Abstract
This article argues for the use of the queer kenotic theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid as a theological framework for analysing two stories of ambivalence and risk emerging from an ecclesial practice committed to hospitality. Following Natalie Wigg-Stevenson in envisioning theology not as proclamation but as conversation, the article is an example of what theology can look like when ethnographic material is juxtaposed with systematic theology. The empirical material is created using ethnography as a research strategy in the ecclesial practice of the Lutheran church of Our Lady, Trondheim, Norway. In 2007, this church reopened as an ‘open church’ for people who live with different kinds of marginalization. As the sacred medieval space encounters the messy and chaotic lives of people, a powerful displacement of space, practices and bodies occur. The article concludes by discussing how the empirical material feeds back to kenotic theology and queer theology.
Introduction
Through her scholarly brilliance, creative imagination and sharp pen, Marcella Althaus-Reid revitalizes feminist and queer theology. In this article, I argue that her queer interpretation of the theology of kenosis not only serves as an indecent systematic theological proposition about God, it may also serve as a hermeneutical framework for analysing a lived practice made researchable through an ethnographic strategy. Although Althaus-Reid never conducted ethnography herself, 1 ethnography as a research strategy is deeply connected to a topic which goes to the core of her theology: a critique of the politics of representation in Latin American liberation theology. Although liberation theology claims to create a theology from the perspective of the marginalized, the question of who gets to represent the ‘poor’ is under-communicated. According to Althaus-Reid, the result is that ‘the poor’ has become a label without gender or sexuality, occluding how both gender and sexuality are closely related to oppression and marginalization (Althaus-Reid, 2004 : 84). Ethnography may be a method for including the diversity of experience of the poor and the marginalized (Althaus-Reid, 2000: 30; Althaus-Reid, 2003: 56). Similarly, this article does not aim to prove the ethical or ecclesiological privilege of religiously motivated practices of hospitality nor the epistemological or methodological privilege of ethnography alone. Rather, I argue that an analysis of ethnographic material using the systematic theology of queer kenosis displays how risk and ambivalence is expressed in diverse, surprising and conflicting ways in the ecclesial practices of hospitality. An analysis of two narratives of risk and ambivalence from the Church of Our Lady in the light of the queer kenosis of Marcella Althaus-Reid shows the queer kenotic capacity of an ecclesial practice of hospitality.
Research Strategy and Methodology
As noted above, the research strategy for this article was ethnography. Only fairly recently has ethnography been added to the methodological reservoir of theology. Natalie Wigg-Stevenson envisions the relationship between the outcomes of ethnographic inquiry and systematic theology as a conversation. This conversation has been going on for centuries between the various disciplines of theology. The empirically inclined theologian still does what theologians always have done: present the different sources and then discuss them against each other and consider their relevance (Wigg-Stevenson, 2015).
This article is a conversation between the theology of the queer kenosis of Marcella Althaus-Reid and interview material from an ethnographic study conducted in the Church of Our Lady 2 . The theology of kenosis in general, and its queer construal in particular, are a surprising choice of theory when working with a church involved in social action and hospitality. The theology of queer kenosis was chosen after using abduction as an analytical strategy. According to Afdal, abduction is the hermeneutical movement between theory and practice in the reflective process (2010: 115). Alvesson and Kärreman highlight abduction as an analytic strategy that is especially potent when experiencing a breakdown between the empirical material and commonly used theory (2011: 58). During four years of constructing and analysing the empirical material, I have discovered the need for a theoretical grasp which enables me to interpret theologically the stories of risk and ambivalence that surface in the empirical material. The stories of the two informants represent different kinds of risk and ambivalence, ranging from the breakdown of traditional theological epistemology to personal relationships and economic survival. This diversity is intentional, recognizing that ambivalence and risk cannot be categorized as only social, sexual or economic. The analysis aims to show how risk and ambivalence is lived as a messy and unsettled agonism between vulnerability, empowerment and resistance.
The Space and People of the Lutheran Church of Our Lady, Trondheim, Norway
Built in the thirteenth century and having served as a Church of Norway congregational church for the inner city of Trondheim since 1585, the Church of Our Lady faced closure in the late 80s. Since the early 90s, Our Lady has been the home of the street ministry of Church City Mission (CCM), welcoming people living with drug and alcohol addiction into a sacred space for liturgy, meals and fellowship. In 2008, it was reopened as ‘Our Lady Open Church’, running as a joint venture between the Church City Mission and the congregation of the Nidaros Cathedral and Our Lady of the Church of Norway. The floor plan of the church was considerably altered relative to a traditional congregational church. In the back part of the church, pews were replaced by chairs and tables and a well-equipped kitchen. The new material infrastructure creates the possibility for a social life inside the sacred space. Coffee and tea are always available. Breakfast is served every morning. A clean and free toilet is always at the disposal of the guests. On Thursday evening, thick hot soup is served, followed by a service celebrated among the chairs and tables. The church is open from 09.00–18.00 on weekdays and 24/7 on weekends. The church is kept open by 400 volunteers and a staff of six, ordained and non-ordained, all employed and paid by the CCM.
