Mozaik 9/2002 Embodied Faith

Between Denial and Assertion ”The Gospel is about the embodiment of the spiritual – the fleshing out of the eternal.”

(Ronald F ERGUSON ) When we called for articles for this issue, we were looking for

Bible studies within WSCF, and asked Nienke P RUIKSMA , our

essays and articles examining the connections between body

previous chairperson who wrote the Bible study for the pres-

and mind, body and spirit; the role of sexuality in Christian

ent issue, to be responsible for this section in the future. Her

life; wholeness and holiness; fullness of life and life in abun-

text is completed with a prayer from the Amsterdam confer-

dance. We encouraged the authors to contribute to ecumeni-

ence.

cal thinking by exploring and rediscovering the body (to be

Our illustrator in this issue is an Italian artist, Karen L A FATA . Her long-time focus is the human body, which she sees

resurrected).

This issue on Body is connected to our Gender and

as an architectural masterpiece in itself. We wholeheartedly

Education Working Group within WSCF Europe, coordinat-

thank her for providing the graphical program for this issue.

ed by Ellen Aasland Reinertsen. Our last conference (in

Since one of our aims is to build a thinktank of committed

Amsterdam, April 2002) dealt with Women and Men Created

and concerned people, we encourage our readers to write-in

in God’s ImageÖbut? – Body and Sexuality between Denial

with responses to the articles contained in this issue of

and Assertion. Our journal builds on the findings and con-

Mozaik. Please send all comments, feedback, and further

cerns of this event.

ideas on Embodied Faith and this issue to our email address

The fourteen articles gathered here mirror the ways that

(wscfmozaik@yahoo.co.uk).

students and young intellectuals see the question of body in

As you can see, the intention of the editorial board was to

the world and in the Church. The geographical scope of the

create an organic text (proper to this topic), which can speak

reflections arches from England, Scotland, the Netherlands,

for itself. We think that both provoking and reconciling can

Norway and Italy to Lithuania, Belarus and Romania, and

be part of the thematics and style of this ecumenical journal,

from Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to North

their dynamics hopefully contributing to the unity of the

America.

Church of Jesus Christ.

We grouped the contributions into four sections, so that they could underline or undermine each other within one section, but also that sections as different approaches to our topic could be in dialogue with each other. While the section Interior and Exterior deals with the possibilities and limitations of the human body, the part Fullness of Life places the body within the perspective of the life of the Church.

The heading Challenges in the Church

gathers

provocative

essays

towards

more

internal

issues which we tend to hide and to forget in our accustomed Christian life. As closure, three articles on the artistic understanding of the body are grouped within the section, Glance of an Artist.

We revived the long tradition of

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Jennifer M U E L L E R

Feeling the Touch It's 3:15am Norwegian time. That's 9:15pm New York time and 8:15 in the Midwest. I know this because I'm from the Midwest and subtracting seven has become my most commonly preformed math function since I moved to Europe eight months ago. Eight months ago my world changed.

Seven months and 25 days ago, the world’s world changed.

But that’s a separate story.

Tonight, or this morning, depending upon what side of the Prime Meridian you're on, I'm hungry. My stomach wants nourishment before it will submit to my eyes’ will to close and before it will bless my body with an evening full of sleep.

Full stomach, full night's sleep. Empty stomach, empty sleep.

My body negotiates, and drives a hard bargain at that.

These are feelings: hunger, fatigue. Physical feelings.

Weaknesses. I search myself for a strong will, for “will power” to overcome these desires (sleep, food). Surely it's mind over matter. Or so I think.

A few months ago I was drinking red wine and enjoying a nice meal at a friend's apartment in Geneva. She was considering a move to Amsterdam. She just wants to go there.

She's comfortable there. She imagines herself there. But these are "just feelings", she said.

I encouraged her to try it out, to go. We have feelings for a reason, I said. God gives us feelings.

Really?

A few weeks ago I was sitting in the office of one of my favorite university professors, a Jesuit priest, Father Mueller.

We talked a lot about prayer and listening to God's call. God doesn't always speak in an audible voice, Father Mueller told me. Sometimes we have to train ourselves through prayer to hear what God is telling us. We have to evaluate our lives, to reflect, to see where we feel strength and energy and where we feel fatigued. We have to sense where we are weak and where we are strong. That's how we uncover our gifts.

Uncovering our gifts. Evaluating our feelings. Listening to God. A few days ago I read an article online about listening to our bodies. The author of the article discovered that her attempts to separate her spirit from her physical body left her drained, both physically and then spiritually. (At the end of the day, after she had driven around to this practice and that meeting, she had no more energy to make dinner, let alone meditate or pray.)

It seems that we can't have the spiritual if we neglect the physical.

Bummer.

God gives us spirit and body--and both are good.

Any attempt to develop the spirit while neglecting the body is only half of our mission. God embodies us for a reason.

Instead of straining ourselves to overcome and separate ourselves from our bodies, as many philosophies might lead us to try to do, we can actually enhance our spirituality by listening to our bodies. Not only that, we can draw closer to God through our bodies.

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And it’s not just me saying so. The Bible has examples of God working through physical bodies to get people's attention and to do His will.

Look at Zechariah whose lips were sealed until God’s will was fulfilled through the naming of his son. God interacted with Zechariah’s physical body, rendering him unable to speak for a period of time, to ensure the proper completion of His will. (Luke 1:20) Bodies are important. And God, our Creator, shows us that by making us embodied and by communicating with us through our bodies.

Jesus came to us embodied. Embodiment played such an integral role in Christ's mission that he took on human form to share his message.

Traveling in Gerasenes, near Galilee, Jesus heals a demonpossessed man named Legion. After performing the miracle, Jesus instructs Legion to "return home and tell how much God has done for you" (Luke 8:39). When Jesus returned to Galilee, a woman suffering from 12 years of bleeding came up behind him and touched his cloak and immediately her bleeding stopped. Jesus turned, questioned the crowd as to whom touched his cloak, and said to the woman, "daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace" (Luke 8: 48).

Jesus revealed himself, the will of God, and his message of faith in part by interacting with physical bodies. At the same time that Jesus performed miracles and healed physical infirmaries, Jesus taught about faith.

First Corinthians tells us that our body is a temple and we should therefore honor God with our bodies (6:19-20). Our bodies can empower us to perform acts of worship that are pleasing to the Lord.

Eating dinner at the house of a Pharisee, a sinful woman anointed Jesus by wetting his feet with her tears, wiping them with her hair, and showering his feet with kisses. Jesus responds that her many sins have been forgiven because “she loved much” (Luke 7:47).

The sinful woman's love pleased Jesus. She showed her love through acts of worship - through her body.

Can this be true? Is my physical body seriously more than a bundle of limbs and innards that riddle me with desires and lusts and give me more than sensation and limits? Can my physical being, if I listen and care for it, actually help me to draw closer to God? I think so. And not just with my mind, but with my whole body.

SUGGESTED READINGS: B ARTON Ruth Haley, Flesh-and-Blood Spirituality. www. regenerator. com/ 5.2/ fleshandblood. html Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ. New York, 1995.

Jennifer Mueller (physical and spiritual) is a Global Missions Intern with the United Church of Christ working with WSCF Europe in Oslo, Norway. She studied Politics, French, and Chemistry at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

She is copy editor of Mozaik.

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Eva S Z A R K O W S K A

What a Body Desires What does a body desire? The answer seems very simple. A body has some elementary needs that must be fulfilled. The problem is that nowadays hardly anyone limits themselves to satisfying those elementary needs. A body of today wants to be well groomed (up to the tips of the nails), tanned (regardless of the season) and hyperactive (24 hours a day). The following needs (are they really needs?) grow up like branches of a sprouting plant. The better the position of the individual and the more modern the civilisation, the more those needs become sophisticated and removed from the original requirements.

The fact that people create a higher living standard in the material dimension is not bad. However, it would be good to remember that not all of our caprices are equally important. Not all of them will give you a higher spiritual standard of living. Therefore it is worth distancing yourself from your caprices to evaluate their genuine value and to define which of them are necessary and creative and which are purely consuming. Creating a hierarchial system of evaluation is necessary to avoid allowing your body to force you into a corner.

THE PRIVILEGES AND THE DUTIES In the modern civilisation the body has greater privileges than the soul. The body is the main audience of all consumer offers from foodstuffs, to cosmetics, to clothes, and innumerable objects of daily use. At the same time the body is an effective means of promoting these goods. Chewing gum is advertised by the whiteness of somebody’s teeth, face cream by smooth skin of a model and beer by women’s slim legs.

Next to the privileges the body has numerous duties. The most severe one is to be up to the standards of physical attractiveness created by the media. The cult of the slim figure keeps many young people awake at night because they use it to measure their value as an individual.

This cult also requires sacrifices, persistence and even spirituality in treatment of the body.

Every coin has two sides. The body that consents to everything can overindulge by falling into extremes, i.e. excessive gluttony. It is easier now in the age of consumption, when temptations are in abundance. Yet gluttony has consequences beyond health detriments. For the believer it also carries moral consequences – it is a sin against yourself. The most important thing is to learn to listen to your body, to understand its rhythm and its needs, to learn to read the signals it sends, to answer accurately, and to answer in time. For average persons in the

streets who cannot renounce their bodies like monks or saints, balance is the desirable state.

FROM A STATUE TO A HAIR SHIRT The ancients mastered the balance between the physical and the spiritual. They could reconcile the world of senses with spiritual development, the joys of the body with intellectual activity. Famous antique feasts can be a good example of that: philosophical disputations with wine-cup-inyour-hand. Ancient Greeks were consciously striving for an ideal connection of both spheres of life. Therefore they put an emphasis on simultaneously developing the body through fitness and the mind through intellectual activities.

“Kalokagatia”, based on the belief that physical virtues should go hand in hand with moral virtues (beautiful, flexible body and beautiful soul), was a popular maxim. Harmony is but the right connection of different elements and balanced proportions.

The principle of moderation advocated by the Stoics can be interpreted in a similar way. In the context of the element of the body, this principle means centring between debauchery and asceticism and approaching your wants and limits with common sense. “We should behave as if we did not have to live for the body but as if we could not live without the body,” says S ENECA . Antiquity is characterized by an affirmative attitude towards the body. They worshipped the body’s beauty and perfect shapes without insincere shame, erecting statues to celebrate this beauty. In contrast, the next ages pushed the body into the depths of contempt and humiliation. They clothed the body in a hair shirt. Whipping replaced applying fragrances and laudatory songs were

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replaced by severe sermons condemning the body as a hotbed of lust and the source of all evil.

BODY TRANSFORMED The Christian West broke the unity of an individual by contrasting the sinful body with a pure soul, imprisoned in flesh.

The outer human form became the favourite target of rhetorical crusades. The most severe ones attacked a woman’s body, accusing it of causing the first downfall and exile from paradise. The woman’s body was considered to be more deeply immersed, physiologically, in the flesh and therefore more impure. Paradoxically, these same critics ignored the fact that the woman’s body gives birth.

Because the woman’s body belongs to a divine creature, Orthodox treatment of the body does not consider it to be a less desirable part of human nature. The essence of Christianity is the incarnation of the Word. The Divine Logos adopts human form and reduces Its eternal nature to the limiting walls of mortal flesh. Thanks to this, the flesh becomes sanctified. Similar glorification happened earlier, in the act of creation, when the Holy Spirit descended into matter, reviving the flesh that was formed of clay. The human body became the temple of the Ghost. Exposed to hostile powers, the walls of this temple crumble and are constantly in need of strengthening and support. It might be the quintessence of human shape.

The Mystery of Incarnation and the Transformation bear hope that, despite its earthly, lethal nature, the body can participate in what is immortal and eternal. While overcoming its weaknesses and limits, the body ascends to a higher plane of existence. It becomes more transparent, i.e. it does not head towards earthly occupations and pleasures that divert one’s attention from reality but it rises towards heaven.

Despite the verisimilitudes, clothing does not play an unimportant role here. It is undeniable that what we wear influences our behaviour. We feel differently in a tight T-shirt, featuring the body’s curves, than we do in a loose sweatshirt, which conceals them. As Umberto E CO notices: “The thought does not tolerate a close-fitting under-vest”. Dress, and the hampering of our body, absorbs our attention too much and therefore is not conducive to inner life development. This development, according to what Oliver C LEMENT writes, is the condition of ‘gaining’ a praiseworthy body and transforming impermanent reality into eternal existence.

RECONCILIATION Establishing and keeping a proper relation with your own body requires a dialogue. This dialogue denies the instrumental treatment of the body imposed by modern civilisation and assumes an attempt to read body language and an effort to accept its needs. It is a minimum that is necessary to achieve balance – a balance in which the body is neither excessively worshipped nor undeservedly neglected. From the balance, from the agreement between the soul and the body, something new will be born – an understanding and a tender outlook towards body as a being which has been promised the chance of transformation and grace of being the part of the future glory of Resurrection. The outlook will be full of respect, containing the awareness of suffering and physical imperfection. ’ (Translated by Dorota R OMA NCZUK ) Suggested Readings: C LEMENT Oliver, Corps de mort et de gloire. Petite introduction a une theopoetique du corps.

E VDOKIMOV Paul, La femme et le salut du monde.

BODY AND IDENTITY The body establishes our individuality. It separates us from others and isolates us from the environment by marking the individual’s physical borders. To a certain degree, it determines our identity. In another body we would be somebody else or rather we would feel ourselves differently. The feeling that myself is myself consists of an awareness of my body, i.e. the rhythm of its physiological activities and outward appearance. It is not true that we should deny the body as a worse part of a being. Despite the whole imperfection, it deserves proper treatment, at least by virtue of being the first stage of meeting with another person; it is like a business card heralding a hidden interior.

In this respect clothing should become the object of our concern. This concern should be expressed on one hand in one’s efforts to match their dress to their personality, on the other hand assuming a critical view of current fashion. Not everything that is regarded as fashionable (in the meaning – ‘I must have it’) matches my nature. In an age focusing on the individual, imposing general standards smothers individual uniqueness.

The fact that we live in an age of goods causes our activity to be directed outwards, towards these things that you can get, have or (at least) wear. Identity-seeking often ends on the outside layer, which is where it should start. Yet discovery of your self requires inward direction and focus within yourself.

