AS A MOTHER TENDERLY Exploring parish ministry through the metaphor and analogy of mothering REVEREND EMMA PERCY MA Cantab BA Dunelm Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2012 As a mother tenderly: using mothering as a metaphor and analogy for parish ministry. The thesis sets out to use maternal imagery as a way of articulating the practice of parish ministry in the Church of England. The aim is to find a language which can affirm and encourage many aspects of good practice that are in danger of being over looked because they are neither well articulated nor valued. The ministry of a parish priest is a relational activity: characterised by care. It is because the priest has a responsibility to care for those entrusted to her that she engages in priestly activity. In doing so she is sharing in the collective ministry of the church in which she has a pivotal and public role. The church is to be a community in which people grow up in Christ and come to maturity of faith. In order to explore the relational activity of a parish priest the imagery of mothering is used. The changing place of women in society has made it more difficult to use gendered images and thus it is necessary to discuss whether mothering is an essentially female activity. After acknowledging the complexity of the gendered language and the reality that most women arrive at mothering through a specifically female bodily experience, the thesis goes on to state that the practice of mothering is not instinctual but learnt. It involves learning through a relationship with a particular child and what is learnt are human ways of being and doing which are not gender specific. As the child is a growing developing human being the relationship and activity needs to be adaptable and contingent, requiring concrete thinking. Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking offers a philosophical understanding of mothering as a practice shaped by three demands which are all good and often conflict. Using her understanding of mothering and drawing on Hanah Arendt’s categories of human activity the thesis explores the practice of mothering. The thesis then uses this understanding of mothering as a way of reflecting on the practice of parish ministry. As a relational activity parish ministry needs to value particularity and concrete contingent responsiveness. Intersubjective relationships need to be maintained and the virtues cultivated that guard against the temptations to intrusive or domineering styles of care on the one hand or passive abnegation of responsibility on the other. Parish ministry cannot be understood in terms of tangible productivity so different ways of understanding success and evaluating priorities need to be articulated. The thesis suggests ways of thinking about and describing aspects of parish ministry that highlight the kinds of practices that enable people to flourish. The use of maternal imagery is not intended to suggest that women have a better access to these ways of being and doing, nor that congregations are like children. Mothering at its best seeks to create the relationships and spaces in which people grow up and flourish. Times of dependency are part of that but maturity and reciprocal relationships of interdependence is the goal. 2 CONTENTS Introduction Metaphorical language and ministerial practice 4 Chapter One Theology of parish ministry in the Church of England 18 Chapter Two Maternal imagery for clergy in the Christian tradition 53 Chapter Three Mothering – gender and culture 71 Chapter Four Mothering – a relationship of care 104 Chapter Five Using a maternal analogy to explore parish ministry 150 Chapter Six The limitations of a maternal model 194 Chapter Seven Using maternal language to articulate aspects of 221 parish ministry – some examples Conclusion 254 3 Introduction: Metaphorical language and ministerial practice The phrase ‘as a mother tenderly’ has become familiar to many in the Church of England as a metaphor about the love of God. It appears in Eucharistic prayer G in Common Worship. 1 It alludes to Isaiah’s description of God comforting like a mother2 and Jesus’ description of himself as a hen gathering her chicks.3 In this thesis I am choosing to use this metaphor not to explore the love of God but to think about the role of a parish priest. The purpose is to offer a different perspective for exploring the role of a priest, and in particular a perspective based on the centrality of relationship and care. The thesis provides an extended and intentional conversation between a way of understanding mothering and the work of a parish priest. It is not an empirical study, nor a study of how mothers function as parish priests. It does, however, draw on my own experiences of being a mother and a parish priest – experiences out of which the original thinking and exploration began. In Maternal Thinking, a philosophical reflection on mothering that I will return to in Chapter Four, Sara Ruddick reflects on her own process of writing about mothering. She begins by admitting that at one level she has ‘made it up’;4that is, she has not conducted an empirical study of thinking mothers. However, she is grateful to accept the observation of another scholar who defined her approach anthropologically and called Ruddick ‘a participant- observer of mothering’. She describes how she draws on both her own experiences and wider observation: As an ‘anthropologist’ I begin by remembering as honestly and as deeply as I can my own experience as a mother and daughter and that of my closest friends. I then extend my memory as responsibly as I am able, by reading, by eavesdropping, by looking at films, and most of all by mother-watching.5 1 Common Worship, London: Church House Publishing, 2000. 2 Isaiah 66:13, RSV. 3 Matthew 23:37, RSV. 4 Ruddick, Sara, Maternal Thinking, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, pp. 61–64. 5 Ibid., p. 62. 4 She notes the different writers and friends who have shaped her thinking. In this thesis I am working in a similar way and write as a participant-observer of mothering and of ministry. Like Ruddick, alongside the many books and articles credited in the bibliography I have mined my personal experiences of being a mother and a daughter, of being a member of a congregation and a parish priest. I have also reflected on the experiences of friends who are mothers or priests or both and engaged in plenty of mother-watching and priest-watching. This thesis is, therefore, an extended essay in which I draw out aspects of ministry that are in danger of being eclipsed by the prevailing language. It is a way of recovering and articulating the priority of relationship and care in parish ministry and locating the priest’s role in the mutual relationships that should be inherent in a parish community. It is not surprising that the fears associated with decline in status and numbers leads to a desire within the Church of England to formulate programmes of growth, but there is a danger that such programmes fail to understand the nature of human growth or the reality of the local church as a community of unique people. One strength of a maternal metaphor is that it highlights the reality that parish ministry involves a relationship and an activity that are inextricably linked. Too many discussions of ministry focus either on the relationship: What does it mean to be a priest? or the activity: What are the tasks of a priest? A parish priest has accepted the responsibility of a community or communities entrusted to him or her by the bishop. Because she has this responsibility, she needs to learn what it means to both know and care for them as a priest. I suggest that looking at the way mothers engage in their responsibility to relate and care for their children can help to articulate this practice. Inevitably, this thesis touches on issues of gender and I will return to them in a later chapter. However, one of the issues in writing is the need to use a gendered pronoun. I have adopted the convention of referring to a priest as female. This is a feminist piece of writing in the sense that it prioritises what can be learned from a way of being that has specifically female components and traditional female resonances, and in that it draws on the work of many feminist writers who critique assumptions about language, child development and the prioritising of abstract ways of reasoning over concrete practice. Yet it 5 is not written specifically for women. I have presumed that men and women can learn from female imagery. Therefore, when I talk about a parish priest I am assuming that the priest may be female or male. In the thesis I usually refer to a child as he, but clearly the child could be male or female. Metaphorical language This thesis is about how the language used shapes both the practice of ministry and the way it is valued. To speak of a priest being like a mother is to use a figure of speech. It is clearly not to say that a priest should be a mother or suggest that a priest should give birth to or feed children out of her own body. Nor, as I will explore more fully in the thesis, is it to say that women have a particular ability to be priests or that congregations need to be treated like children. It is to open up a way of looking at what mothers are like and how that might suggest ways of being priests.