Mary Grey Must We Live Without Our Dreams?

Mary Grey Must We Live without our Dreams? Believing in a Future from within the Ashes of the Second Millennium 1. Introduction The title of our Conference – At the end of Liberation – Liberation at the end? – presented me immediately with my title. For, dreaming and envisioning an alternative world has been an integral part of Feminist Theology as I have known it since the immense surge of energy following its arising – womenspirit rising – in the late nineteen-sixties.1 And what a challenge I have been presented with in dealing with the rich mix of ideas and theories of this conference. Feminist Theology – at least as most us began to encounter its challenges – was born of this optimism. As we began to understand the struggles of our fore- mothers of past centuries the utopianism, the conviction that the forgotten and excluded contributions of women would fashion a better and transformed world has fuelled our energies and our hopes. Yet, as my colleagues have been telling us in the last few days, despite nearly forty years of analysis, of struggle in academy, faith community and in our own networks, the new heaven and earth continue to elude us. If world poverty is our gauge, then statistics indicate worsening poverty, with women’s well-being firmly at the bottom of the scale. If equality of leadership and authority in the churches is our yardstick, while there is considerable progress in some churches, and some faith communities, the Catholic Church is in the midst of a seemingly unshakeable, intransigent opposition to women’s leadership as the recent international conference over the ordination of women in Dublin, Ireland, has shown.2 While there is much 1 Womenspirit Rising is the title of the reader edited by Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow (Harper and Row: San Francisco 1978). It remains an important resource to this day. 2 The Vatican prevented the ecumenical speaker Aruna Gnanadason of the WCC from presenting a paper, on the grounds that this would be seen as interference in the internal affairs of other churches. Both the main speaker, Sister Joan Chittester, and Sister Myra Poole were threatened with expulsion from their respective congregations should they take part in the conference. 111 Thema Subject Sujet progress to be celebrated in terms of access to education, to government posts and to many professions in some countries, progress is far from even and in some countries women’s situation has regressed. But does this mean the death of dreams? Here are two examples of the fragility of women’s contexts: in 1990, at the European Ecumenical Forum for Christian Women’s Conference in York a group of women from the former East Germany surprised many of us participants by performing a mime for the Assembly. We had imagined them euphoric at the fall of communism and alleged liberation of the country. Instead of this, we watched them walking in a circle, symbolising the loss of dreams. Now they were once more in the wilderness like the children of Israel. But one key difference – without a vision of the Promised Land. The socialist dream was dead – only the alluring and inescapable embrace of advanced western capitalism beckoned. Ten years later, at a gathering at the Boldern Academy on the mountains out- side Zurich, Switzerland, the consequences of not only political change but the war in the former Jugoslavia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and consequent re-map- ping of the Balkan countries emerged clearly, as groups of young women tes- tified as to what this loss of dreaming meant for them.3 A young woman from the Ukraine laughed at me. “You ask about dreaming?” she scoffed: “Mere survival is all that we can even dare to work for.” Deepening spirals of poverty, complete vanishing of hope and lives defined by the struggle to survive from day to day – all this sums up what they were saying. But, as my colleagues have suggested, the sense that we have lost our way has come also from within the academic world itself. As feminist theologians we cite feminist theorists, but it is mostly a one-way traffic. As the British feminist theologian Tina Beattie put it recently, in her article “Global Sister- hood or Wicked Stepsisters: Why Don’t Girls with God-Mothers Get Invited to the Ball?”4 She criticises secular feminists for their “patriarchal blind spot“ in not acknowledging the significance of Christianity (and the role of faith itself) in many women’s lives. This point was made also by Elina Vuola in her But, as Joan Chittester courageously said: “We will not let a little letter from Rome prevent us from coming and speaking!” (Martin Browne, “Women Raise their voices,” in The Tablet, 7 July 2001, 1001). 3 Summer Academy, Boldern, Switzerland 1999: The Conference theme was: “A Cow for Martha – A Computer for Hilary: Women’s Visions of Economics and Spirituality.” 