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E CO Umberto, Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio.

Ewa Szarkowska was born in 1974 in Bialystok, Poland. She studied Polish philology, now she works as a librarian. She is Orthodox. For the last two years she has been cooperating with ‘ARCHE. Wiadomosci Bractwa’ (the magazine of the Fellowship of Orthodox Youth in Poland). Her interests are literature, ecology and the culture of national minorities.

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P e t e r Sˇ A J D A

Harming the Body Or the Softening of the Negative Touch The human body has throughout the ages inspired a great variety of arts. Its beauty and colourfulness have never ceased to evoke admiration and awe. It has been ever again experienced as a unique medium of love, care and interest. On the other hand, however, the human body has been the constant medium of pain as well. The sad history of pain contains too many examples of how often the human body has been used as the medium of punishment or revenge. Even if the sensation of love (penetrative physical warmth) and the sensation of pain (penetrative physical coldness) are usually two diametrically different sorts of experience, their origin can lie in the same movement – the movement of physical touch. For this reason the culture of the touch can be seen as a phenomenon, which deserves the attention of every person striving for an integrated approach towards human relationships.

one of its instances. In other words, human bodies are not to be treated in the same way as material objects or property, since there is a qualitative difference between them. Thus harm done to human bodies cannot be likened to damage done to material goods.

TUKA: DEATH PENALTY IS SUB-LEGAL The advocates of the absolute corporal punishment (the capital punishment), e.g. Jean-Jacques R O U S S E A U or Immanuel K ANT , denote the death penalty as an act of selfdefense of the society. This is also the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (N 2266). T UKA remarks in connection with this concept that it presents only one side of

I. The Remote Negative To u c h – S o c i e t y v s .

Individual VIOLENCE AS THE NEGATIVE TOUCH The society awards, as well as punishes, the individual. It has often been argued that violence is the essence of law (T OLSTOY ). Historically, the law itself has always availed itself of violence as a measure of correction, albeit in different measures and with different explanations. It has also been argued in this connection that lawless power, as well as powerless law, are of a very limited duration (T UKA ). From another perspective, however, the enforcement of law can be seen as a part of the culture of the negative touch. Even if the society represents a very abstract institution, its touch is as concrete as the touch between two individuals. Therefore the laws of the society that concern the culture of the touch do matter, since their impact is usually broad and general. In this lies also the responsibility of the individual towards the society. The individual by her/his stance determines the flow of the society and through this the to-be-adopted culture of the touch.

“EVERY ACT OF VIOLENCE IS A LOSS OF ENERGY” This statement pronounced by the Slovak law theoretician Vojtech T UKA seems obvious when it comes down to the physics of violence. The statement, however, explains the social dynamics of violence. As T UKA puts it, the society should be careful about its economy of enforcement and violence should be understood as a warning (Damocles’ sword) rather than as a handy tool. It should be the ultima ratio iuris (the last instance of the law), rather than just 7

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a two-sided coin. The usual ceremonies connected with public executions prove in his opinion that the society is aware of the fact that something more is happening than just an elimination of a socially dangerous element.

The society cannot totally annihilate compassion with the condemned one. In other words, the society realizes that this touch is the last one perceived by the condemned individual.

The society consciously gives up the touching relationship with one of its members. Because of its final character Tuka refuses to accept the capital punishment as punishment.

This negative touch can namely never improve the condemned individual and is thus not a proper instrument of law. It is rather a sub-legal solution of cases, in which law is at a loss.

I I . T h e C l o s e N e g a t i v e To u c h – Individual vs. Individual

er. Such a statement could be, however, considered illusory.

Even if it should be presented as the ultimate goal, it should not exclude pondering on the moderation, minimisation and humanisation of the extant negative touch. There are several values, which can be promoted in connection with the negative touch. T UKA suggests e.g. total elimination of humiliation.

Penetrative physical touch is irreversible. Even if the body recovers from it, it leaves a print on the mind. If the negative touch becomes too cold, too insensitive and too humiliating, it loses its power of correction and turns against the society and the individual. Thus if the society or the individual are forced by circumstances to defend themselves using the negative touch, it would make them noble if they bore in mind that what they touch is the mirror of the Divine Beauty – the fragile, but eternal, human body.

Bibliography:

THE NEGATIVE TOUCH AND THE MARQUIS DE SADE It is not the aim of this essay to present a deeper study of S ADE ‘s life and work. Nevertheless it is the aim of this essay to make a mention of the fact that S ADE ‘s works reflect the interconnection between the negative social touch and the negative individual touch. Even though S ADE ‘s works touch primarily upon individual pain-infliction, they also reflect the reality their author experienced on a day-to-day basis as a member of the French society at a given time.

The fact that S ADE was imprisoned in Vincennes (1777) and later in the Bastille (1784) on the basis of a lettre de cachet (sealed letter) of the King Louis XVI, meant that there was no official sentence pronounced about the accused one. Sade was condemned without a trial. In other words, the touch of the society tried to remain as anonymous as possible.

Therefore his work 120 Days of Sodom, written in the Bastille (1785), reflects the helplessness connected to the capriciousness of the negative touch.

Later on, when Sade was appointed a revolutionary judge during the French revolution, he himself was accused of anti-revolutionary behaviour and imprisoned anew. From the window of his cell he could not avoid seeing the executions taking place in the courtyard. Sade, who was an opponent of capital punishment, witnessed in this way no less than 1800 executions. He tried to capture the seen brutality of the negative touch in his Philosophy in the Bedroom (written at that time), where he “justifies” the violence committed by the protagonists as being “republican”.

SADE’S LIFE AS THE BODY OF EVIDENCE S ADE , who spent most of his life locked in, died finally at the mental institution of Charenton. No matter how we judge his life and his writings, the fact that they bear clear evidence of the interconnection between the negative social touch and the negative individual touch is of importance for the presented essay. Therefore the touch-relationships of society vs. individual and individual vs. individual (incl. self-touch) can never be completely disconnected. They reflect and nourish each other. The touch-culture of the society and the touchculture of individuals are in constant touch.

S ADE Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de, Oeuvres Complètes du Marquis de Sade (Complete Works of the Marquis de Sade). Paris, 1986-88.

D ONALD Thomas, The Marquis de Sade. London, 1993.

T UKA Béla (Vojtech), A szabadság (On Liberty). Budapest, 1910.

T UKA Vojtech, Právne sústavy - Ná˘crt právnej filozofie (Legal Systems - An Outline of a Philosophy of Law), Bratislava, 1942. (In German: Die Rechtssysteme Grundriß einer Rechtsphilosophie. Berlin, 1941).

Peter Sˇ AJDA is a Graduate of the Faculty of Arts of the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. He is a member of Ekunet Slovakia, an ecumenical organisation focusing on ecumenical networking in Slovakia. He is a member of the Order of Preachers. He is currently a student of theology at the Theological Institute CMBF in Kosice, Slovakia. He is a co-opted member of the European Regional Committee of WSCF.

Books Leafflets Flyers Design and Printing Budapest 1106, Fehér u. 10/62 Tel: +36 1 260 1685 / +36 1 264 4602 Fax: +36 1 264 3592

SOFTENING THE NEGATIVE TOUCH When speaking about the culture of the negative touch it can seem sensible to claim that it should disappear altogeth-

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Orinta Z. R O E T T I N G

Unlimited Communication: People with Disability Communication is the feature of any living creature. We share enormous amounts of information with others through our bodies, our knowledge or our beliefs. We all contain some fear of loosing the space of understanding and the tools of reasonably comprehensible communication at any stage of our lives. Limitedness scares us more than anything else, making or containing a mistake or an error, like default in our seen body or slow minds. Our minds, drained from post-modern fatigue in striving to become somebody we are not, worry about exclusion.

ELIMINATING THE MISTAKE After the end of World War II, sociologists search for the answer to the pedantic perfectionism appearing in the form of a wish to create the perfect modern society. This would exist without illness, and would be based upon a rationale that maximizes preventive rules and minimizes oversight. Francis FUKUYAMA, in his new book “Our Post-human Future”, describes the other extreme of the new century: carrying the consequence of the biotechnological revolution.

Socially controlled prescribed drug remedies and genetic engineering are signs of individuals loosing the responsibility for their own actions and handing it into the hands of medical economy. Handicap demonstrated the factors that humans cannot control.

The Nazis and other regimes tried to eliminate the “mistake”. They developed medications for changing moods and controlling feelings. The genetic management of the “mistake” in our days could be a tendency to ignore the “mistake” or to remove it without considering the consequences. Both tendencies share a similar driving principle: let’s get rid of the “mistake”.

EXPANDED POSSIBILITIES And here I am, after reading long texts of sociological analysis, sitting with one of my friends at the airport. She lost her sight as a baby and Social services helps her to travel from home to school.

Between flight announcements, she excitedly describes her recent visit to Spain.

She has not seen anything.

She smelled eucalyptus trees, walked on hot stones, heard flamenco and tasted lobster. Her loss of sight encouraged her to making the other senses more exciting. Her descrip-

tions were real. Listening to her, my worries about how to ask about her trip were gone. All I could remember from my trip were images. Her story helped me to realize my unlimited opportunities to understand people and to answer them.

THEATRE OF LIMITED EXPRESSION The Arts Council of Ireland initiated a theatre workshop for people with disabilities. Connor, the group leader, teaches the group to use and communicate feelings and ideas. They talk about things and concepts and try to express them.

One man in the group cannot move his body at all. The only movements his body allows him to manage is to shake his head in saying “yes” or “no” or move his eyes up and down.

But he is an artist, so he had to say something (“say” means give a sign) to the audience.

The group worked for hours trying to find symbols that could be understood in a similar way both by the group members and by the spectators in the theatre hall. The man with restricted body movements found his role, too. I wondered what role he could take without just sitting on the stage as a decoration, explained C ONNOR . In a dark scene the group fixed a bulb to his head and the man swung his head to the rhythm of the music. It was beautiful and mesmerising, remembers C ONNOR .

In the beginning the artists were uncertain whether the audience would understand it genuinely as art. The audience, memorised by the scene of the unique expression, created a dialogue between the performer and themselves through a long applause. This was enough to communicate joy.

“We can speak,” the actors said.

“We can understand,” replied the audience. There are no boundaries that communication can not overcome.

SUBJECTIVITY VERSUS TOTALIZATION Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called the Other as the most important landmark of the process of unifying individ-

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uals. The realisation of the other reality, but not consuming or ignoring it created the opposite of the relationship of totalization. Limited means of transforming restricted possibilities into a theatre communicates a different reality.

The complete list of our full possibilities to communicate in speech, move, touch, colour, smell, sound and feeling, can be or is shorter for some of us. And it is by our given fate or just a nature of our character, tendency to use one or the other type of expression. L EVINAS says that the central violence to the other is that of the denial of the other’s own autonomy. He calls this violence totalization. It occurs when someone assumes they know what another is about before the other has spoken.

Totalization is a denial of the other’s difference. In other words, we forget about our many communicative potentials and instead focus on the lack of one particular aspect.

Subjectivity is the opposite of totalization. L EVINAS says that the proximity of the other is not simply special or familial, but the other draws closer insofar as I feel myself responsible for them. In responsibility for the others we are really ourselves. Responsibility for the other starts from describing the other.

HELP OF COMMUNICATION Many who are different are troubled by the way they are described. Language, written or spoken, is the most developed tool of communication in the world. People have difficulties, but are not the disability themselves. We can be disabled by the environment, attitudes or stereotypes. There is no perfect or naturally complete person in this world.

Disability, as we take it, is a natural thing. It is not a mistake or an error.

Organisations working with people who have a visual or a hidden handicap have created some help for those who want to learn to be sensitive and responsible while meeting people with certain difficulties. Some agencies refer to these tips as The Ten Commandments of Etiquette for Communicating with People with Disabilities. Here are some of them: Do not ignore the person, while speaking to one’s companion or interpreter.

If you offer assistance, wait until the offer is accepted. Then listen to or ask for instructions.

Never patronize people who use wheelchairs by patting them on the head or shoulder.

Never pretend to understand if you are having difficulty doing so. Instead, repeat what you have understood and allow the person to respond. The response will clue you in and guide your understanding.

Do not be embarrassed if you happen to use accepted, common expressions such as “See you later” or “Did you hear about that?” that seems to relate to a person’s disability.

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Do not be afraid to ask questions when you are unsure of what to do.

Do not say “disabled person”, but “person with a particular disability”.

As we talk about disability, we exclude or include, harmonize our relationship or completely spoil it, or even hurt the other. This happens even if we are unaware. Equality is a complicated goal to achieve. Someone who is living abroad with a limited command of the local language might feel similar to a disabled persons. Some of the commandments above would fit their situation as well.

LIMITED NATURE As people of the Gospel, we experience limitedness in our ability to communicate the Ultimate Truth. We live within the limits of our lives and our bodies. We try to make the possibility for improvement a reality.

We all might have a different world-view if we were asked to experience the world differently. Our brain selects one image and explains the world with the help of this image.

Something missing would never constitute a mistake—I hope. We realise unlimited possibilities in touching the limitedness of the other’s body or soul. One word can contain the universe as well as one touch can contain all the words.

Orinta Z. ROETTING was born in Kaunas (Lithuania) and married Martin from München (Germany). She recently graduated at Trinity College, Dublin (Irish School of Ecumenics) in the International Peace Studies programme (M. Phil.), she works with refugees. She is a member of the Lithuanian Catholic Youth Organisation “Ateitis” (Future).

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Ellen Aasland R E I N E R T S E N

A Religion of Body I am a bodily creature. I am a body. I relate to all my surroundings as a body. And through my body I relate to my faith. Christianity is often accused of having had and having a sick relationship to everything bodily.

Throughout the history of the church the body has been seen as the lower part of creation: The body is the prison of our divine soul -- the seat of evil desires. While acknowledging that the church’s understanding of the body often has been unhealthy, I believe that Christianity is a religion of body.

A BODY LIKE GOD At the core of the Holy Scriptures and the Christian tradition we find a positive view of the human body. The creation story in Genesis 2 gives us bodily images of how humankind was created. The Lord God took clay from the earth and shaped it into a human body. God blew the breath of life into the nose and the body came to life (Gen 2:7).

