Anthony Freeman SoF Magazine No. 25, April 1996 i| ‘LET’S HAVE A GOD WHO LAUGHS!’ urges David Bryant —I| [ has taken me thirty five years to realise that there was a fundamental flaw in my training for the priesthood.
Implicit in the theological college system was the assumption that sensuality was, if not actually ‘wrong’, to be severely haltered. Austerity was the prime virtue to be inculcated into ordinands and the rules worked to that end. Communication with the resident Irish maids was considered unseemly. The local inn was proscribed territory, both because of the evils of drink and also to ensure that no unsavoury relationships were forged there, and the college food was (1 suspect intentionally) made unpalatable. Lady friends were closely monitored at the termly dances so that their suitability as future clergy wives could be assessed. On visiting days they had to sign out early in the evening lest sexual improprieties should take place. (Temptation in the afternoons was assumed to be less severe.) Twice-daily chapel attendance was compulsory and rumour had it that the sub-warden ensconced in the rear pew noted the order in which we departed from our devotions. Wednesday evenings had a monastic bent and culminated in a ‘spiritual’ talk on a weighty matter, after which silence was maintained.
I still recall a senior staff member deliver a homily on the delicate subject of lust, in muted tones. that such weaknesses were to be sublimated and subdued before we were worthy of ordination.
This pressure led us to an unhealthy introspection and an undue concern with ‘saving our souls’.
Spirituality became an exercise in ego-building, a kind of heroic attempt to surmount the evils of the body and become saintly. Such dualism turned us into prime material for the psychiatrist’s couch and it certainly made for a distorted sexuality. A reading of the beautifully sensual Song of Songs in chapel produced no more than an embarrassed giggling. A roving copy of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill was avidly seized upon by one set of damp hands after another.
It would be instructive to know how many of the sexual misdemeanours concerning clergy, reported in the press, spring from this early rejection of the sensual. pressure led us to an unhealthy introspection and an undue concern with ‘saving our souls’ We ached for a passionate, laughter-filled, humorous, sensitive, weeping, sensual God The entire regime was anti-life, anti-world, antisensual and depicted religion as wearisome and lacking in joy. It produced a deadly dichotomy between body and soul. The one was evil the other good. This immediately induced a guilt complex in us. We wanted to enjoy the sensuality and sheer exuberance of life, natural to our youthful secular contemporaries, and yet we were left in no doubt All this left us quite inadequate to deal with the pastoral problems which might be expected to come our way in future parish life. If the body was evil, what advice were we to give to the worried homosexual who indulged his body in an ‘unnatural’ way? How were we to guide married men or women embroiled in a passionate affair who desperately needed to talk? What on earth did we say to the masturbating teenager or the young couple ‘living in sin’? Condemnation was our only possible response.
We had been programmed that way.
Nor was this an ideal basis on which to found our relationships with women in the parishes where we were to work or indeed with our own future wives. If Irish maids were a potential source of our downfall, so presumably were all women. At the very least they were to be treated with the utmost caution. (Does this in part explain male antipathy to women priests?) SoF Magazine No. 25, April 1996 If the body was evil, what advice were we to give... ?
What we needed above all was to be told that the sensual (when exercised in a controlled and compassionate manner) is entirely good and one of God’s greatest blessings. Why were we never given any help in learning the art of loving our-selves, soul AND body, so that we could then go on to love others? Surely one of our pundits should have pointed out that the imagined dichotomy between body and soul was a treacherous invention and led to a disparagement of life and humanity and to a destructive inner conflict? If only we had been taught the skills of loving rather than hating!
Because the sensual and the sexual were gross and secular, God was kept firmly away from them. He was ‘out there’, not ‘in here’; deistic, not pantheistic. He was the remote being to whom we prayed solemnly and fearfully. In his absence he had called us to do his work in the world vicariously. (After all, weren’t we all going to end up as ‘vicars’?) He watched over us moodily, spasmodically tugging the reins of our guilt and selfrecrimination to keep us on the straight path. He could be grim and frightening if we missed saying the daily offices or passed the bounds of decency with a woman friend. He smiled when we endured a particularly lengthy prayer session or banished lustful thoughts for the night.
The real problem was that this distant God was excluded from the very experiences which meant the most to us — and which offered the best hope of our finding Him — namely, girl friends, sex, laughter, companionable drinking, humour and _ sheer pleasure. He was absent from our deepest concerns and thereby effectively dead. What we would have welcomed with open arms was an injection of God’s immanence; for somebody in authority to stand up in the pulpit on those doom-laden Wednesday evenings and to say, ‘Yes. God is in sexuality, in joy, in femininity, in dancing, in kissing, in enjoyment and pleasure, in falling into or out of love. Yes, he is in the Irish maids with their wiles and charms, he is in the light-heartedness and youthful excesses.” We longed for a thorough-going pantheism, for a God who was ‘in all’. We ached for a passionate, laughter-filled, humorous, sensitive, weeping, sensual God.
Because the sensual and the sexual were gross and secular, God was kept firmly away from them None of this would matter if it were not for the fact that little has changed. We are still I guess preaching a distant God ‘out there’, who pulls the puppet strings and makes us dance to his tune and we are still moralising about the wickedness of human sensuality. Perhaps this is why (according to the latest survey) more than half the people in Britain believe that the Church is out of touch with teal life.
If we started proclaiming a smiling, sensual God who is right here in our deepest concerns, maybe all this would change.