4 Tina Beattie, “Global sisterhood or Wicked Stepsisters: Why Don’t Girls with God-Mothers Get Invited to the Ball?” in: Deborah F. Sawyer and Diane M. Collier (eds), Is there a Future for Feminist Theology? (Sheffield Academic Press: Sheffield 1999), 115-125. 112 Mary Grey Must We Live without our Dreams? lecture as part of this Conference.5 But feminist theologians too are at fault for not acknowledging just how effectively the secular sisterhood silences women’s theological voices: It is as if [writes Tina Beattie] Cinderella is pretending that of course she has been invited to the ball, and steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that she has been con- fined to the entrance hall while the ugly sisters are having a ball without her in the banqueting halls of the ivory tower.6 To enter the world of so-called mainstream theology, and male-dominated institutions, then, is to confront the painful absences of our work from recent key works of prominent male theologians (again with some notable exceptions). We are frequently criticised for remaining in a backwater and for not engaging more with the key theologians and theological movements of the day. David Ford, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, in a recent survey of British Theology, includes Feminist Theology as one of the “network theologies”, which implies that this is the key identifying feature of what we are about.7 Professor Ursula King (a former President of this Society, and personal friend and colleague of many of us here), wrote in the same collection of essays cited above of the need for feminist theologians to get out of their own isolation – whether institutionally imposed or intellectually adopted – and develop a more fully dialogical approach not only among themselves in different parts of the world or with women of many different faith traditions, but also from reflecting on their own expe- riences of solidarity and sisterhood on some of the burning questions of our time.8 I could continue in this vein. Has Feminist Theology become another ortho- doxy with its own inflexible canons? Have what were originally meant as sharp critical positions with regard to the traditions now become obstacles to further development? Is Feminist Theology so tainted with European colonial superiority, with layers of racist myopia and false assumptions that it has lost 5 For the work of Elina Vuola, see her Limits of Liberation: Praxis as Method in Latin American Liberation Theology and Feminist Theology (Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia: Helsinki 1997; repr. Sheffield Academic Press: Sheffield 2001. 6 Beattie, “Global Sisterhood,” 116. 7 David Ford, in a series of articles in Church Times (UK), 4 May–8 June, 2001. The issue refer- ring to Feminist Theology is 1 June, 14-15. 8 Ursula King, “Feminist Theologies in Contemporary Contexts: A Provisional Assessment,” in: Sawyer / Collier (eds), Is there a Future for Feminist Theology? 100-114. 113 Thema Subject Sujet all credibility? Have we – as another collection of essays, admittedly conserv- ative in character, accuses – so completely lost touch with the transcendent, the Holy, that we do not deserve the word theology?9 Or even the word “feminist”? Small wonder that, as my title suggests, that it could seem that we have lost our way – the plot, the dream, the transforming vision – and that we now seek a way to arise from the ashes of this confusion. 2. ESWTR: Focus on Context One of the strengths of Feminist Theology/Women’s Studies Theology has always been to take context seriously: the political, social, economic, ecolog- ical and cultural scene is not just the backdrop to our theology but has furnished a dialogical method. Over the last thirty years the tool “women’s experience” has never been understood merely as limited to the world of the individual, but increasingly related to her culture, race, sexuality, historical background and economic position. Whatever the limitations, the criticisms and sense of fail- ure with which we are confronted, since the founding of this society in Magliaso, Switzerland, 1986, this has been an unswerving commitment. In the first Jahrbuch of the Society in 1993 Catherine Halkes charted the long struggle that led to its founding.10 It is important to recall what we owe to the efforts of the founding members and to the support given from various institutions for the birth of the society. Since its founding, although the focus of the Society has been on the position of women in theology in the academy – however widely and loosely this has been defined – and the need to address the specific exclusionary policies, the economic or racial barriers keeping women out, there has always been a genuine attempt to enter into a dialogue with women’s life-situations in a global context.

Load more