In the Hebrew tradition we find little separation between

body and soul. God did not first create a body, and then give it a soul. No, when God blew into the human being the lifegiving breath the human being became a soul. A living soul.

A living creature. If we combine the creation story in Genesis 2 with the one in Genesis 1, we believe that living beings, that embodied souls, are created in the image of God (Gen 1:27).

GOD AS BODY One important Christian doctrine is that God chose to come to the world as a body. “Incarnation” comes from Latin and means “coming in flesh”. According to what became a Christian doctrine, Jesus was not only 100% God, but also 100% human. He was the real thing, a real body.

The earthly Jesus preached good news for bodies. He proclaimed that in the bodies of our sisters and brothers we see God. When we satisfy the bodily needs of suffering bodies, we satisfy the needs of God. In a parable of the coming judgement, Jesus tells that the Great King says “What you

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did to one of the least of these my brothers, you did to me” (Mt 25:40b).

The last thing Jesus did with his friends before his death, according to the biblical gospels, was to eat with them. A meal is a bodily enjoyment and at the same time a strengthening of the body. “Do this in remembrance of me”, Jesus said. And we still do. We eat the body of Christ and drink the blood, and what we eat and drink becomes part of our own bodies.

Jesus died bodily. With blood and pain and despair. And as Christians we believe that the resurrection of Christ was a bodily one. We believe that eventually we will do the same.

When Christian theology was shaped in the first centuries of the common era, it meet with competing views of the body. A popular and fascinating worldview at that time was that bodies and all matter are made by an evil god, different from the good god who created the souls and all spiritual life.

What became Christian theology had to struggle to keep the belief that the body is the good creation of the good God.

The Hebrew word qáráb means “come near” or “approach”. This word has a span of meaning from approaching the altar for cultic worship to (for a man) coming near a woman for sexual intercourse.

How do I relate to God? Through what do I experience and worship the divine? Knowledge in my tradition is often intellectual knowledge. My worship is not very often bodily. I find it inspiring that the words used for knowledge and worship in the Hebrew context have far broader meaning potential than in my context. The same word can refer to approaching the divine and coming close to your beloved and the way you know your lover is compatible with your insights into religious truths.

Is it not so that my knowledge of, and experience with, the divine has to do with every aspect of mine? With my entire body? I am a body and this is how I relate to God. My faith is embodied in a religion of body.

Suggested Readings: M C FAGUE Sally, Body of God. 1959.

BODILY SPIRITUALITY Studying the Old Testament, I came across two Hebrew concepts which fascinate me.

Yád’a is a verb describing knowledge, experience or insight. It is often used for knowing or being known by God, often in an intimate way. The same word can also mean bodily knowledge: sexual contact.

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G ALLOWAY Kathy (ed.), Dreaming of Eden. Reflections on Christianity and Sexuality. 1997.

Ellen Aasland REINERTSEN is a student of Lutheran theology at the University of Oslo (Norway) and the University of Vienna (Austria). She is 25 years old and has been part of the Oslo SCM since 1998, also on the local board. Since October 2001 she has been part of the European Regional Committee of WSCF, where she is the coordinator of the Gender and Education Working Group.

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N A G Y P Á L Szabolcs

Dismembered Body: The Ecumenical Joints of Christ It seems that the crucial question which Christianity faces today is the ecumenical question: how can there be so many vivid and blessed Christian communities who are not in communion with each other? What is at stake now is the credibility of Christianity, the vivacity of the Christian message in our days. It has become more or less obvious that the core of the challenge is our picture of ourselves, how we see our being as the Church. In theological thinking, quite some metaphors are used to depict and describe the phenomenon called the Church. One of them is the Biblical metaphor of Body.

each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbilds itself in love” (Ephesians 4:15-16).

This sentence is one of the basic texts which compare the Christian existence with being a body. Since the creation of the world we have been thaught that we are created in the image and likeness of God, and our created icon portrays the Creator Godself. Then we learn in the redemption story that the Word became flesh to dwell among us, in order that we would be able to embody the Word and dwell fully in the world. The image of God, the Body of Christ and the enlivening Spirit are constitutive elements of our being-in-the-world.

I.

1. GENETICS Baptism and the outpouring and emanation of the Holy Spirit implanted a common DNA into us. As the science of genetics improved, it is high time to improve our understanding on the common genetic map of Christianity, in existence and functioning for proper inheritance.

The common DNA of a body can be found in each and every cell in the body, and the challenge now is to try to draw this genetic map of Christiantity where our common mission and vocation, our common history and destiny, our common motivation and emotion would be depicted.

THE PHENOMENON OF A METAPHOR Apart from the theological differences, the history of the many schisms within the Church is marked by the struggle of temperaments and political conceptions as well. In the rhetorical field, however, it is also marked by the war of choices between poetic expressions: metaphors, allegories, metonims or analogies. The paradigms of ecclesiology are poetic expressions, usually metaphors. They try to describe the Church in different ways, evoking the not-so-obvious sides of the Church by comparing Her with other phenomena.

If it is so, first we have to define metaphor, its infinitenesses and its limits. The role of metaphor is to condense two distant pictures into one name in order to evoke their hidden parallels. In a way, metaphor is infinite, since we can find more and more parallels between the two pictures or phenomena.

On the other hand, not all of the parallels make sense, so we have to limit our usage of the metaphor to keep it meaningful.

A metaphor can be exploited or cultivated. We are responsible for helping the maximum amount of meaning to emerge from a metaphor, and at the same time to avoid its implied traps. How to unwrap and how to avoid – there is a fundamental disagreement about this question among Christian thinkers, and only our wisdom can help us to discern. It is of the utmost importance to find and use the appropriate metaphors for the ecumenical approachment. Our metaphorical definition can create, but also disperse and destroy its object.

We are all responsible for the right choice of metaphors in ecclesiology as well. The most commonly acceptable metaphors for the Church are naturally those of the Bible.

We do not mention now all the other metaphors for the Church, altough it is worth to examine all of them and unwrap their possible meanings. In this essay, we only deal with the metaphor of the Church as Body, since we suspect that we have not drawn all of the consequences from this metaphor as yet.

II.

A BIBLICAL METAPHOR ENRICHED “Truthing in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him, Who is the head, into Christ, from Whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when

2. BLOOD-CIRCULATION There seems to be an ecumenical consensus that we are already one in Christ, embodied in His Body through baptism, even though this unity is not yet visible and realised. Baptism creates a belonging to the Body, and we members become organically embodied in the whole. There are different members of the Body of Christ, who could not recognise each other as members of the same body, and they have been trying to block the blood-circulation among themselves.

The ecumenical adventure seeks to walk over the bridge between already and not yet. One of the things which we must do as committed ecumenical Christians is to restore the blood-circulation within this one body. Obviously, if the blood-circulation stops somewhere in a body, it is not only the limbs which die, but at the end of the day the whole body gets infected and starts to agonise – some more sensitive members have felt this agony for a thousand years and a half, some for a thousand, others for five hundred years.

3. JOY AND PAIN All members of the Body are organic, interconnected and mutually dependent. The joy of a member is the joy of all, and the pain of a member hurts all the others. If one part of the body aches, it is difficult for the whole body to concentrate on its main calling. If one of the members is not in a living contact with the others any more, it dies, and the dead part may infect all the other members. When we ampute certain members, the whole body becomes paralysed, truncated and incomplete. This state of affairs, the pain of truncatedness, can be a driving force for us, Christians.

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The joy of a member is the joy of all. The joy of the coming fullness of the Body will be overwhelming: the Body of Christ will shine like the sun and its clothes will become white as the light. It will be like the transfigured Body on Mount Tabor, where for a while His fullness was present as an abundance. This future joy can be a driving force for us, Christians, people of vision, to eagerly await the day of our unity. This day will not be the end, as the transfiguration was not the end but a station, a glimpse of eternity. From this event we shall return and fulfill our vocation and mission on the Earth.

EXCURSUS: VEGETABLE AND ANIMAL BODY We know that the relation of vegetables to life is much broader and flexible than of animals and humans. So, the Church would be a vegetable-like body, the parts of which can be replanted and which can start a new life on their own? Some of the Christians imagine the Church exactly like this. It seems that focusing on the Church as a human-like body emphasises the fact more prominently that the Body is created and sent to the world once and for all. The people who belong to Christ, belong to each other necessarily and inseparably.

There are animal bodies – like that of the earthworm which you can slice and they still keep on being alive, or even start a new life individually. Even though this understanding of the body-metaphor may provide some very meaningful insights, it seems more convincing to concentrate on the Church again as a human-like body. In case of human beings, the separated parts can not live alone, only a maximum of one of them (most of the churches would like to think that they are this surviving one), but still this part is incomplete without the others. In contrast with the way of dialogue, “an exclusive claim is like a bit of rock in a handful of peanuts. It may break a few teeth but will never provide nourishment to the body” (Stanley J. S AMARTHA ).

Since there is only one Christ, there is only one Body of Christ, and each member belongs to this Body through baptism. The metaphorical possibilities of a vegetable body or an animal body do not explain the inherent interwovenness of all Body-members, and the longing and belonging of each to their unifying force, Jesus the Christ.

4. BECOMING AND ACTING The Body not only exists and belongs together, it also acts and functions together. The real meaning of ecumenicity and catholicity is that we consider all the members when deciding on an issue or when conducting our business. We can recognise that the members of the Body are not only the churches and denominations, but also the spiritual movements, monastic orders, theological schools. The renewal movements in the Church are meant to clean the Body and also to heal and recreate the sick members, all of us. There are life functions, which only a certain member can provide for the others. We are prophets for each other, as persons and denominations.

For a Magyar Jesuit, Ö RSY László, ecumenical dialogue is the effort to promote and sustain the healing process within the one body. The kenosis (self-emptying) of Christ is the eternal model for the functions of the members of the Body.

Death is the door to resurrection, as well as kenosis is the door to genuine unity. This kenosis should not touch our

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Christian or ecclesial identity, rather our temporary popular identity, the dimension of historical contingencies. These accidentals could be abandoned and offered as a pleasing sacrifice to God, the Triune community of dialogue.

IV. NOURISHMENT: THE BODY OF CHRIST AND BLOOD The Eucharist is the source and peak of the life of the Church. The Eucharistic celebration is the meeting point, where the Body of Christ, the Church, shares the Body of Christ, the Eucharist. That is how the organic unity of Christ upbuilds itself. This process evokes the ancient symbol of Christ as a pelican, feeding his children with his own blood.

Under two species, only the blood of Christ can renew the body of Christ. The martyric blood of Jesus is the seed of the Church. Blood has a twofold meaning: it means suffering and pain and martyrdom, but it also means blood-circulation, soul, and – ultimately – life.

Eucharist and Church – the two metaphors are each other’s analogy. We are what we eat, our food assimilates us. (There are saints who fed themselves only with the Eucharist for years.) We can claim that sharing in the Eucharist is the starting point for sharing in Church-life. We can also claim that ecclesial unity is necessary first to share the Eucharist with each other.

But we have to be aware that this snake which bites her own end would not turn out to be a vicious circle, where no progress happens. Centripetal ecumenism (where we concentrate on our Christian doctrines in order to reach unity) and centrifugal ecumenism (when we act together as Christians, and our united effort creates a community from us) have to go hand in hand (these terms are from a Magyar theologian, O ROVA Csaba).

Truthing in love, loving in truth. In this essay, we followed the fly of some ideas which emerged from the metaphor of the Church as Body. We discovered some paths which remain unexplored in the realm of this metaphor, and we found some obvious limits and borders which we should not transgress, because they lead nowhere.

As we said in the beginning of our journey, we are responsible for our own choosing of appropriate metaphors, but also for our consistency and our intention to walk all along the way our chosen metaphor provides, striving and “pushing the neon” as far as it makes sense. May the Body of Christ upbuild itself, joint together in love, for the nourishment of all.

Suggested Readings: B ÉKÉS Gellért OSB, Egyház a Lélek erõterében (Church in the Field of Spirit).

Pannonhalma, 1999.

Alan D. FALCONER , Towards Unity through Diversity: Bilateral and Multilateral Dialogues. One in Christ 1993/4. Ö RSY László (Ladislaus ORSY) SI, “Kenosis”: The Door to Christian Unity. Origins 1993/3.

Konrad R AISER , “That the World May Believe”. The Missionary Vocation as the Necessary Horizon for Ecumenism. Unpublished lecture at the SEDOS Seminar, Ariccia, 19 May 1999.

NAGYPÁL Szabolcs is a graduate in law, literature and ecumenical theology. He is Roman Catholic, a theologian in the Békés Gellért Ecumenical Institute in Pannonhalma, Hungary. He is a former chairperson of KÖD (Magyar SCM), and is currently a member of WSCF European Regional Committee and global Executive Committee. He is the editor of Mozaik and Student World.

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N A G Y Szilvia

Song of the Body.

Liturgical Revolution from the Third World When we look at the theologies and spiritualities which emerged from the Third World, we might first feel they remained particular. They were born in a particular context, they were addressed to people who share the common circumstances of life, and they tried to find answers and solutions for their own problems. Their effort to concentrate on God’s immanence and on the immanent realities of the world (such as society, culture, poverty and oppression), at first seems irrelevant to the other parts of the world.

Third World theologies, however, confronted not only their own countries and people, but also the First (and Second) World countries and people as well, with their realities (poverty, oppression etc) that they all tried to hide.

They also confronted the world and its Western European and North American white male rational ruling principle, which was the political, social and even Christian standard before. They also called Christianity to face its corrupted reality that failed to transfer the good news and became a strange and an oppressive ideology. The new spiritual revolution of body completely transformed the style of Christian spirituality and worship.

I. NEW SONG FROM AFRICA AND NORTH AMERICA People from the Third World recognized themselves as essentially religious and intuitive beings. They gave voice to their authentic spirituality, unique to the colonial one. The essence of this spirituality is the rejection of every artificial separation as material and spiritual world, the body and soul etc. It sees the experienced world in a dynamic and comprehensive manner.

