How refreshing! A book that sees the dynamics of sex as a positive analogy for how human beings in all their diversity can love each other in a world where all people are loved equally by God. Christians through the centuries who have seen sex as a threat to spiritual growth will be turning in their graves. Long may that continue!
Claire Henderson Davis is one of a growing number of women and men struggling to counteract the harmful effects on humanity resulting from the dualism that sees the worlds of body and spirit as mutually exclusive. She explores what divine encounter might look like in a ‘sexual age’. For Claire the goal of a sexual structure is ‘to create a common space, a single body formed through the coming together of different bodies.’ She suggests we might become much more compassionate people if we read the teachings of Jesus, ‘not primarily in a parent to child voice, but in the adult to adult voice of a good sex guide.’ In so doing, her conclusions expose the failure of the Church to live truly the role of servant.
Although sex is a key analogy in this book, it is about much more than sex. Using autobiography, imaginative exploration of biblical stories, the insights of psychology, sociology and politics, Claire leads us from the Garden of Eden, via the Tower of Babel and Pentecost, Abraham and Isaac, Incarnation, the Trinity, and the Body of Christ, to a possible expression of faith today that resonates with adults who have had enough of infantile forms of religious expression. The journey takes us through three forms of ‘worship’ which might be described as a progression from infancy to adulthood, but Claire notes that each form is repeated every time a new stage in the story of an individual or community unfolds.
The first form is that of sacrifice, ‘the powerful outward projection of internal realities, both individual and collective, onto an object in the external world, who is made to carry the burden of what properly belongs to us.’ The second form, obeying the law, is that part in the process where we begin to do for ourselves what we thought previously only another could do for us. ‘The law is a demystification of sacrifice.’ The third form is sex, where ‘an individual formed by the law relates to the law, no longer as an obedient child, but as an equal, and through a process of encounter, new possibilities arise.
Here, also, is the encounter of different laws, the meeting of adults who all possess language, and must converse in order to create common space.’ Claire writes beautifully. Her thoughtful honesty about her own experience reveals a warm humanity, and roots her reflections in authentic experience. I appreciated her clear sense of archetypal imagery in Biblical stories. Her insights into familiar texts, such as that of the Good Samaritan, Jesus washing the feet of the disciples or Matthew’s story of the sheep and the goats, of those who do or don’t inherit the kingdom, opened up new avenues of thought for me.
I hope Claire will develop further the ideas she expresses in this book. She is saying something that needs to be taken seriously in the Church. Her book also highlights a tension that I recognise in my own wrestling with faith. In the Introduction Claire writes, ‘In the West, the downfall of public narrative is Church control. The world moves on while religion loses touch with language, gets wedded to archaic forms.’ Yet in seeking out a new language Claire uses some of those archaic forms, namely, ancient Biblical stories. Occasionally I felt the gulf between present experience and this past mythology was almost too great to support the connections Claire made, but despite their limitations we continue to turn to ancient myths, not only because they contain rich seams to be explored, if we are prepared to dig deep enough, but also because it is hard to find modern myths that hold all the wisdom we can uncover in ancient epic tales. Who is writing or telling the stories that will take the place of archaic forms when they have truly passed their sell-by date? Will we recognise them in the making? Claire has opened up the search for a new language, but we have a long way to go if it is to be one that can truly sustain us ‘after the Church’.
Ruth Scott is an Anglican priest, writer and broadcaster. Her second book, Slipstreams for Healing Souls, was published by SPCK in 2006. In her spare time she eats fire.
Reviewed: After the Church: Divine Encounter in a Sexual Age by Claire Henderson Davis, Canterbury Press (London), 2007, £8.99, 79 pp., ISBN:9781853117367.