; to bodge a piece of electrical kit to that inelegant-but-functional state which is characteristic of a good bodge, you need to understand the principles of electrical work (but only some of the tools and none of the qualifications. Please note that, although I will admit to bodging myself, I’m not recommending you try this at home!). To that basic level of skill it adds an appreciation of the need to keep things going rather than simply buying new or beginning again, and it requires a few relevant tools (if not the ideal thing) and some relevant materials (if not just the thing for the job).

Some jobs are improvisational by nature. Improv theatre, obviously. Most things which require contact with the public need a level of flexibility, of willingness to assess what is happening and respond in the moment. Teaching, especially teaching as a visitor in a space you may never had visited before and with people you have never previously met, has a lot of this. These things might be good training for bodging, but I don’t think they’re bodging as such. Bodging is more tangible. You end up with an object.

But that object might not look quite the way it would if it had been new or mended professionally. Here’s the kind of bodging I learned from one my grandmothers: the cuddly toy with a glued on felt eye on one side to replace the broken plastic type, which remains on the other side, has been mended by a bodger. The skirt whose hem I turned up so I no longer trip over it, but didn’t get quite neat so that it can’t be ironed to flat, is bodged. (I tackle this situation with a bodger’s solution: don’t iron it.) If you buy a cushion cover, these days it usually has a zip fitted so it can easily be removed for cleaning. When I took a bit of embroidery we found in my other grandmother’s house and made it into a cushion cover with a bit of backing fabric I happened to have in my spares drawer, I didn’t have a zip, so I just sewed the cushion in – I did have to go and buy a cheap cushion pad – and if I need to wash it, I’ll unpick it and stitch it up again afterwards. I don’t have a sewing machine so it’s just done by hand anyway.

There are some tasks where I think about bodging them, but I come up short because although the thing is theoretically bodgable (or bodgible, or maybe bodgeable – eh, that spelling might not be elegant but it’s functional) I either lack the relevant skills or the collection of no-things by which it is possible to make something from nothing. Cushions, yes. Computers, no – although I know people who can.

What do you bodge? Is it even part of your vocabulary?

Queer Quaker theology: abundance as resistance

“Whoever has, will be given more.” (Matthew 25:29)

A little while ago I wrote a post about labels. Afterwards, I thought: how does this affirmation of the need for more and richer labels for all sorts of genders and sexualities fit with the queer theory I use in some of my academic work? The very use of the label ‘queer’ implies a resistance to narrowing down, definition, or precise identification.

In this blog post, I want to argue that the abundance of labels can lead us to a place which is deeply queer. To argue that, I’m going to compare the situation of multiplying gender and sexuality labels with a situation I’ve already written about – the multiplication of names for God among liberal Quakers. Just as having more and more words for the Divine seems to bring Quaker writing back to the same place as Quaker practice – a place of silence and the acknowledgement of mystery – so having more and more words for sexuality and gender might bring our society round to a deeply queer place, a place of resistance to the oppression of pre-determined categories.

The two situations which form the background to this discussion can be quickly summarised as follows, in the form of two observations.

Observation 1: the English language is quickly developing, especially on the internet, a wide range of terms for sexualities and genders which were previously unnamed and hence invisible. Examples include terms like ‘non-binary’, ‘asexual’, ‘cisgendered’, and ‘gray-a’. At first glance, this appears to run completely counter to a previous movement which aimed to unite all sorts of alternative sexualities, and maybe genders, under the term ‘queer’ – queer is not just lesbian, not just gay, not just bi, not just kinky, not just pegging, etc.

Observation 2: modern British Quaker publications about Quakerism often include a disclaimer about the use of the word ‘God’, either offering a list of alternatives or inviting the reader to swap the word for another of their choosing (which presupposes a list of possible acceptable alternatives). These lists typically include words like ‘light’, ‘love’, ‘God’, ‘Spirit’, ‘Divine’, ‘Christ’, ‘Allah’, and ‘Being’. At first glance, this appears to be both the complete opposite of silence, and hopelessly confused, especially when the words are not used as synonyms in other contexts.

In many situations, including their worship, liberal Quakers prefer silence, or the specific forms of speech which create vocal ministry during worship: words which are held in the context of silence. When the situation forces the use of ordinary words – as when someone sits down to write a book about Quakerism, so that they can neither remain silent (by leaving the page blank?) nor assume that the words will be read in the context of silence – the use of a list, whether stated or assumed, allows the author to say something without being bound to connotations of a word, like ‘God’, which can be radically different for those outside the community. (To start thinking about the ways a word’s connotations are affected by its context and use, consider this: the ‘God’ discussed in New Atheist publications has very little in common with the ‘God’ described by Quaker publications.) It often seems that the very act of making a list, of using lots of words, draws attention to the fact that no one word will do. The abundance of words becomes a resistance to words, or to put it another way: in saying too much, Quaker authors are able to come back round to their starting point, not wanting to say anything.