NEW SONG OF COLOUR Third World theologies started their revolution with a new theological paradigm shift. They changed the starting point to the understanding of who God is, and it changed the object of theology and worship. They began theology with the first thing humans experience: their own body. In particular, Black Theology was a leading force at this point, experiencing the blacks’ bodies as the source of all their discriminations.

Black Theology stated that God is black.

“There is no place in Black Theology for a colorless God in a society where human beings suffer precisely because of their color”, said James H. CONE. It implied that the source of being black is in God, which means a

strong assurance of identity. Concerning human beings, Black Theology stated that spiritual needs are as important for the body as bodily needs are for the soul. The body, by remembering its origin and its womb, was seen as a tool that can lead to the primordial consciousness of the presence of God. That is why, through gestures, bodily expressions confirm that human beings are embodied and that the reality of Incarnation is to be taken seriously.

NEW SONG OF MOVEMENT Contrary to the classical Greek and Roman philosophical culture, which shaped Western Christianity, for peoples from the Third World the body is neither fallen nor an instrument of sin. Rather, the body is the center of the total manifestation of the person. African theology especially emphasizes this idea. The body bears witness to the past, lives in the present, keeps the memorial of the Lord, and expresses discipleship through an ethical life. While in the Roman liturgy the immobility symbolized perfection, the gestures, the flexing of the body, and the dances in the Third World liturgies express both the individuals and the community as they are assembled before God. Human voices, drums, rhythm and movement of the dance express the whole worldview, theology and God-relationship of the people. That is why H ERSKOVITS argued that what Africa needs is not only black theology but blackbody theology: bodily experiences (being in contact with the people, with nature, and with the cosmos) and expressions are essential elements of faith. Faith is shaped (and to be shaped) by the outer forms of religious expression rather than on inner values and beliefs. These outer forms can offer the depth of the inner values and beliefs in an effective and life-transforming way.

The body is natural and ritualized (sanctified). It can be and should be used in worshipping God. The effort to create ‘body-theology’, however, did not stay only in Africa but helped the other Third World theologies in forming their image of human beings and in rediscovering their own cultural values. On the other hand, it challenged the First World’s image of body, of the human being, and of Incarnation. In the beginning, body-theology was a scandal.

Later on, however, it started a revolution of body that culminated in involving gestures, movements and dances into the liturgical order.

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II. NEW SONG FROM ASIA Contrary to the other Third World theologies, where enlightenment was the rediscovery of the communal aspects of humanity, Indian spirituality put the person and the personal encounter with God into the center. As Swami A MALDAS wrote, among the gifts given by God to India, the greatest is that of interiority, the awareness of the presence of God dwelling in the heart of each human person, which is fostered by prayer and meditation, by contemplative silence and the practice of yoga and sannyasa.

NEW SONG OF MEDITATION Perhaps the main contribution of India to ecumenical spirituality was the introduction of yoga and the rediscovery of the value of meditation. Their wide possibilities opened the way to their use at personal devotion at worship. Both yoga and meditation concentrate on the person, on the human nature, but not from the side of historical context but from the side of the soul, the common human eternal bases, like growing toward self-perfection, realizing the latent resources of the self, living life in its fullness and wholeness.

Although meditations may use movements (e.g. walks), their main benefit offer was to lead Christianity in rediscovering the value of silence and concentration. It happened on two levels, one of them being the rediscovery of the great meditative and mystical tradition of Christianity. The other level was the discovery of the meditative tradition of the Orient (mainly of India) and the introduction of meditation into Christian spiritual practice.

basic postures and silence they became natural elements of common growth in spiritual ecumenism and they broke the autocracy of sermons with the revolution of the soul.

III. NEW SONG OF BODY The discovery of the human body as a tool of worship, the (re)introduction of yoga and meditative practices, helped Western and Westernized Christianity to see the criteria of rational usefulness, objectified spiritual desires (going to church, reading Bible every day, liturgy in a strict order), and determined self, faith, spirituality, and church images (by dogmatic inheritances) as illusions and unfair boundaries.

The key is to change first the inner world of a person, which can be the source for changes in the outer world.

These spiritualities saw the political, social, and economic changes as obvious consequences of the people’s conscious spiritual growth. “The more one recedes inward, the more one encompasses the world at large - without opposition”, said Justin O’B RIEN . We could realize, in the ecumenical movement’s spiritual and practical fields, the strength and power coming from these practices when these fields met each other and these spiritualities helped to make balance and focus for the ecumenical social efforts.

Servant Christ, Help us to follow you out of the dark tomb, To share daily your resurrected life, To be renewed daily in your image of love,

NEW SONG OF YOGA Yoga operates with the human body by putting more emphasis on the body than meditation. We can realize, however, that the focus of Yoga practices is the soul that inspires and transforms the body and makes it a tool for deepening one’s spiritual life. Yoga ritualizes and internalizes postures which are part of the dance. It deals with the parts of dances as elements with separated identity and it gives time for each of the parts to display its own effects.

These techniques with their elaborateness are more useful in individual devotions or for a ’spiritual elite’, while dances and common rites fit more for gatherings. Our ecumenical experience shows, however, that because yoga itself and its single elements are able to transcend denominational and cultural labels, owing to their universal character, much of the elements of this religiosity can be widely used in ecumenical gatherings.

For introducing these practices and techniques, especially in public spiritual occasions, deep knowledge, skills and experience are required. In their simple form as gestures,

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To be used daily as your new Body In your service to the world, Servant Christ, help us to follow you.

(Indian Litany of the Disciples of Christ the Servant) Suggested Readings: C A R D E N John, A Procession of Prayers.

Prayers and Meditations from Around the World. London-Geneva, 1998.

G RAHAM Aelred, Contemplative Christianity: An Approach to the Realities of Religion. The Ecumenical Review 1976/28.

Spirituality and Social Embodiement. Oxford, 1997.

Spirituality of Interfaith Dialogue. Geneva, 1989.

U ZUKWU Elochukwu E., Body and Memory in African Liturgy. Concilium 1995.

NAGY Szilvia is an ecumenical theologian from Hungary, a member of KÖD (Magyar SCM). She is a graduate of the EvangelicalLutheran Faculty of Theology (Budapest) and

the

Bossey

Ecumenical

Institute

(Switzerland). Currently she is writing her ThD on ecumenical and interreligious liturgies. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Ecumenical Youth Council in Europe (EYCE).

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Cornel E L I S E I

The Beauty of the Resurrected Body - An Orthodox Perspective The essence of Christianity is undoubtedly the reality of the resurrected body of our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. In other words, Christianity brings a solution to the problem of the immortal body or of the elixir of life, a subject in which many scientists have shown their interest. Some scientific experiments offer us a few hypotheses by means of which the life of the body can be prolonged or its biological functions improved.

THE INVULNERABLE BODY OF JESUS It is obvious that there is a great deal of research in our contemporary world, out of which we are sure to learn useful things. But as true Christians, it is our duty to consult the basis of our faith in Jesus Christ, namely the Holy Scripture, the works of the Church Fathers, as they are the sources of eternal life (Ps 36:9; Jn 4:14), and the experience of the saints. As a matter of fact, what is the kind of body Jesus proposes to us?

If we search evidence in the New Testament, we find, just after Christ’s resurrection, nine references to the kind of body Jesus proposes to us. We understand that Jesus passes with his body through the locked doors (Jn 20:19), eats fish and honey (Lk 24:42), enlightens the minds of the disciples with regards to their understanding of the Scripture (Lk 24:45), and prepares them for clothing with power from on high (Lk 24:49), and implicitly for the mission of preaching His resurrection.

In other words, Jesus Christ proves the existence of an invulnerable body that cannot be harmed, either by people or by fire, by water or by death. Unfortunately, for the majority of our contemporaries such a body is neither credible nor possible. However, the words of Saint GREGORY of Sinai should give us food for thought: “If we do not know ourselves as God created us, we will not know what sin has made of us.”

(Apophtegmata, cap. 50.)

ADAM, THE MASTERPIECE OF CREATION Starting from these two premises, that of the reality of Christ’s body and that of the creation of humanity, we must understand the primary creation of humanity by God (ie the creation of Adam). If we were to characterize Adam’s condition in Eden, we could mention the words of Saint S ERAPHIM of Sarov: “Adam was made to be unharmed by the action of any of the natural elements that God also created, so that he could not get drowned in water or burnt by fire, swallowed by the ground or harmed by the wind.

All the natural forces were in his power, as he was one chosen by God to be emperor and master of the living world. And all admired him as a perfect masterpiece of God’s creation.

When God asked him to give names to the other living creatures he gave each, in turn, such a name that it comprised all its gifts, all its power and all the particular features that they possessed, each according to what God endowed them with in the very moment of their creation.

Only owing to this supernatural gift of divine grace given to him when God blew life over him could Adam see and realise

God wandering around the Paradise, understand God’s words and at the same time those of the angels and the language of all animals, birds and reptiles, creatures living on earth and all those things that are hidden for us nowadays because of the loss of divine grace and our wretchedness but which were so familiar to Adam before his fall. The Lord our God bestowed Eve the same wisdom, the same strength and almightiness, together with all the rest of sacred and noble qualities.” (The Life and Teaching of Saint Seraphim of Sarov) THE GIFT OF RESURRECTION Therefore, Adam possessed the gift of resurrection, which Saint G REGORY of Nyssa characterizes in this way: “The gift of resurrection must be understood mainly as a way of setting the people back into the old condition they had before the fall. Indeed, the gift we hope for is a return to the original life, when human, who had been dropped out of Eden, will be placed there again. Consequently if the life of those resettled resembles to that of the angels, then it is obvious that the life before sin was a sort of angelic life. That is why the return of our life to its old state makes us angel-like.”(On Man’s Creation, cap. 17.)

SUBMISSION AND FASTING Certainly, we can re-live the life before the sin and Saint GREGORY of Sinai suggests the solution or the means of doing that: “It is by means of two commandments that those who strive for the old grace come forth, namely by submission and fasting. It was by their contrary that all sins corrupted the human nature. Those who keep the commandments by obedience turn back to God faster than those who keep them by fast and prayer because the former is characteristic only to very few, being difficult even for the most resolute.”

(Apophtegmata, cap. 18.)

We can notice the unity in conception about the reality of the resurrected body according to Saint GREGORY of Nyssa, Saint GREGORY of Sinai and Saint SERAPHIM of Sarov, although they lived in totally different ages (the 4th, 13-14th and 19th centuries). As we have already mentioned, Saint GREGORY of Nyssa and Saint SERAPHIM of Sarov, we shall remember the words of Saint GREGORY of Sinai about the resurrected body: “The immortal body is the material body, except its humors and consistence, unfathomable changed from spiritual into resurrected body, so that it is both earthly and heavenly due to the immateriality of its divine appearance. For it is as it was originally created that it will rise out of death to resemble the Son of Man’s appearance while fully sharing divine grace.”

(Apophtegmata, cap. 46.)

HEAVENLY IMMATERIALITY With a similar point of view, one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, Dumitru STANILOAE explains in a note (no.

18.) the above mentioned words of Saint GREGORY of Sinai: “The emphasis is laid on immateriality as the characteristic of 17

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the body become divine and restored to its natural splendor, which does not exclude a certain vigor, both of them implying lack of any alterance. Becoming heavenly, the body remains earthly as well because it does not exclude substance, no matter how transparent it may become by the presence of the Holy Spirit. The body, transformed in this way, attains the structure of God embodied after the Resurrection, and this is the reason why He is named the Son of Man pre-eminently.”

THREE HOLY RELICS These are only a few testimonies on the reality of the resurrected body from the Holy Scripture and the books of the Church Fathers. It is also necessary to bring evidence from real life—from the liturgical life of the Church. We refer to something characteristic to Orthodoxy, namely the worship of the holy relics. I will mention only three examples which impressed me and which could at least be the subject of some questioning or curiosity for anyone.

1. MARIA MAGDALENA, out of whom Jesus exorcised seven demons, is the first person to whom the Redeemer revealed Himself after His Resurrection. One of her arms is at the monastery Simonos Petras in Mount Athos. What is interesting to know is the fact that her arm has constantly the temperature of the human body. Moreover, on the 22 July, every year, when there is a holiday in her honor, the temperature of the arm rises.

2. Saint SPIRIDON, a participant in the first ecumenical Synod in Nicea in 325 AD and active maintainer and preacher of the Holy Trinity. His body remains well preserved in the Island of Corfu (Greece) and continues to exhibit significant flexibility.

3. Saint PARASCHEVA from Iasi, protector of Moldavia and of

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our student association (ASCOR Iasi). At the beginning of the 20th century, her relics were also in Iasi but in another church.

During a fire, the greatest part of the inside church was destroyed. The coffin that contained the relics burned to ashes but the relics were found absolutely untouched.

ANGELS WITHIN A BODY The relics of any saint are sweet smelling, whereas we know than a common corpse after only a few days gives off on unbearable smell. The facts mentioned seem to describe another world, a world of the angels within a body, a world about which Christ assures us. “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world” (Mt 25:34), referring to the Eden prepared for Adam and Eve. I think this verse is suitable to end with. A few years ago someone asked a very old monk, “Father, supposing I do not read the whole Bible, what are my chances to be redeemed?” The old monk answered eloquently, “read and carry out all that is written in Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 25, and we shall meet in Heaven.”

May we also share the joy of the heavenly Kingdom together with wise virgins, and the servants who increased the talents, with the merciful, with the holy angels, with the Holy Virgin and Our Lord Himself, Jesus Christ.

Suggested Readings: Saint G REGORY of Nyssa, On Man’s Creation.

Saint G REGORY of Sinai: Apophtegmata.

The Life and Teaching of Saint Seraphim of Sarov.

Corneliu Elisei is an Orthodox from Romania. He graduated in Orthodox theology at the Orthodox Faculty “Dumitru Staniloae” in Iasi, in 2001. He is the president of the Iasi branch of ASCOR, the Romanian Student Christian-Orthodox Association.

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Nadzeya C H E R K A S

Can Women in Belarus Enjoy the Fullness of Life?

According to the Orthodox women’s theological thought (which is still being formed), the Soviet variant of feminism differs from the Western one primarily in its Christian direction. As part of the former Soviet Union, Belarus was a typical example of a country that proclaimed full equality between women and men but failed to implement it in practice and failed to eliminate women’s discrimination in public life and in the family.

