Or at least it is when it has a sexy accent.
“Poor people are not asexual, and issues of sexuality are also important for their lives, so I always wanted to find God in the corners, in the gaps of their life and struggle.” (Marcella Althaus-Reid, interviewed by Linda Clark).
It’s not often anyone so radical comes to speak here, let alone in a church. Some people seem to think that the most radical statement they can make about God is to say that God does not exist. But in fact it is far more radical, more challenging, more dangerous, to say that God is queer, that God is a tranny, that God is sexual.
Marcella: The status quo is an ideology, it is an normalisation process, and I claim that you cannot find god in a normalisation process, after all, Jesus Christ come from some abnormality, in people’s every day life. You don’t have a God being born every day, do you?!
Linda Clark: So what, has the church somehow perverted that?
Marcella: The church has not perverted it, because pervert for me is a very positive concept. Perversion, in reality, as the way that I use it theologically, it comes from a Latin root that means to take another road, to take a different turn, not an expected one. So I wanted a per-version in theology, which means another version. A perversion of finding God, another way to find God, which is not strange for us in Liberation Theology. This is what we have been striving for years, to find a God that is Latin American, among our people, among our experiences. What theology had done, and the church had done, is to normalise and domesticate God. In that way, that God is just a reflection of our ideologies and the way that we think and we understand normality. My understanding is that God exceeds all the categories. This is a little bit of what queering God will mean.
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Why say “God does not exist” without questioning the definition of God? How can you say something doesn’t exist if you don’t know what it is?
I do not believe in a God who is up in the sky, looking down on us. I do not believe in a God who is male, let alone a man with a long white beard.
But I do believe in God.
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Contrary to popular belief, I have actually read the bible. Interesting fact: the bible was written by people. Ordinary, fallible people. Who lived a long time ago, in a particular part of the world.
I’ll leave it to others to point out the contradictions in the bible, the metaphors, the passages that were written with a specific time and place and people in mind, the way that the culture and preconceptions of the authors have influenced their interpretation of God’s wisdom. The way that meanings have been subtly altered in translation. I’m bored with all that.
What bothers me is not the way that people cling to bible verses taken literally, and out of context, but the way that they ignore the countless other ways that God communicates with humanity.
I really struggle with the idea that the writers of the bible were the only people in the world, the only people in history, who were handed God-given wisdom about how we should live our lives. Didn’t God stir in the lives of people in Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Pacific? Didn’t anyone anywhere else, in any other period of history, experience dreams, visions, prophecies of God?
The bible does contain a lot of valuable wisdom. But wisdom for life can also be found within the teachings of other faiths. In the words of other teachers. Buddha and Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Te Whiti o Rongomai. It can be found in the poems of children, and in graffiti sprayed on the walls of cities, notes scribbled on napkins, words stitched into cloth, or scratched in clay. Works of art, drama, music, contemporary and ancient, these can all teach us about God. A droplet of rain at the tip of a branch of rimu, a passionate kiss, the song of birds, a letter to someone in prison, the badges worn by a punk teenager, a debate in the comments section of a weblog.
If God is truly omnipresent, then how can we possibly hope to study God if we limit ourselves to the pages of a single collection of texts? And so it is refreshing to hear Marcella speaking of the God of graffitied walls in the poorer streets of Buenos Aires.
If you haven’t caught Marcella yet, you have two more chances in Wellington: Tuesday 9 and Thursday 11, 12:15pm at St Andrew’s on the Terrace. Then she’s off to Christchurch, Hamilton and Auckland.
Posted by Fionnaigh at August 4, 2005 12:59 AM | TrackBackI totally agree with you about the value of offering variant readings: there are really only a set of variant readings. I've come to acknowledge that I just can't be a card-carrying Buddhist because I don't agree with everything written in the dharma. At first there was a sense of loss: you lose a church or a sangha. But now I see myself as just working through variant readings. I'm not a Christian either but I'm not not a Christian: I was born in a Christian culture and just as some of my family are Hindus, born to Hindu culture, so I see myself as having a sort of 'legacy' relationship to Christianity and I refuse to let the whole tradition be manipulated by or hijacked by fanatics. Yes, I probably remain confused. I too read the Bible from time to time--it's fantastic literature.
Posted by: arcite at August 9, 2005 11:34 AMPeople have been questioning the reality of the bible and the way it was written for years, in fact for centeries, it's interesting the questions and thought processes that have been put forward are the same time and time again, whilst the wording may change the actual workings do not. Just as the bible can be reworded time and time again, but the workings do not change. The basic points are - One God, creates earth, is disappointed in humans, fixes problem. End of story.