This is not to say that the words are not important, or that we could do without them. They are absolutely vital. You can’t get a reader past their other ideas about ‘God’ without some form of extra words showing how their use of the word is different to yours. This is not a development process in which we can hope one day to skip a step and do without the words, but a way of using language as a tool to point beyond language.

In the case of the development of lots of words for genders and sexualities, we are talking about people rather than God (although perhaps all of the words can also be applied to the Divine!). Any given person will have some which are true for them and some which are false for them, and perhaps also some which are nonsensical to them. Taken as a group, however, the collection of words seems to me to be forming an ever richer picture of humanity as a whole. By adding concepts like ‘demi-sexual’ and ‘homoromantic’ to our vocabulary, we nuance or break down previous categories. (If someone is homosocial and heteroromantic but asexual, are they gay or not?) Just as the list of terms for God breaks down previous assumptions about what God must be like, the development of more terms for people breaks down previous assumptions about the categories people must fit into. In the process, we see one another more clearly: what was previously hidden under the curtain of a single word is revealed as a shining diversity. The abundance of words, even – no, especially – to the point of confusion brings us to the same place of accepting complexity and multiplicity which was previously captured under the ever-broadening umbrella ‘queer’.

The proliferation of terms can be anxiety-inducing. It’s common to worry that all these lists of not-quite-the-same words for God reveal not a theology but a vagueness. It’s also common to be concerned that all these words for subtly different groups of people mean that we can’t unite around anything. However, I am arguing that both are much more productive than this implies. The Quaker use of an abundance of words to return to a place of mystery and the queer use of freshly created words to resist overly broad categories are both revealing and creative. Rather than allowing a few loud voices in society to tell us what ‘God’ must be (and why we shouldn’t believe in ‘Him’) or what gender and sexuality ‘really’ are (and why we should go on behaving in accordance with their rules), we can use new words and plenty of them to overturn these claims.

Labels: good or bad?

I was indirectly compared to a Nazi on Facebook the other day. It made me feel a bit sad, a bit nostalgic, and a bit smug. Smug because by Godwin’s Law, that’s a win. Nostalgic because since I started mostly been spending my internet time talking about Quaker stuff, it hasn’t happened often. And sad because someone in my community thinks that friends of mine are worth comparing with Nazis.

In order to discuss this properly, I want to begin with a philosopher’s move, and lay out the strongest version I can concoct of the opposing argument (‘argument’ in the philosopher’s sense, too: the case someone is putting forward). This isn’t exactly what was said, but represents what I take to be the points involved. The arguments begin with something which everyone can agree on: people these days are, as a matter of fact, using more categories than just ‘male’ and ‘female’ to describe gender. Terms such as transgender, non-binary, and genderqueer have been invented and are in use. So far so good. We also all agree that some Quaker meetings have noted this fact and decided to take steps to make sure they are inclusive of people who identify as something other than simply ‘male’ or ‘female’. Recently, a national Quaker body noted this – which was the occasion for the discussion.

For some people, the proliferation of identity labels looks like a problem. There are, I think, two subtly different forms of the case they put from here on. In the first one, labels are a problem in relationships. For example, if I am trying to get to know someone, and I have been told that they are a woman, I might be inclined to make assumptions about them: that they are likely to be smaller and weaker, that they are likely to be interested in fashion, or whatever. Probably in a real situation the examples are more subtle than this – but they are real and pervasive. The cure for this is not to create and use more labels, but to get to know people as individuals. As the saying goes, if you know one person with autism, you know one person with autism – the label ‘autism’ may tell you very little.

In the second version of the argument, labels are a social problem. For example, if I am trying to describe society, and I pick out a group such as ‘immigrants’, I can then say certain things about them. I have, by the way, chosen this example as a case which seems to me to be a real, current case of the pattern which worries people who put this argument. However, I think it’s a group label used much more by people outside the group than people inside the group, and that might make a significant different to the ethics of using it at all. That, though, isn’t the line of argument which is pursued here – and proponents of it might well say that all labels can be used in similarly bad ways regardless of who applies them first. Anyway: having identified the group ‘immigrants’, I might say positive things, such as ‘immigrants make a huge contribution to the nation’s economy’, but I might just as easily say negative things, such as ‘we’d all be better off without immigrants’. This is where people like to mention Nazis. In particular, the Nazi practice of picking out individuals and forcing them to make their group membership visible – the imposition of yellow stars, pink triangles, and so on – makes the mere act of labelling, rather than saying horrible things about groups of people, seem like the problem.