The awful conditions under which Soviet women lived, gave birth to, and educated children is no longer a secret.

Women were not considered feminine. They were just a working force in building a better future. That ideology imposed a semi-woman, a semi-man, someone who would be ready to work in the mine, factory or railways, to do the hardest work. Men and women were called and addressed just as tovarishch (comrade).

WOMEN’S RETURN TO FEMININITY The feminist movement appeared and developed quickly at the end of the eighties. It is not in social critics, but in the contemplation of the virtues of purity, chastity, self-sacrifice (personified in God’s Mother), that Russian feminists found the way of self-renewal. They rediscovered earlier ridiculed values and submitted to Christian God, because they found Life, Truth and Way in God. God helped them to overcome dazzling pain and sorrow and to defeat suffering with Love. Thus emancipation (as a return to femininity!) had paradoxical results: the most emancipated women were in Church.

“The prayers to Virgin Mary helped me to find, open, and resurrect my femininity in all its purity and perfection,” one Russian feminist writes. Indeed, the position given to the Mother of our Lord in the Orthodox religiosity is next to the Lord himself. Mary, born as we are, gives all of us a fully realized and blessedly imitable example of how to use our human nature to glorify God in every moment of life. God’s Son’s embodiment through the Virgin Mary raised women into the highest stage of dignity. She is no longer a slave, a thing, but equal with man, with the same talents, the same immortal soul, and high meaning. She is not only a friend, but a co-heiress of eternal life in God’s kingdom.

Jesus Christ’s example of life, teaching, and suffering justified and ennobled women. He paid attention and respect women, sanctified her human virtues and moral powers, and he taught others to do this as well. Thus he elevated woman to her proper place in creation. Through his actions women were emancipated from rabbinic rigidity. “At the same time, gender distinction within the Christian community remained, though women and men enjoyed the fullness of union with God by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not come to deliver humanity from the distinction of being female and male, but came to restore primeval beauty of both forms”.

APOSTLE OF THE APOSTLES The idea of motherhood as a woman’s sole mission was surpassed and the reliability of women was recognized. Consider

the mirth-bearing women and the apostles. When the latter hid and left their Teacher without support, the former ignored the danger of being caught and turned out to be more faithful and courageous than the apostles. Then they came to the empty tomb. Saint Mary Magdalena was the first to see the resurrected Christ and preached this to the apostles, and then they spread the message of resurrection in the whole world. Thus, she was “the apostle of the apostles”. This term is a correction of any image of the Church, in which women are only supposed to listen, and preaching is to be done exclusively by men.

Unfortunately, it is not only people in other churches who are unaware of the rich history of women in the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox are also unaware and need to find ways to tap the tremendous energy lying dormant among their women and use this for strengthening their faith and ministry.

It is due to women that the Orthodox religion has been preserved in our country, in spite of many years of persecutions.

Today, when men are just awakening from spiritual sleep, women compose the majority of parish people. The idea of spiritual motherhood is well known: a woman makes a man not only with the act of physical birth, but she also gives birth to spirituality in him. Love (Lubou), Faith (Vera), Hope (Nadzeya) - these are all Orthodox names for females. In them lies the essence of humanity.

THE CALLING OF WOMEN Church tradition tells us about the internal, essential difference in the calling of women and men. They cannot be replaced by each other. The callings of a woman, wife, and mother are completely different from those of a man, husband, and father. So they complement each other. It is in marriage that one fulfills their calling or mission because within the framework of one’s human nature they realize God’s way of life.

Marriage is a unique union of two human beings in love.

These two human beings can surpass their own human nature and be united not only with each other (they become one body), but also in Christ. It is a mystery, in which a complete change of the human being is taking place, a renewal and rebirth into the world in a new fullness. It is in marriage that a complete knowledge of being is possible - the wonder of feeling, touching and seeing the other person. This enjoyment of real life makes us richer, wiser and gives us the feeling of fullness of life. This fullness is intensified with the birth of a child, united and reconciled.

If the marriage is based on love and faithfulness, it is chaste. It is interesting to mention the etymology of the Russian word tselomudrie (chastity): tselo means whole(ness), mudrie means wisdom, that is the word chastity expresses the unity of wholeness and wisdom. The marriage, deprived of chastity, loses its wholeness.

THE SEXUAL REALISATION OF MARRIAGE When speaking from a Christian understanding of marriage, we cannot skip the sexual communication between

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woman and man. Today we face desacralisation of love, dissection of life, where physical activity is detached from the life of the spirit or the life of the spirit is detached from the bodily experience. We must look at sexual life as an activity that involves the whole person, body and soul and spirit, rather than simply as an activity that involves our biological self. According to Saint Dionysius the Areopagite, our sexual actions involve not only ourselves, but also our relationships to those around us and to God. When we see sexual activity simply as an action, we are reduced to an animalistic state. We are reduced to a series of parts instead of the unity, which is called a person. There must be a meaningful, committed relationship between two people if sexual activity is to be that which works for the betterment and not the degradation of the person. Therefore sexual activity must be placed within the full sacramental context of a personal relationship, this relationship being defined as a unity of thoughts and actions which take into consideration one’s relationship with God, oneself and the other person.

In practice in the churches, the most common ways of dealing with sexuality is silence and censorship. This fact is closely connected with Russian culture, which was always marked by hyper bashfulness. Perhaps many people noticed a strange peculiarity of the Russian language (it is more common in present day Belarus after many years of its intrusion during the Soviet Union period). On the one hand, it is so rich, but on the other, there is a white spot in such an important sphere as love. There are no words for expressing physical love. There are either scientific terms, or indecent words. It is not accidentally so. This theme is evidently tabooed in the Russian language, and consequently in the culture. It is tabooed because they consider this sphere to be sacred.

IS THERE A WOMEN’S LIBERATION IN SOCIETY? In Belarus, social equality between women and men is fully guaranteed by law. However, laws are often disregarded, and many provisions are not enforced. Women continue to face discrimination in the economy and labour relations. They have no economic independence. In today’s society, many jobs are being perceived as unsuitable for women and certain occupations are being avoided by large numbers of men for fear of not fitting the image of “a true man”. These are examples of gender stereotypes, which still have the better of us. As before, women’s participation in decision-making and public administration at all levels remains limited. In fact, there are a lot of clever and intelligent women able to reveal their talents in any state or social activity. There is a growing number of women who not only have political or managerial aspirations, but are also in active search of opportunities to realise their leadership ambitions. The authorities, however, do not accept categorically protruding women, and people support such an attitude to them. Our state, led by men, manages to burden women with all possible problems of everyday life: children, school, shopping, hospital, etc., so that they cannot afford such a luxury – they cannot be social or political leaders.

Violence against women at home is also a serious concern that still remains hidden from public view. Belarus does not have laws against domestic violence. This type of criminal behavior is not even defined in the Criminal Code. The life of women in our country is not easy. Such a lump of prob-

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lems fell on them, that they practically lie under it – squeezed, hardly alive, confused and expecting help from surrounding people. Support can hardly arrive.

THREE TYPES OF BELARUSIAN WOMEN Those who have soberly evaluated the situation crawl out and take up the problems. Such advanced women gained university diplomas and entered business, laying household duties on others’ shoulders. They earn their own income and can afford to look after themselves and to keep physically fit.

Yet they often find their husbands carried off with other women.

Still most of the Belarusian women with scanty salaries can afford neither aerobic lessons, nor cosmetic salons, nor a household governess. They exhaust themselves physically and morally, working hard at work and at home. In spring they set up to work at dachas. They dig soil, plant potatoes, weed strawberries, water plants, and collect the harvest—all for the sake of family sustenance and surviving. Used to hard physical and moral commitments, they are able to save separated, depressed and dispirited society, but they should not keep silent, but they must act.

There is a third category of women in Belarus. These women do not change anything in their lives. They make no moves to business or dachas. They simply renounce from all problems, take to drinking, and voluntary degradation. They fill their lives with chaos, drunkard swearing and complete hopelessness. There is little hope that such women will make order in their houses and thoughts. It is unlikely that they will look upon themselves objectively and find a worthy way out from this desperate situation and become a whole person. Liberation of sexes should go hand in hand with the liberation of the person.

Suggested Readings: B EHR -S IGEL Elizabeth, Le ministere de la femme dans l’Eglise. Paris, 1987.

F ITZ G ERALD Kyriaki Karidoyanes (ed.), Orthodox Women Speak. Discerning the “Signs of the Times”. Geneva, 1999.

Nadzeya CHERKAS is a member of the youth group of the Belarusian Orthodox Brotherhood of Saint Vilnya Martyrs, and she is responsible for the youth projects.

She studied foreign languages and dreamed of building bridges between her country and the rest of Europe and the whole of the world.

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Eilidh W H I T E F O R D

The Body as a Barrier to Ecumenism Christianity is by no means unique in using metaphors of the human body to put flesh on the bones of its skeletal structural framework. The idea of the ‘body politic’ emerges in a range of Classical and Hebrew sources and has retained its currency through the ages, even though its ideological complexion has been subject to subtle, and not so subtle, shifts at different moments in history.

The body imagery used in the Pauline letter to the Romans and first letter to the Corinthians might seem particularly relevant to contemporary ecumenical discussions, in that these texts present a call to Christian unity in the face of conflict and difference. In these letters the ideal Christian community is envisioned as a single body of diverse parts, a metaphoric portrayal which might, superficially at least, appear to articulate the aspirations of all who strive to manifest Christian unity as an actual and visible reality through participation in ecumenical activities and dialogue.

Yet the more I reflect on key issues at stake in contemporary ecumenical discourses, the more I reach the sobering conclusion that the most significant obstacles to genuine ecumenical encounter (surely a precursor to any meaningful unity) are embodied in the most basic grounds of our being.

Today we are less divided by doctrine, tradition and spiritual practice than by race, class and gender.

One-to-one, or within hermetically-sealed religious communities, we can choose to overlook or try to overcome such crude markers of social status and agency, but to do so fails to acknowledge, much less challenge, the prevailing political and economic order in the wider world and the power it has to affect our lives. If our spiritual practices and insights are related in any way to real life in the material world (and not just a by-product of abstract thought or woolly delusion) human bodies and the ideological meanings and values invested in them are of the utmost relevance to the ecumenical project.

BODY SWERVES European philosophical traditions tend to shy away from the implications of the incarnation. The Western churches, particularly, have tended to forget Christianity’s origins as an incarnational movement. The Gospel, after all, centres around a person who is born, lives, loves, suffers and dies, a person who is human and divine. Whatever cosmic or spiritual significance we attach to that narrative is grounded in actual lived experience in the real world – our own, as well as that of Jesus and his followers. Yet, too often, throughout European secular and religious culture, we are encouraged to prefer the rational to the intuitive, the transcendent to the immanent, and to trust theoretical knowledge more than spiritual wisdom; in short, to appropriate the body metaphor, we privilege the head over the heart.

Early on, Western Christianity slipped into a comfort zone where our physical bodies became a poor relation to our lofty intellects and metaphysical souls. This vain attempt to

evade the worst existential extremes of human suffering has hardly helped us avoid its physical excesses. Instead, our bodies are often made alien to us, and we fail to draw on our bodies’ resources of knowledge, pleasure and power. Even where distrust and hatred of human physicality is less overt, or where lip-service is paid to the value of embodied spiritual expression, there is an underlying fear of the flesh evident throughout European culture that denigrates certain bodies more than others, to the ultimate detriment of all. A failure to love humanity in its carnality and rich variety is manifest in orchestrated and random acts of violence perpetrated against groups and individuals throughout Europe and the wider world.

BODIES OF EVIDENCE But what does this mean for ecumenism? I want to share two stories from my own experience of involvement in ecumenical processes as a means of exemplifying in concrete terms ways in which bodies can act as a barrier to ecumenism. The incidents recounted took place at large international ecumenical events and involved participants at those events, so are particularly ‘close to the bone’ for those of us in WSCF who are part of those circles. The stories identify some deeply ingrained body-hating attitudes manifest within our Christian community, but frequently masked by institutional structures and processes. Nevertheless, the unconscious values and conscious attitudes that denigrate the bodies of certain people – certain parts of the body of Christ - become evident in other ways. I argue that in the contemporary era the ‘body politic’ obscures the ‘politics of the body’. The systematic exclusion and sidelining of certain persons and categories of person within ecumenical processes is a disavowal of the vision “that all might be one” and reduces discussions to the status of mere inter-church dialogue. Such exclusions, I argue, not only infect our current ecumenical activities, but prevent us from establishing a basis for authentic, inclusive ecumenical dialogue in the first place.

In 1997 I travelled to Graz, Austria for the European Ecumenical Assembly taking place there. At one point during the Assembly, local Roman Catholic women organised a gathering outside the main plenary hall to highlight their de facto exclusion (because of their gender) from discussions they considered important. They wanted to make public the fact that their church spokesmen did not speak for everyone in the Catholic Church when insisting that demand for women’s ordination was a non-issue and refusing to enter into any debate on the question. The Austrian women wanted to name honestly the actual political and theological divisions within their communities, rather than gloss over the reality.

It is a good-natured gathering with lots of noisy, joyful singing and a real festival atmosphere. It has attracted far more people, women and men, than the organisers anticipated. Passers-by linger longer than intended, joining in the 21

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singing, supporting these women as they express their sense of injustice, and their hope that institutional intransigence might be softened through gentle persistence, wise deliberation, patience and loyalty. By now a big crowd has gathered, and there is no easy thoroughfare to the entrance of the building where the decision-makers are meeting. What happens next leaves me speechless.

I move aside to allow the passage through the throng of a man in clerical dress with a large ornamental cross around his neck who is pushing his way to the front impatiently.

Unfortunately, the woman standing next to me is not so agile and fails to step out of his way quickly enough, so he shoves her, quite viciously and deliberately, out of his path. She loses her balance and falls, bruising and grazing herself. This woman (a Scottish Catholic I’ve met for the first time earlier in the week) happens to have physical disabilities that make her movements slow and painful; the priest who pushes her down does not acknowledge her for a single moment, and does not look back.

