Learning from Other Lives
In the examples above I have explored how life writing can take theological reflection in differing ways. Both McFague and Wolfteich are creative and committed Christian theologians whose political and spiritual concerns resonate with the vision that this journal has boldly championed for many years. However, McFague is using life writing to enrich and support theological thinking that whilst certainly progressive is deeply established within the social teaching and spiritual traditions of the Church. To do so she attempts to smooth out the lives she narrates. There is no attempt to disguise the conflicts and personal suffering experienced as part of the spiritual journey. However, as her intention is moral pedagogy her exemplars are made to display a growing coherence and certainty in their vocations. The melody moves steadfastly towards resolution by employing the familiar tropes of the Augustinian quest.
In contrast Wolfteich is fully aware of the unstable resource that life writing represents and for her this quality represents its most lively theological contribution. The material obstinacy of human life defies confinement within closed theological systems and the genius of life writing is that it prompts us to revisitreceived assumptions and encounter new, and sometimes disruptive, theological insights.
Clearly these contrasting approaches illustrate the differing ways of positioning theopoetics that I outlined at the beginning of this article; it can be used either to enrich and support or to critically challenge theology. It is probably apparent that my own passion and energies are most usually devoted to the second task. I see my theological calling as being to ferment (and drink!) new wine. There are theologians enough patchingup the wineskins.Indeed I would like us to become even more radical in the kind of lives we consider as spiritual resources and the manner we engage with life writing.
In his recent book Divine Generosity and Human Creativity (2017) the celebrated British theologian of the imagination, David Brown, argues that theology needs to reach beyond the witness of ‘holy lives’ if it is to be attuned to the disturbing revelatory power of God. He takes as an example the work of the artist Francis Bacon, a none-believing gay man whose personal relationships were conflicted and frequently abusive. He describes two significant creations in particular. Bacon’s ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ is a work of artistic imagination that draws upon Bacon’s own turmoils to portray the agony and suffering of that scene in a manner that far exceeds the reach of most religious art. However, another set of three images which show the suicide of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer, in the bathroom of a Parisian Hotel touches the deepest levels of loss and tenderness. Brown writes that Bacon’s desperate efforts to express what he knows of love calls our attention to the fact that even in flawed or promiscuous relationships people still embody in their imperfections something of its divine qualities. Indeed, when loving is undertaken at great personal cost beyond safe boundaries its radiance can be particularly startling.
This essay in no way seeks to minimise the many theological dilemmas we encounter in engaging with those challenging issues of embodiment and desire which have been the focus of so much debate in the last half century. The Church continues to struggle with the ethical challenges of the way we live now. However, whatever our ethical convictions, there is no doubt that the life writing that emerges from contexts of intense suffering and desire does provoke us to new insights into the groaning of creation in travail and the travail of our Creator in this process.
In my own work on motherhood I have gained so much from reading of lives on the boundaries; of experiences marginalised and occluded in mainstream discourse. For example in Julia Leigh’s recent book on her IVF journey, Avalanche (2016). I found descriptions of the longing of a woman for a child that are unparalleled in Christian literature and which inspire heartfelt theological reflection. I was also deeply moved and challenged by the books ending:
What I try to hold onto – now that the treatment has failed – is a commitment to love widely and intensely. Tenderly. In ways I would not have previously expected. I to You; I to We; I to This. To unshackled my love from the great love I wanted to give my own child. (2012, Kindle: 1125).
Similarly, Sonja Boon’s evocative essay ‘Autobiography by Numbers: or, Embodying Maternal Grief’ (2012) tells of how she developed irrevocable health problems as the result of pregnancy.She cannot now ever disassociate grieving from her experience of giving birth – yet finds this ambivalence almost impossible to voice:
This body speaks… My body is restless. Rooting. Wandering. Searching. Buried in my flesh, a clinging desperation. A haunted body that seeks an audience. That wants to speak. A story that resists its telling even as it yearns for an audience. (2012: 197)
Once again I am moved by the grace contained in this painful narrative of maternal anger and woundedness. Boon somehow discovers, amidst her grief, courage that can still declare, ‘My grief, an open wound. My wound, the site of possibility, potential, wonder’ (2012: 195).
I am finishing this article at my kitchen table – of course. As I come towards a conclusion I find myself challenged by the work of x and Boon to be more self reflexive concerning the distinctions I have made between a theopoetics of life writing that supports the theological enterprise and one which challenges and critiques it. If I am honest the distinction cannot really hold. Even the theologian committed to present faithful lives as pedagogical examples get’s caught up in the quirky, creative individuality they encounter – the wild qualities that make them holy. And, as I have argued,those narratives that appear to deny coherence, that are deeply attentive to pain and desire and even those that appear far removed from any Christian pattern, are often also attuned to wonder; to glory; and to a fragile beauty at the heart of things. There is refreshment and renewal to be found within them that will sustain theological thinking even as it engages more fully with the way we live now. I should have been more truthful and less polemical. I know well, in my heart and in my life, that in our faithful creativity we can be both barren and blessed.