I hope that these are fair representations of the positions involved. (If not, my comments section is open to you.) I think that both of these views catch something useful, but that ultimately both are mistaken about the value of terms such as ‘genderqueer’.

I can recall holding a view much like the first one myself. I remember expressing it in an online conversation with a non-white friend, who had posted to say that she was feeling a need to take her racial identity much more seriously. This made me uncomfortably aware of the ways in which my whiteness separated me from someone I liked to think I was close to, and I commented to say that I thought it didn’t matter much and we had lots of other things in common. Her reaction quickly let me know that in trying to bring us back together in this way, I’d actually made a much worse gap between us, by downplaying the significance of something which I had the privilege to ignore and she, in our racist society, had to acknowledge every day.

Nothing about that negates the need to get to know people as individuals – my friend is as different from others of her ethnicity as I am from other white people – but it does point to an uncomfortable truth. By focusing on individuals, we can miss two things. We can miss the effects of systems on them – while I focus on my friend as an individual, I might assume that her experiences of racism are somehow just about her and not examples of a system problem. And we can miss how different we really are by paying more attention to what we have in common. However much we have in common, we’ll always be different (another white middle-class cissexual woman from the south of England and I can be very different indeed, as a survey of my school friends will tell you). If in our personal relationships we try and ignore the labels which pick out our differences, we might fool ourselves into thinking we have more in common than we really do – especially because it’s a common human error to fill in the blanks with more of the same. If I don’t hear about (or listen to) how your experiences are different to mine, I’m liable to assume that your experiences are the same as mine, in the same way that as a child I assumed all families ate supper at 6pm because that’s what my family did.

I can also see the appeal of the second position. When people pick out groups they don’t belong to, they almost always at least simplify and generalise, and often make crass mistakes, or, as in the examples above, blame the group for whatever social problem worries them. However, I also think something must have gone wrong with this argument: despite the actions of the Nazis, I still see the six-pointed star outside synagogues, so putting up a label must have some uses for the Jewish community. (I also see security fences, so I’m not claiming that it doesn’t have drawbacks as well.) The gender-identity terms which were immediately under discussion are labels which people claim for themselves.

The uses of labels seem to me to fall into two forms. One is self-knowledge. Especially if the label you need wasn’t readily available to you, there can be a huge relief – and sometimes straightforward practical advantages – in finding the right one. Someone who discovers the word ‘asexual’, for example, when their partner has been calling them ‘frigid’, suddenly has a different perspective on their own desires. They also have a way to explain their preferences to others, and this is the second use of labels: to give others some idea. Any term will need extra clarification in a deeper relationship, but often a label that gets you into the right area helps to decide whether or not you want to develop the relationship further, and how to go about it if you do. The clearest cases are sexual relationships (woman to man: “No thank you, I’m a lesbian” – three labels in the space of nine words, and you’ve got the picture) and community formation (we’re here, we’re queer, we could have a Pride march). I think it applies in lots of other circumstances too, though, even if the decision isn’t so clear cut: having just met someone who identifies as a Christian, I might ask different questions to if I meet someone who identifies as a Pagan. Neither label tells me what the person believes, but both give me a nudge away from putting my foot in my mouth – and will help me explain Quakerism in terms they are likely to recognise.

Using a label will always carry risks. People will make assumptions – because that’s how labels work. People might try and attach negative ideas to your label. People might attack you because of your label. However, what I am hearing from many people who use labels like non-binary, trans*, or genderqueer is that the advantages outweigh the risks.

In particular, the risks of a new label which is correct are much easier to bear than the pains of an old or accidental label which is wrong. I’m a cissexual woman and I can laugh it off when someone calls me ‘sir’ when they ask for my train ticket – but it’s still an awkward moment for both of us. If I wasn’t cissexual, I imagine that would be a moment of real fear – am I being ‘found out’, will they be angry with me when they realise – and if I was non-binary, identifying neither as a woman or a man, it might take a lot longer to sort out. Indeed, in that kind of very short interaction, I suspect complex genders are often not understood at all. To me, that makes it even more important to name and accept them in communities where we have longer and hence more time to explain. Similarly, I am queer – I could easily let that slide, I’ve dated people of several genders and I could let you assume I was straight – but I don’t want to. Politically, I want to be visible, and personally, I don’t want you to be surprised when my in-depth analysis of The Night Manager includes a hotness rating for Olivia Colman as well as Tom Hiddleston.

The biggest risks of not using the label, though, are the gaps in knowledge. You can just about have a label and not use it, gaining the self-knowledge without sharing it, but humans are social and we want to connect with people. Authentic connection involves sharing that self-knowledge and recognising, not only what we have in common, but what is genuinely different. If we deny those differences in an attempt to create the illusion of unity, we actually slip back into another oppressive pattern: the desire for everyone to be like me.