In 1998 I experienced a strange sense of déjà vu while attending morning worship in a church in Harare, Zimbabwe during the WCC Assemby. Venturing outside the international ecumenical compound was always going to be a delicate matter for a white tourist with a UK passport and a modicum of historical awareness and political consciousness. The churches in Southern Africa have played a pivotal role in the process of dismantling white supremacist regimes and ideologies, but it would be naïve to deny that Zimbabwe is anything other than a racially and economically divided society, and equally naïve to expect individual congregations

Challenges in the Church to have overcome this historical legacy in a couple of decades.

However, a warm welcome was extended to the international guests at this predominantly white, bourgeois city church, regardless of our diverse ethnic, cultural and confessional backgrounds. The service was followed by the ubiquitous cup of tea and polite conversation – a mandatory part of any ecumenical encounter. I was reflecting wryly on my observation that across our great cultural and confessional divides there is at least one ‘common cup’ in the postcolonial Christian world when I witnessed a chilling episode that reminded me of my experience in Graz.

A young white priest snaps orders at the elderly black man who is making and serving the tea to the congregation. The older man attempts to follow the instructions he is given, but not nearly fast enough for the young priest who pushes him fiercely out of the way with a dismissive comment I do not catch, and takes over his post. The old man stumbles, but at least this time does not actually fall over; nevertheless, he has been publicly humiliated and rejected.

The problem? This old man has failed to make sufficient haste in the rather urgent and important task of bringing tea to a visiting Metropolitan. With the old fellow out of the way, a tray is duly presented with much ceremony and effusion to the eminent guest who seems blissfully unaware of the commotion staged on his behalf. The incident forces me to acknowledge openly to myself the extent to which the person serving the tea is not part of this’ congregational family’; he is not engaged in the idle small-talk and is poorly dressed. The institutional racism implicit in the situation becomes naked in the priest’s gesture; it is the manner in which he pushes the older person

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Challenges in the Church aside and fawns over the distinguished visitor that reveals his true values and the cultural assumptions underpinning them.

For me this is a wake-up call, alerting me to my own complicity with a cosy ecumencial process in which my ethnicity, class and education enable my privileged participation.

DISMEMBERED BODIES I want to be clear that in sharing these anecdotes my purpose is not to suggest that one church tradition or denomination is more exclusionary or oppressive than any other.

Rather, I want to encourage reflection on the extent to which all of us are implicated in harming or marginalizing those people who constitute the undervalued, expendable parts of ‘the body of Christ’. (If we extend the Pauline metaphor, we might see them as the toenails or armpits... you can draw your own conclusions about the implications of that!). These are not comfortable stories and, personally, I think I emerge rather badly from both of them. Why did not I pursue the Priest in the first story, confront him with the consequences of his aggression and ask him to help me assist the woman to the First Aid tent? Why did not I intervene in the tea-making episode? Well, I was a guest too; it would have been embarrassing and impolite to make a scene. In both cases it was easier not to risk public confrontation. I cannot pretend to have anything other than the most flimsy and pathetic excuses for my own feeble responses to what I saw.

But these memories have haunted me and have taught me that hiding defensively behind confessional and institutional barricades helps us avoid confrontation with the less palatable realities of our own church contexts. It is also worth stating that I am not trying to catalogue a litany of clerical offences here either, nor to erect a hierarchy of oppressive practices exercised against certain groups of people, within and outwith church environs. It goes without saying that this is not the typical behaviour we expect or encounter from priests or laity of any tradition; but denying, trivialising or ignoring such behaviours when they do emerge is an evasion of our shared human frailty and responsibility to one another.

Instead I tell these sad, discomforting stories as I witnessed them because they illustrate deep-rooted attitudinal, structural and ideological barriers to ecumenism in a (literally) embodied way. In other words, what view do you have of yourself, of your church, of the divine, if your priest shoves you around? And what sort of Gospel do you understand and share? This is one reason why bodies are central to any authentic ecumenism. At one level these are isolated incidents, connected only by my perception and interpretation, yet they serve to illustrate how the ideologies of race and gender (as two examples) function in the real world to our shared detriment and injury. While scenes like these replicate dynamics depressingly familiar from my own cultural and church context (and could have happened anywhere) it is profoundly disillusioning to see them mirrored in an ecumenical environment which makes explicit outward commitments to ‘honouring diversity’. Words like ‘love’, ‘unity’ and ‘justice’ get bandied about a lot in these situations, but come to seem pretty meaningless in practice.

These two disturbing incidents also demonstrate forcibly how easily those called to serve the church, even as priests, can absorb and perpetuate cultural value systems that see a disabled woman as a dangerous, annoying subversive to be

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crushed and cast aside, or see an elderly black man as an inconvenient, incompetent nuisance. Neither are viewed as a valued part of the ‘body of Christ’.

This leaves us grappling with a dilemma. Can we really sustain the assertion that in Christ ‘there can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female’ (Galatians 3) in the face of such evidence to the contrary? We all do well to ask ourselves how heavily we invest, institutionally and individually, in dehumanising, selfaggrandising, mythologies that allow us to fear, marginalise or ignore those parts of the collective body that trouble and unsettle us. What will it take to shake us out of that complacency, wake us up to our own blind spots, inconsistencies and evasions? And is the contemporary church really up to the task? Let us not confuse our aspirations with our present reality, but rather, subject to thorough critique the implicit power relations that prefigure and underpin any ecumenical encounter.

BODY COUNT I used to persuade myself that in an era of ruthless economic exploitation and militarism, the church could act as a reference point for counter-hegemonic currents affirming life, creativity, the value of human being, and the integrity of the planet. Over time I have found that hope impossible to sustain in the face of actual experience. When the chips are down, churches too often prefer to side with established authorities than with hard-pressed people, preferring to blame them for their own oppression, or telling them their suffering is a cross they should bear patiently. Churches will never be immune to prevailing social, political and cultural tides, but, for me, the scales have tipped too far. I can no longer avoid the conclusion that institutional Christianity in Europe is more part of our endemic, systemic problems than part of any solution.

By this I do not mean to demoralise those who ardently pursue the laudable goals of unity, who seek wisdom, who honour the prophetic call of justice, who strive for peace and healing in the world; but I do think we need to strip ourselves of some cherished illusions about the church and world as they actually exist. How can we even begin to talk about spiritual values or renewal divorced from the physical and social realities of the world we inhabit? The starting point for our ecumenical dialogue needs to change.

Becoming disillusioned need not imply becoming demoralised, but we need to acknowledge the barriers to ecumenism, and tell it like it is. The old metaphors of the body politic no longer serve us well in this process. Instead, to face the magnitude of this challenge we may need to acknowledge that our resources, our witnesses and prophets, are embodied in those on the front-line of our contemporary ideological and spiritual battlegrounds. By addressing the politics of the body we may yet find a way to circumvent some of the most stubborn obstacles to authentic ecumenical encounter.

Eilidh WHITEFORD was chairperson of WSCF Europe between 1997-1999. She studied in Scotland and Canada and since the completion of her doctorate in modern literature has lectured and published on related topics. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland where she currently combines working for a national charity in the social policy arena with occasional academic teaching and writing.

E-mail: eilidhwhiteford@yahoo.co.uk

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Challenges in the Church

Gyrid G U N N E S

Queering the Body During the practical semester of my theological studies in the Lutheran Church, I worked in the parish of Tromsøysund, a surburbian parish of my home town Tromsø, in Northern Norway. During Easter, services were held in the chapels in the villages of Lakselvbukt and Sjursnes. In these chapels, located about two hours by car outside TromsØ, I could not do any training for the priesthood. I could read from the Scripture but I could not have any clerical function. The only reason I could not and in the near future will not be able to work as what I have a seven year long training in doing, is the shape of my genitals. I have the body of a women.

The Norwegian Lutheran Church has been ordaining women for thirty years. Still, in some parts of the country, especially in the Northern and Western parts, female ordination is still not accepted. And as I sit in the benches of Lakselvbukt chapel I wonder: why is this so?

Discrimination of a person because of his or her sex is in all other parts of Norwegian society considered equivalent to discrimination due to colour. What is it that makes the shape of the body so important to selection of priests?

WHY IS IT SO? The denial of priesthood to women can and should be interpreted as a way of limiting women’s possibilities to equal participation in society. It is a grave example of the global oppression of women. But can it also be interpreted differently, not letting the first perspective go, but taking another perspective in addition. This is the perspective of body which I wish to develop in the following. It is a tentative perspective, open to criticism and change.

I sit in Lakselvbukt chapel. I ask my self what is it that I take part in. Around me I see men dressed in suites, women dressed in skirts, most of them covering their heads. Lakselvbukt is a traditional community. And then I look at the priest. I see a man, dressed in his liturgical clothing. Like all other liturgical clothing, it is a dress. I see a man in a dress.

The priest, as he performs the ritual of Sunday service, performs a drag show.

It is a highly untraditional drag show, without any glamour or makeup, not in a night-club, but in a church, but still it is a drag show. He covers his body, which is called male, in a suit of clothing, a dress. And dresses are considered to be for women. How can we understand this?

ONE OR TWO SEXES? Until the 18th century, the understanding of the difference of men and women rested to a great extent on the teaching

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of the Greek doctor GALEN in the first century after Christ (ARRHENIUS, 1999). His theory was that men and women have the same sex, but that women are underdeveloped men. She does not produce enough warmth in her body to become a man. But there was no absolute difference between women and men (SCHIEBLINGER, 2000). The meaning that was ascribed to the sex, the gender, became a matter of what you did, your work and your way of dressing.

With the growth of modern science, the way of thinking about the differences between women and men changed.

Although, in earlier times, too, children with vaginas were taught to have the gender “women” and children with a penis were taught to be “men”, modern science located the difference of the sexes in the body itself, in genitals, cells, hormones and in the brain. The whole body became sexed.

The difference became absolute, and was not any longer a question of a scale were women were further down on the scale than men. This makes the absolute biological differences between the bodies a guarantor for the absolute differences in gender roles. The XVIIIth century biologist would tell me this: “You have a female body (your sex), therefore you are kind, neutering, loving, caring and less intelligent than men (your gender). Because of your body, you can not be a priest nor a prime minister.” Fixing the content of the gender to sexes which are absolute should be seen as a patriarchal attempt to find a scientific explanation for women’s inferior position in society.

THE QUEERED BODY Using biology as a guarantor for gender roles introduces a problem: the body is ambivalent. The body resists the categories of being either male or female, separate and different.

My female body just has hairy legs (which it is not supposed to). My female body has hairy armpits.

My grandmother nearly has a beard. I used to have two centimetres of hair on my head. I have strong muscles which enables me to carry my luggage and open all doors myself. I have breasts and a vagina and ovaries, but I may choose not to use them for reproduction. I can decide when and if I want to have children. My body, like all other bodies, is queer.

This shows that on the level of biology, the difference is not as absolute as some wish to think. And the content of the genders ascribed to each sex is arbitrary. Being a male today and fifty years ago is different. The content of the genders changes. The co-relation that penis means trousers and vagina means skirt or dress is arbitrary and contextually determined. So patriarchy needs to handle the ambivalence of the

Challenges in the Church body, at the same time take it into account but still prevent it from contaminating society. This contamination would make people question biology as a justification of the gender roles.

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A RRHENIUS Sara, En ekte kvinne – en kritikk av den nye biologismen (A Real Women – A Critique of the New Biologism). Oslo, 1999.

Gyrid GUNNES (23) is a Lutheran student of theology and leader of the SCM Tromsø in Northern Norway. She also studied sociology and criminology. She is interested

HOW TO HANDLE THE AMBIVALENT BODY One way of handling it is violence. Senior advisor in the Norwegian Directory of Health, Berit AUSTVEG, has, through working with African female refugee who are victims of genital mutilation, showed that genital mutilation (also called circumcision) can be understood as a violent act to bring under control the queerness of the body. The female clitoris can be understood as a small penis, a trace of maleness on the female body. The clitoris then becomes a threat to the absolute difference between women and men. It has to be cut of.

Can ritual be understood as the tool for handling this ambivalence of the body? The structuralist anthropologist Victor TURNER has studied rites of passage, showing that such and similar rites enables society and individuals to tackle transition and ambivalence. Once inside the ritual (the liming phase) the participant(s) is not confined to their social status (age, position and, in our case, gender), but is neither and both, she or he is ambivalent. If the participant (or the society) would remain liminal, the structure of order (in this case the patriarchal order of the connection of gender and sex) would break down.

IS SUNDAY SERVICE REALLY A DRAG-SHOW? The ritual of Sunday service can be seen as a way of handling the dangerous queerness of our bodies. The ritual, in its liminal phase, is a space where the structures of the society are set aside. God becomes human. Bread and wine become flesh and blood. The male becomes female. Things are not what they seem to be. The priest performs a ritualised drag-show, at the same time acting and embodies the ambivalence and the danger of the body, but though doing it in a ritual, the ambivalence is fixed to the ritual.

The priest as a drag-artist is a scapegoat, bearing not the guilt, but the ambivalence of the congregation. He represents not Christ’s maleness but the ambivalence of masculinity. In the ritual the forces that question the gender structures of society are loose, but when we say the last amen, we bind them, we enter the postliminal phase where the world order is re-establised. Bread is bread and female and male are separated. The members of the congregation leave their seats, men wearing suits, women wearing dresses and skirts and covering their heads. Cosmos and patriarchy has once more been restored. The priest takes off his dress away form the congregation, and comes back as a male. We celebrate the successful return to the order of gender with tea and cakes afterwards.

THE HOPE FOR A DIFFERENT FUTURE Our bodies are ambivalent. Our gender roles are changing.

In a society where this would be taken seriously, I believe that the shape of the genitals would not shape our lives as it does today. This would be a society were violence and scapegoating would not be necessary tools for suppressing the ambivalence.

My body and the body of my boyfriend might be different (and alike), but does it matter when it comes to shaping our lives?

Suggested Readings:

in feminism, particularly in working on the combination of sexuality and Christianity. This article was written after attending and being inspired by the WSCF Europe conference on Body and Sexuality.

SEX AND GENDER The terminology of sex and gender are sociological terms developed to differentiate between the shape of the genitals (sex) and the societal meaning given to these shapes (the gender). The gender-sex term seeks to show that there is no eternal, given once and for all connection between the body and the qualities and roles ascribed to the body. Being a female (sex) does not have to be connected to being gentle, caring, warm, loving and being a parent.

