That wasn’t the only “unholy alliance” that emerged between and amongst the four panellists at the conference. Our “identity categories”, as caricatured by our Chair, were: token Quaker (Graham Shaw), token evangelical (David Hilborn), token Jew (Rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok), token American (Funk himself) and token woman (me). Our discussions were perhaps examples of what Funk’s compatriot, feminist theologian Mary Hunt, long ago called “unlikely coalitions of justice-seeking friends” - that’s her definition of “church”, and I’ve never heard a better one.
Funk’s equivalent was “enclaves of resolute truth tellers”, and the participants at the conference were very taken with that. As am I, to a certain extent. Especially on hearing again, in the discussion groups at the conference, more stories of the persistent lack of “safe space” in our religious communities for free and open discussion of doubt and faith. It’s been said that churches find it hardest of all to talk about sex. I disagree. I think churches find it hardest of all to talk about religious doubt. They groan under the hegemony of spiritual dishonesty and fear of voicing creative questions of belief.
Truth and stories In his excellent lecture Funk talked of the need for “truth squads to ferret out deception”; spoke of “the original sin of self-deception” and of the need for exercises in “learning to tell the truth”.
But my question is - and this brings me back to the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” - what is this “truth” that we will be telling in our enclaves? For Funk also talked about the need for “myth making” and “telling our stories”. I certainly agree that we need to do this - but there’s an important methodological question here. Is the telling of our individual stories in Funk’s schema to be a parallel to the corporate telling of the story of Jesus? That is, is the underlying aim to be one of “stripping our stories of their interpretative overlay” so we can “set ourselves free”?
If so, we’re on a hiding to nothing. For I suggest that there is no such thing as a “factual” identity divorced from “interpretative overlay”.
It’s the interpretative overlay which makes our stories our stories and our stories. Each of us is an ever-changing composite of present perceptions, creative memory and hope for the future. The “memory” part of that mixture is interesting enough in itself. “Memory”, scholars say, is an activity by which events are not merely recalled, but recreated each time. Always different.
Cumulative. ‘Strong poets’ When I told my Miracle story at last year’s Sea of Faith conference [see SOF 38, Autumn 1999], the reaction which I found most intriguing was the common urge to be told how much of it was “autobiographical”. In short, to know how much of it was “really true”. The point of the story was to incite listeners to create their own truths out of it and to see their own truths in it. To undertake a “quest for the historical Alison Webster”, as some did, was to spectacularly miss the point that I was making about the conference’s question: “what is religion for?”. Yet something very strong and anti-religious in us yearns to strip away interpretative overlay and get to “the facts” - pure and bare (and innocent?). For some reason we think this will provide us with a firm, selfevident foundation on which to build our religious identity.
The way to overcome self deception is not by gaining access to pure and undisputed fact, but by developing our skills of self-reflexivity. That is, learning to see ourselves in our relational and political context; understand ourselves as part of matrices and webs of power relations: sometimes the more powerful, sometimes the less powerful.
Being able to face the reality and inescapability of that, the politics of that, the messiness of it, of always being responsible, never blameless, always compromised.
Another of Funk’s aphorisms on April 1 which proved popular was his aim “always to be an outsider”. From someone who’s faced down the exclusionary practices of the twin institutions of the church and the academy this is wholly understandable. Yet this must be coupled with a recognition that no-one is always the outsider, at all times and in all places. To seek to be so is to seek to be innocent. Change happens via institutions, like it or not, and through the deployment of power. If we’re serious about change, we need to think more of strategic deployment of the insights that come from our outsider status, but deployed within institutions.
The way to escape institutionalisation is not to run away from institutions, but to bring the power of those whom Funk called “the strong poets” within them. “Believe me, I’m telling you stories” writes my oft-quoted and favourite novelist Jeanette Winterson in The Passion. She is a strong poet.
For, according to Funk, these people produce “startlement”. They bewitch, charm and enchant us. And, I would add, they move us, give us passion, motivate us to change. I agree that we need to make the most of them. We need to learn to tell not the truth, but stories - to translate and recreate ourselves and the world around us through the stories we tell.
There is no such thing as a “factual” identity divorced from “interpretative overlay”.
It’s the interpretative overlay which makes our stories our stories and our stories. 5 SOF 41 / May 2000 sey it de era EN SCO DNS SOF 41 / May 2000 credo in... beatlesism?