We’re not alike. As humans, we’re immensely different, and hugely creative, and people bring new labels into being and repurpose old ones in order to communicate as well as they can. That process of communication absolutely has risks – but those risks are often worth taking. This blog post, for example, risks re-opening conversations which quickly turned unproductive – but I hope it helps us understand one another better.

T is for theəlogy

This, for completely terrible reasons, is one of my favourite technical terms – I think everyone has a soft spot for a word they’ve invented, whether or not it turns out to be as useful as imagined at the moment of invention. The term theəlogy is intended to solve a difficulty about what to write when wanting to consider a wide range of worldviews – too broad to be contained within the term theology, or at least potentially so, but wanting to relate to the tradition of doing theology as a discipline.

Feminist theologians have sometimes referred to their work as being ‘thealogy’, talking about a feminine divine. Non-believers who engage in this kind of thought sometimes use the term ‘atheology’ for their process. Within the Quaker community about which I often write, there are a wide range of views – Christian (and Jewish and Muslim and some other) views clearly coming under the tradition of term ‘theology’; feminist, Pagan, and other views which might be represented by ‘thealogy’; and humanist, Buddhist, fictionalist, and other views which could be described as ‘atheologies’.  It would be possible to write ‘a/thea/ology’ or ‘(a)the(a/o)logy’ to roll all these possibilities into one word – but it’s very clunky.

Instead, I chose to use the schwa vowel, represented by the upside-down e (ə), to stand for an ‘err’ sound. (Linguists cringing about stressed and unstressed syllables, sorry.) The idea is that this roles all the questions – doubt about the gender of the divine, doubt about the existence of the divine, and so forth – into the one word, while still allowing us to talk about people having opinions, views, and feelings about these issues in a succinct way.

In particular, I wanted to be able to talk about things – usually things people say or write – as ‘multi-theəlogy’, containing multiple and perhaps conflicting ideas about the Divine. I don’t, as it turns out, use this term as much as I thought I might, but I still have a soft spot for it.

K is for Kin-dom

The word ‘kin-dom’ was offered to Britain Yearly Meeting this year in a piece of ministry about our main theme, living out our faith in the world. It is recorded in the minute, our discerned or distilled essence of what we have been given in our waiting worship, in this paragraph:

What are the changes which are needed to the systemic injustice and inequality that we see in society? We need to go deeper to find the roots of our social ills, and how we might uproot the powers that maintain them. We should rethink what needs to grow in this world and what does not. Can we transform the way the world is going and recognise that everyone and everything on the planet matters and can be thought of as a divine commonwealth, or kin-dom? Quakerism is all about putting our faith in a power which transforms us.

(The full minutes can be downloaded from the Quakers in Britain website. This quotation is from minute 36, ‘Living out our faith in the world – are we ready to meet the challenge?’)

This term intrigued me at the time and it seems worth thinking about the resonances which it has. One reference is obviously to the term ‘kingdom’ – in the minute, ‘kin-dom’ is offered as a rephrasing of ‘divine commonwealth’, a term which has itself been around for a while as an alternative to ‘kingdom of God’ or ‘kingdom of Heaven’. Although the words ‘kin’ and ‘king’ both come from the same Anglo-Saxon root, they have in today’s English quite different connotations.

‘King’ is a familiar word, even while we have a queen on the throne, and has a long history of religious use. Whether this use reinforces patriarchal values (by setting up human kings as divine), or subverts them (by replacing the human king’s authority with God’s authority), depends on the historical moment and your perspective on it: in either case, it is difficult to use a ‘God as king’ image today without being distracted by this issue. This seems to have been the motivation for the coining of the term ‘kin-dom’ among Christian feminists. (This blog post summarises the history.)

‘Kin’, although not unknown, is a more obscure word today. I think it’s mainly used in some Christmas carols and the phrases ‘kith and kin’ (‘kith’ is an even more obscure word meaning ‘friends’ or ‘fellow countrymen’), and ‘next of kin’ (where the vagueness of the term seems like an advantage). ‘Kin’ does still mean ‘family’, though, and this gives the term ‘kin-dom’ a specific flavour.

In the Divine Commonwealth, we might all simply be fellow citizens. Hopefully, in working for the common good, we would be neighbours and even friends. In a kin-dom, though, the implication is that everyone is family. It’s possible to have family members who don’t matter to you, and perhaps even sometimes healthy to ignore them. In general use, though, family is taken to be very important, and this is an additional weight which ‘kin-dom’ – however hard it is to read aloud – adds to the minute, especially to the idea that “everyone and everything on the planet matters”.