These qualities are given to people with one kind of body through upbringing, but they do not derive from the body itself.

In this way the sex-gender differentiating serves to dethrone the stereotype gender roles through depriving them of their self-acclaimed authority in nature and biology. The sex-gender terminology is a good analytic tool for understanding the huge variations between cultures of what it means to be a woman or a man. The body is the same, but the gender roles change according to culture and time.

One of the critiques towards the gender-sex dichotomy is that it is not possible to differentiate between the body and the gender which is played out in society. The body is never experienced in itself as pure biology. Being a human being is in itself a truly hermeneutic state, which means that everything, down to the most basic bodily process is interpreted and given meaning by the society we live in.

Every healthy woman has a menstruation cycle, but how menstruation is interpreted varies a lot between cultures (from seeing it as a state of impurity to not giving it much significance). This shows that it is impossible to distinguish between the biology as something which is in itself and the gender that is the qualities ascribed to the sex. On the other hand, the terminology of gender and sex can be a useful one, although it is important to state that biology (sex) does not mean something which is outside the realm of interpretation, social construction and change.

QUEER Queer originally meant «strange» and «particular». It has also functioned as a name for gays and lesbians. With the development of «queer theory» in the 80s it has come to have a slightly different meaning. Queer theory aims to deconstruct all common ways of thinking about gender and sexual orientation. It questions the reason why we are so fixed in the absolute difference of what we call «male» or «female». It puts a question mark on why we always speak in terms of «heterosexuality» or «homosexuality», as though the two were opponents.

A queer look at the world is to destabilise the known categories and think in terms of «both», not «or». It even questions the notion of why be either male or female, why not be both.

The queer is what is indefinable within traditional categories, it is the difference, and it is proud to be different. The queer is the ambivalent, the strange. It is not a new category, not a new gender, but a perspective that tries to eliminate all categories.

S CHIEBRINGER Londa, Feminism and the Body. Oxford, 2000.

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Glance of an Artist

Katrin R O G G E

Transformed Bodies: The Challenge of Changing I would like to speak about thinkable forms of transformation of bodies. It is a very complex theme, and so I decided to take three concrete examples to illustrate what “transformed bodies” could mean. I hope to encourage you to get into a discussion about challenges and risks of transformation and raise awareness of your own borders that you might we unwilling or unable to cross over.

TRANSFORMATION AND BODY Transformation has something to do with change – more or less radical change – and with opening new spaces. When something is being transformed it gets another quality – hopefully a better or more complete one. So we have (at least) two states – one before and one after the transformation. But what is more exciting is the question what is happening with something (in our case with the body) during the process of transformation. This is the question for the reason of starting a process of transformation and also about the driving force. How does something change? Can you recognize it after the transformation? Is there, for example, a part or an essence, an identity perhaps, that does not change, that stays the same?

There is a scheme for examination: What is the starting point of the transformation-process (“transformation from what”)? Why is it or why is it necessary (“transformation for what”)? What is the state reached at the end or the aim (“transformation into what”)?

Such characterizations can start the discussion about challenges and risks of the process of transformation.

There are two things which are important for me if I speak about the body. First, thinking about our bodies has really a theological meaning. And second, our body – our skin, senses, movement – is our entrance to the world; we do not have any other ways of communicating than through our bodies. “Transformation of body” can be illustrated in three parts. After a theological part (concerning resurrection) there will follow two very different examples of changing bodies, both in a quite radical way. The first example is Stelarc, an Australian performance artist who works with his body in the field of Cyborg-existence; the second example will be transgender (or more exactly transsexual) identity.

RESURRECTION – TRANSFORMATION OF OUR BODIES IN DEATH The resurrection or rising of our bodies is probably the most radical transformation we can think about.

The imagination of a resurrection of our bodies presents a paradox. On the one hand our death is really an end and therefore something radically new; a life after death is a totally different kind of existence than life here on earth. On the other hand, resurrection suggests a continuity of our life in death. So far, the dying and

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the rising body have the same identity. We have a radical change or transformation of our mortal body in death and at the same time a preservation of our bodies because of the preservation of our identity. Paul gives a description of this dilemma in a famous New Testament text: 1. Corinthians 15, 35-49.

In this text, Paul gives a picture of a seed. With this picture he strongly emphasizes the discontinuity or discrepancy between the dying and the rising person: “The seed you sow

Glance of an Artist does not come to life unless it has first died; and what you sow is not the body that shall be, but a naked grain.” But in the same moment Paul speaks about the continuation between dying and rising, too, when he says that God will give it a new body, after it died. It is the same “it” – in the “animal” as well as in the “spiritual” body. The body around will change, not the “it”. The conclusion is that we have to think about the transformation in death in the way that there is continuity and discontinuity, identity and newness with the same grade of importance. Death is the most radical change of our existence, it is a complete and radical change of our bodies – but still of our bodies. I will rise with my body (my identity) – you will rise with your body. Even in death it is non-interchangeable.

But how is this imaginable? Another text from Paul explains.

It is in Romans 8, 11, ”Moreover, if the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead dwells within you, then the God who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give new life to your mortal bodies through God’s indwelling Spirit”. This is a key to the understanding of the transformation in the resurrection. The question is: in which way is there something which keeps the living and the power in all loosening and transformation of the dying body? Back to the picture: If the seed would really die in a literal sense then it would not be able to produce a plant or a fruit. But it is able to – it becomes a plant, thus far it gets a new body.

How does this happen? How can we imagine this process of transformation? Paul gives the answer: It is not a part of our body which stays alive and gives new life while the other parts are dying (so it is not a part of the seed). The whole body dies and the whole body stays alive. It is God who gives the mortal body of the human being new life with God’s Spirit, which dwells inside our bodies (Romans 8:11). The Spirit of God is the connection between our mortal body (“animal body”) which will die and our spiritual body which will live forever. With this Spirit inside and outside us, we can overcome the paradox or the dilemma of continuity and discontinuity of our body in death.

What Paul wants to explain is the quality of transformation of our bodies in death. It is the transformation from the mortal animal body into the immortal spiritual body – both are the same and totally different. The connection is the presence of God’s Spirit within us (within our bodies). The spirit of God is the principle of life which survives death. Because it is embodied in our human mortal bodies already now, we are connected with God beyond death. But to get in a final state, there must be a radical change of the old (the mortal body or flesh or the seed or the animal body – whatever you want) to give the space for newness (for the spiritual body or the plant). And nothing is more radical than death.

STELARC – EXTENDING AND ENHANCING THE OBSOLETE BODY A very different form of transformation of the body is postulated by the Australian performance artist STELARC. Transformation of the body in his context means to extend and enhance our obsolete and imperfect bodies. STELARC was born in Limassol (Cyprus) but moved to Australia when he was 18 years old, where he studied Arts and Crafts at Melbourne University. STELARC is interested in the change (or transformation) of natural human body into Cyborg-existence. His work explores the concept of the body with technology through

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human-machine interfaces, using technical help like the Internet and Web, sound, music, video and computers. He always works with his own body as a medium, so in his person he is both artist and artwork.

He has been extending his body through performances since the late 1960s, sometimes with a high risk of getting hurt and with much pain. In one of his last performances he connected his body to electrodes and computers with the Internet. So, from different places people could move STELARC‘s body (his arms, legs, even his head) via the Internet. Before that his performances included attaching a “Third Hand” to his body, which is movable not with mechanical power but through his nerves and brain. Over twenty-five times he made so called “suspension”-events where he hung his entire body from hooks piercing his skin.

What is the philosophy behind this? In an interview he explains his suspension-performance, “in the past, we have considered the skin as surface, as interface. The skin has been a boundary for the soul, for the self. Once technology stretches and pierces the skin, the skin as a barrier is erased.” With his experiments or body-performances he wants to show the psychological and physical limitations of the body, and that we are able to develop strategies for extending and enhancing this limitations through technology. STELARC said, “the important thing for me is to extend the body with cyber-systems and see what it can actually do.” STELARC is convinced that it is necessary to redesign our imperfect and obsolete bodies. Our body is biologically inadequate if we get conscious that we live in a high-technology and multimedia information age. For STELARC, our body is impersonal, an objective structure, which has to be radically changed or redesigned to get space for a really new thinking or for really new philosophies.

As he emphasizes, STELARC does not have a utopian perfect body. But he wants to open a process of changing the body because the body has become profoundly obsolete in the created, intense information environment. He wants to show that we are able to extend our bodies (for example to have three arms instead of two) and that we are able to widen our sensibilities and our perception.

Through STELARC’s work, we reach a second level of existence where the body becomes the object for physical and technical experiments in order to discover its limitations.

When he speaks of the “obsolete body” STELARC means that the body must overcome centuries of prejudices and begin to be considered as an extensible evolutionary structure, enhanced with the most disparate technologies that are more precise, accurate and powerful. So STELARC said, “technology is what defines the meaning of being human, it is part of being human.”

TRANSSEXUALS – EXCHANGING THE WRONG BODY INTO THE RIGHT ONE The final example of body-transformation looks at the bodytransformation of transgender, or more precisely, transsexual people. Again this is a form of transformation of the real body. Transsexual people consider themselves to be of a gender different to the one whose physical characteristics they were born with (or they were assigned with after birth, in the case of children born intersex). I speak here about people who wish and seriously act upon the sense of having the wrong gender-body. There are male-to-female transsexuals (they were born with a male body but consider themselves to be a

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woman) and female-to-male transsexuals. This indicates that it seems to be possible to be or to live in a wrong body, or in the right body but with the wrong sex or gender.

Imagine that the body you have does not fit your gender identity. What would you do? The transformation in this case has the quality of correcting something or coming to what you are. To change their bodies is not a whimsical or crazy idea for transsexuals but an absolutely necessary liberation step to get out of a very painful trap and – most importantly – to become one person in mind and body. But, if transsexuals decide really to change their body physically and to alter their gender, it is very hard and again painful. And of course it is an enormous, radical change.

The operative sex change (Sexual Reassignment Surgery, SRS) is a rough interference in the body. For male-to-female transsexuals, it usually involves amputation of testicles and most of the penis, inversion of the penis skin into a vagina, and optional breast implants. For female-to-male transsexuals it involves mastectomy, hysterectomy and optional attempts at creating a penis and scrotum. Before and after surgery a long hormonal treatment is necessary. The stories of transsexual people (how they change their bodies, which surgery they have done, their degree of pressure before) are very different. But in spite of physical pain, most of them describe the process of transformation into the right body as a way of healing and becoming a full person.

GAINING ANOTHER QUALITY Summarizing thoughts about “transformation”, I refer back to the beginning where I give you the scheme: starting point (“from what”) – process and driving force (“for what”) – end and aim (“into what”). How was it in the three given examples?

Resurrection: The starting point is positive and negative: our good body (creation: “And God saw it was good”) but also sinful body. Paradox: Already died but not finally risen. The

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process: final and most radical transformation with the quality of saving our lives. The end: Nothing negative remained.

Finally a risen body or a spiritual body or full participation in God’s glory.

S TELARC : The starting point is a negative state: our imperfect and obsolete body; the only good thing: the body is a “good material” for changing. The process: Quality of enhancing and extending our bodies with using our brains.

The end: Positive (S TELARC )? “Cyborg-bodies” or “modern bodies” relating to the world today; chance to produce new humankind (new ideas and philosophies).

Transsexuals: The starting point is only negative: a wrong gender-body. The process: exchanging or reassignment of gender with the quality of healing. The end: full personality; identity of body and mind; right gender-feeling.

For all three processes it stays important that through the transformation something gains another quality. The biggest challenge and chance I see in transformation processes is to open space for something really new and to dare to bring yourself into a process of changing. Where are the risks and where should there be limits – we can discuss this further referring to the three given examples.

Suggested Readings: H ÄRLE Wilfried, Dogmatik. Berlin, 1995. 334ff. www.standford.ed/dept/HPS/stelarc/a29-extended_body.html

Katrin ROGGE is 31 years old. After school she lived for a year in Israel (in the Christian kibbuz Nes Ammim). There she decided to study theology, which she did in Heidelberg and Berlin. Her main interests are feminist and liberation theology, Jewish-Christian dialogue and gender issues. Since March 1999 she works for the German SCM (ESG) in the office in Berlin as a theologian. Her subjects are theology, university affairs, gender issues, lesbian and gay people. This essay is adapted from her lecture at the WSCF Europe Gender and Education Conference in Amsterdam, in April 2002.

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James B U X T O N

Shold we Display our Dead?

USED WITH THE PERMISSION OF

BODY WORLDS

Ethical Issues behind the Use of a Human Corpse The Body Worlds exhibition of Prof. Von Hagens and the issues raised by the practice of plastination are emotive issues. These are two e-mails I received.

From a consultant at Guy’s: “I do find the display of plastinated corpses abhorrent and even immoral without being able to rationalise the emotion. I am used to the wax models in the Gordon Museum but to display a cadaver holding his skin like a cloak is obscene in the extreme.”

From a first year physiotherapist: “I just want to say that I went with a nonmedic friend of mine to the Body Worlds exhibition, and how fascinating we both found it. Neither of us felt that it was in any way disrespectful to the dead. It felt almost liberating to be able to see at close quarters how wonderfully made the body is. The dissections are fantastic. Isn’t it high time the body was revealed for all to see, just as more and more of the universe is increasingly visible to us, and now the deepest parts of the ocean? How can people be against this?”

SOME POSITIVE REFLECTIONS ON THE PRACTICE OF PLASTINATION, BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION There were no big shocks for me in the exhibition. I have no expertise in anatomy – or in related disciplines, but I have spent time in the dissecting rooms, and I can well appreciate what others have told me, that these cadavers offer opportunities for study that may well go beyond what is possible in the dissecting room. Mainstream contemporary Christianity supports entirely the need for medical professionals to receive the best possible education for the tasks to which they are called, so we cannot say from a Christian point of view that plastinates should be ruled out as an aid in the education process. After all, skeletons, for example, continue to be essential aids to learning, as they have been for many years.

Beyond this, I personally found some of the ‘plastinates’ to be awe-inspiring and beautiful, such as the configurations of blood vessels. To behold the intricacy and artistry of these makes me reflect on the sublime energies of the God whom I believe to be the creator or sustainer of all things.

It is of course the case that this is nothing new. Anybody who has visited the Gordon museum will have received a similar experience through viewing the many extraordinary

models there. Nevertheless, Body Worlds has enabled the vision of the inner body to be communicated to a far wider public than has previously been possible. World-wide, something like 9 million people have seen the exhibition. The huge interest that the exhibition has engendered shows that people are fascinated to know more about what goes on inside. I cannot see that this ‘democratization’ of anatomy (as it has been called) is in itself is wrong, though I know that professionals may argue that just peering does not help one to understand much.

To continue positively, ours is a society in which death and the fact of our natural impermanence has been pushed further and further out of our consciousness. As a society we are loosing sense of what might be a natural life-span, or what might constitute a ‘good’ death, as new technologies make possible the staving off of death for longer and longer. In general we experience death far less often and far less intensely than our forebears did, and as do those in many other parts of the world today. It could be argued that the exhibition may contribute to helping us all to recover not only a more realistic sense both of the wonder of our inner workings, and the limitations of our mortal lives.

CONSENT: BODY WORLDS – THE TIP OF A PLASTINATION ICE-BERG The first among the problems is the issue of consent. If we are going to discuss the display of the dead, I believe we do need to ask if those so displayed had the chance to offer themselves for this. I was present at the press launch of the exhibition, at which Prof. V ON H AGENS , anatomist, and inventor of plastination, was present, along with his team of commentators and apologists.

What struck me very forcefully on that occasion, sitting, appropriately perhaps, next to a journalist from ‘Bizarre Magazine’, that though the panel at the press launch spoke a lot about the ethics of displaying the dead, and gave out about how shocked they were at the difficulties they had in obtaining permission to bring the exhibition of plastinates to this country, the issue of consent was not raised at all until I had a chance to get on the microphone. The question of whether permission has been obtained by the donors for their use in this way is a very important one, and one which we, as those who are involved in medical education and research, are very aware.

I am sure that the Central Office of Anatomy (UK body which regulates use of cadavers for medical and educational research), which was asked to give an opinion on whether this exhibition should go ahead, were punctilious in ensuring that informed consent was gained for the individual cadavers currently being displayed in London. But my concerns is that this exhibition is the tip of the ice-burg in terms of plastination. Prof. V ON H AGENS has extensive operations in China and in Russia, both places which have very different standards with regard to consent than we have here.

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Unclaimed bodies from the mortuaries and prisons of these countries are being used and I very much doubt whether consent as we understand it has been given for these donations. Certainly, V ON H AGENS himself has been content in a non-consensual environment.

THE ETHICS OF CONSENT – A DEVELOPING AREA It seems to me that consent is an area of ethics that has developed considerably in recent years, spurred on by cases such as the saga at Alder Hay Hospital, and the widespread use of organs which were taken, apparently without informed consent. If I am right that bodies are being used without permission within V ON H AGENS ’ global operation, then I am afraid that involvement with the Body Worlds exhibition is a form of collusion with the exploitation of people who have died, and their families and friends.

EDUCATION OR ENTERTAINMENT? Secondly, there are issues on the boundary between education and entertainment. You may feel that the intention of Professor V ON H AGEN is a side issue in this discussion, but I must say that I believe it to be significant. After I had seen the exhibition, I saw as many others may have done, the Channel 4 programme. During this V ON H AGENS is shown darting around the exhibition in the dark, illuminating the flayed and dissected faces of some of the more dramatic cadavers with a torch, while something like a horror-movie sound track thumped in the background. I have recently been do the London Dungeon, around the corner, with three of my nephews, and the professor’s antics evoked more the atmosphere of that kind of horror-fantasy land than that of an educational exhibition. Was this for his gratification or for ours?

It is a direct encouragement of voyeuristic and ghoulish interest in the whole project. Actually it shocked me that he was prepared to flaunt these dead persons in this way. I did not feel at all that those I witnessed looking at the exhibition were doing so out of morbid curiosity or any kind of freak show mentality. So there is a big question mark for me over the subject of whether it is education or entertainment. It puts into question, to say the least, the issues I mentioned earlier about acquainting ourselves more realistically with the consideration of our own mortality.

OBJECTIFICATION – PORNOGRAPHY AND THE DEAD Thirdly, I want to talk about the issue of ‘objectification’.

Somebody said in a Terry P RATCHETT novel that ‘sin is treating people like objects’. Not a bad definition. Christianity is frequently thought of, wrongly in my view, as making a stark distinction between the soul and the body. In this way of thinking, the body is simply the earthly vessel of the eternal soul. There may well be plenty of Christians who take this dualistic view. But I believe that Christianity, undergirded by the highly body affirming doctrines of incarnation and resurrection, understands very well that individuals are psychosomatic; that it is not so easy to tease out what makes a person a person; therefore it is very important that we do not treat the body as an object in isolation from the person, even in death.

We may introduce a slightly risky analogy here. A central problem with pornography is the way that the bodies of those who participate, even when they are consenting, are

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treated simply as objects, and viewed as such. There is a separation of the body from the person. Once you remove the notion of personhood from the bodies of people, you can then do what you like with them – and there lies much of the tragedy of human history. A dead person is still a person, bearing the signature of human life. So, I believe that the display of the dead currently going on in Brick Lane invites just such an objectification of persons, even though they are dead.

CONTEXT IS ALL The context of ‘display’ really is crucial. Take the kind of carefully regulated ‘display’ that we encounter in the dissecting room. Of course a degree of objectification takes place here. It must do. But it takes place in a communal and carefully guarded context. Donated bodies are treated with dignity (charged and difficult word, but I think it is right); and the integrity of each dead person is as far as possible preserved. I have been impressed by the care that is taken in preparing students for the task of dissection. The teachers of anatomy encourage students to value the gift of these bodies so that they may learn the ways and the wonders of the body in the best possible way.

Thus the whole process is framed legally, ethically and spiritually, with all those involved in the process taken into account: Students, teachers, support staff, relatives and friends of the deceased. Even the opportunity of thanksgiving is given, in the annual service at Southwark Cathedral, where everyone is able to gather in a spiritual setting to give thanks for the privilege of working with donated bodies. In my view this is all absolutely as it should be: the use of the dead in this case being carefully framed so that nobody, living or dead, is exploited.

TO SUM UP I can see various reasons why the display of the dead which we are encountering afresh in our society, holds a number of advantages. You only have to listen to some of those who have been to the exhibition to know that there is an opportunity for learning and for wonder in the contemplation of these bodies.

However, I do remain deeply concerned about the issue of consent. Body Worlds is part of a huge world-wide operation, much of which takes place with no regard to the wishes of those whose bodies are used, and without reference to people who were close to them. And then there are questions on the border-line between education or entertainment, and finally the risk of exploitation that takes place when we objectify the dead.

The Revd James B UXTON is one of the Chaplaincy of King’s College London, with responsibility for the Guy’s King’s and St Thomas’ Schools of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Science. He is also Succentor of Southwark Cathedral. He was ordained Priest in 1998, and prior to theological training, he ran an ecumenical project (sponsored by local churches) for refugees and migrants in Istanbul. He was born in Cambridge in 1964.

The original of this essay was a talk given in June 2002 at a joint meeting between the GKT Gazette, Medical Ethics Group and Chaplaincy by GKT Chaplain The Revd James B UXTON . To find out more about The GKT Medical Ethics Group, the site is www.medethics.co.uk The Body Worlds website is www.bodyworlds.co.uk

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Peter C I A C C I O

The Evidence of Bodies “People call me Agrádo, because, for all my life, I always tried to make life agreeable to others. Apart from agreeable, I am very authentic. Look at my body, all made by measure. Almond-eyes: 80,000 [pesetas: approximately 480Ä]; nose: 200,000; tits, two, for I’m not a monster, 70,000 each. There’s silicon in my lips, forehead, cheek-bones, hips and bottom: a litre costs around 100,000, so you may draw up the accounts; filing of the mandible: 75,000; definitive laser-depilation, ‘cause women descend from monkeys just as men do: 60,000 per session – it depends how much beard one has, normally one to four sessions, but, obviously, there is a further need if one dances flamenco. What I mean is that it is expensive to be authentic, and you should not be tight because the more you resemble the idea you dreamed of yourself, the more authentic you are.”

This monologue comes from an important supporting character of A LMODÓVAR ’s All about my Mother (A LMODÓVAR Pedro, Todo Sobre Mi Madre.

Starring Cecilia ROTH, Marisa P E R E D E S , Penélope C RUZ , Candela P EÑA , Spain, 1999.). Agrádo is a borderline character. She enters the movie while defending herself against a violent customer who assaults her while she is prostituting herself.

She has undergone various operations in order to transform her body into a woman’s one, but she still keeps her male genitals, because “men like it like this”. She acts as a comedian, but she is also able to play a dramatic role in Tennessee W ILLIAMS ’ Streetcar Named Desire. She is very provocative, but also sweet and reasonable. A LMODÓVAR invented her character in order to be able to tell a difficult story with tough issues, because Agrádo makes the story “agreeable” (in Spanish, agráda).

It is not by chance that the great Spanish filmmaker chose a transgender to be the “narrative glue” of the story.

The entire movie is full of references, provocation and presentations of different aspects of the body. For this

reason, a transgender role is the main ring of the narrative chain.

A MOTHER’S PHYSICAL RESEARCH IN MEMORY The main character of the movie is Manuela, the young mother of Esteban. She co-ordinates an organ transplantation centre, while her son dreams to become a great playwright like Tennessee W ILLIAMS or Truman C APOTE . On his 17th birthday, they go to the theatre to watch W ILLIAMS ’ Streetcar, with a great actress, Huma Rojo, starring as Blanche. After the show, Esteban tells his mother that the most yearned gift he expects is to be told about his father, whom he never met and never was told about. Manuela promises to tell him the truth about his father when they get home. Suddenly Esteban is killed by a car while he is running behind Huma for an autograph. Now, Manuela is alone and empty and, after Esteban’s organs are transplanted, she does not feel at ease anymore with her job and leaves it. She

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reads Esteban’s diary and discovers that he felt half human knowing nothing about his father.

The missing father is represented by a photograph torn vertically, with the right side missing and a younger Manuela on the left side. The missing father is a physical loss, not spiritual. It is a missing body. One of the reasons Manuela does not tell Esteban about his father is in that missing body. The truth on his father is also the truth on his mother.

In fact, at the beginning of the movie, Esteban writes in his diary the words Todo sobre mi madre as a title for the next story he wanted to write. This may be the reason why Manuela leaves Madrid and goes back to Barcelona, where his son was conceived in a situation she had been escaping from. In this journey through memory, she is also searching for herself.

Manuela suffers a physical loss. She misses the presence of her son and she misses herself. She tries to fill this loss by searching for the people who were part of her life in Barcelona. In particular, she looks for Esteban’s father, himself called Esteban, who ignores the fact that he ever had a son. Esteban is a transgender person, best known as Lola. This is the secret not to be told to their son. Agrádo helps Manuela search for Lola, who has apparently disappeared.

HOW TO TALK ABOUT THE BODY For ALMODÓVAR, the body is so important to look at as a recurrent issue. In some of his movies, this may degenerate into an obsession.

Instead, in All about my Mother, there is a kind of balance in the story for what concerns the body, perhaps because in this movie there is an overview of many bodies. The film is like a XVth century fresco, like a panorama. We may say this is symbolised by the view from the Tibidabo sanctuary, shown to symbolise Manuela’s return to Barcelona.

Tibi dabo (Latin for “I will give you”) recalls Satan’s second temptation to Jesus, showing all the kingdoms of the world and saying “If you worship me, I will give you this” (Luke 3:5-8). This means that the whole city of Barcelona, which can be seen by the Tibidabo, represent the entire world. In other words, it represents the whole of humankind—every-body.

ALMODÓVAR presents the issue of the body in this movie like this: one cannot talk of the body in an ideal way, so one must describe the different bodies, like a city from a mountain, like Barcelona from Tibidabo. When one watches

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Glance of an Artist a panorama, one knows it remains a partial view, because there are places that remain invisible, hidden by buildings, and there are things that are worth a closer look. Likewise, ALMODÓVAR, through the eyes of Manuela, goes in the heart of the city, to search for different kinds of people, for different kinds of bodies.

What we discover, thanks to Manuela’s journey through her own story, is a plural humankind: the loving body of a young nun who believes that Christian compassion means giving herself wholly to the needy ones; the disabled body of an old man who lost his capacity to interact with others; the destroyed body of a drug-addicted actress who breaks the heart of her lover; the insensitive body of an upper class mother who is blind to what happens to her daughter; the unreliable body of an old actress who is afraid of her body getting older; two dying bodies of two people ill with HIV-AIDS. NARRATIVE REINCARNATION When Manuela’s story is written, when the missing parts of the drama Esteban wanted to write about his mother are told, the movie finishes with a sort of “narrative reincarnation”.

Manuela goes back to Madrid with a new born child, just as seventeen years before. This child is called Esteban and is Lola’s son.

Thus, another aspect of the body is told by ALMODÓVAR: one body substituting another.

ALMODÓVAR talks about these bodies in a descriptive way. Even if some characters speak very badly of others, the spectator should not judge the people in the story. This is resumed in the character of Lola. When Manuela talks about him she says, “he took the worst from a man and the worst from a woman”. In this way, the spectator is carried to hate this character, intil Lola shows up with his own body, his pain, his tears, his joy, his humanity. Then, it is no longer possible to hate him.

The characters of ALMODÓVAR’s movie are real, they are physical.

The only ideal aspect is what they dream of themselves. The main message, which sounds even Platonic, seems to rely in Agrádo’s statement, “the more you resemble the idea you dreamed of yourself, the more authentic you are”.

Peter CIACCIO was born in Belfast in 1975. He is a Methodist student at the Waldensian Faculty of Theology in Rome. He is a member of FGEI, the Italian SCM, he is also one of the founders of the “Protestant Association for Cinema Roberto SBAFFI”, a member of Interfilm. Currently, he serves in WSCF Europe as vice-chairperson.