The guests of the church are a heterogeneous group. Some are Norwegian citizens living with drug addiction and mental health issues. Others are migrant workers from Central and Southern Europe. Some struggle to survive by begging on the streets of Trondheim. Other guests are busy shoppers and tourists, dropping by to admire the beautiful baroque interior and perhaps light one of the 1000 candles lit every week on the cobble-stone altar in the shape of a cross on the floor in the front part of the church.
Two Stories of Risk and Ambivalence from Our Lady
The guest
Anne, a woman in her fifties, is a regular guest in Our Lady. She is held in high esteem among the other guests, volunteers and employees, described as a good friend and as a valuable member of the Our Lady community.
Anne has a long history of alcohol abuse but has been sober for the last 12 years. Thus, she understands the drug using guests very well. She often socializes with them in the café area. However, she is committed to – and highly admired for – not using drugs herself. She also has close friends among the non-drug using guests. This go-between position among the different groups of guests is unique to Anne. Today, Anne lives in a sheltered apartment in a mental care institution. She comes to the church every day and stays there for a longer or shorter period between 09.00–16.00. When asked why she comes to Our Lady, she responds: The reason why I come to the church is that when I get up in the morning, I have a cup of coffee and a cigarette and I ask myself: how will I spend the day? Should I only sit and watch TV? No, I cannot watch the TV the whole day. The reason why I come to the church is to be together with people, feel well and have a good life.
To Anne, Our Lady is a place for socializing, meeting and making friends. Anne always participates in the midday prayer. Lighting candles is a central liturgical component of the midday prayer. In contrast to other participants, Anne does not light candles in silence but shares aloud whom she is lighting candles for. When participating in Open Microphone, Anne does not contribute with singing, reading poems or playing an instrument; she participates by entering the stage holding a burning candle, and narrating names of other guests whom she wants to light a candle for. She concludes by saying, ‘If you are lonely and need someone to talk to, come to Our Lady and ask for Anne’.
The strong relational dimension in Anne’s understanding of Our Lady is also evident when asked what it means to her that Our Lady is a church building. She responds by pointing to rationality: (because Our Lady is a church) ‘people can come here and light candles and let go of what is bothering them and then they sit down and have a cup of coffee and get to know people who are in the same situation’. Likewise, when asked about the Thursday services, Anne relates the service not in terms of Gospel or sacraments, but with a liturgical remembering of fellow guests who have died since the previous Thursday. 3 To Anne, church is a place where social relations are created, maintained and reinforced – even beyond death.
One of the core components in Anne’s practice of commitment to her fellow guests is her generous nature. Anne speaks with great pride about her willingness to share her social benefits. However, to her friends among the non-drug using guests – who also live on social benefits – this generosity is a source of frustration. They see such a person as sponsoring the alcohol abuse and drug abuse of male drug using friends. Her support is not only financial: because she is sober, she can buy alcohol for them. In the interview, Anne speaks openly about this habit without being asked to talk about it. The reason she helps her drug using friends is that ‘I know what it is like to be addicted to that stuff’. Because of her generosity, Anne often has little left for her own daily needs. Anne is the only guest with Norwegian citizenship who begs openly. Anne knows that the friends from whom she begs become frustrated with her: ‘Sometimes, people say to me that I should not beg, and that’s ok’. However, as Anne sees it, begging is not shameful or degrading. Rather, it is a matter of reciprocity: ‘I give and give to the church all the time, so now it is time that you (Norwegian: plural) see me and what I need, like a good dinner or a place where I can find tranquility, so that I can have a good life. This is what I need’. From interviewing other guests, it is clear that Anne’s expectation that other guests will share their equally limited resources with her is not shared. However, her frustration does not prevent the other guests and employees from appreciating Anne’s warmth and friendship.
The Volunteer: Gudrun
Gudrun is an experienced host in Our Lady. She has taken many shifts, especially the dreaded weekend night shift from 04.00 to 07.00 in the morning. Like many of the other guests, she became a volunteer after attending the Thursday service. What she appreciated was the openness and inclusivity of the service: Sometimes the service would be chaotic. Some of the noisiest guests would light candles. They would interrupt the sermon and the interruption would develop into a really meaningful dialogue with the priest. Such things showed me that this was a space for all of us . . . I experienced that this was a church and a service which could encompass life itself.
This was in contrast to her earlier experiences with the Church of Norway. Gudrun tells how she had to fight with the local parish priest in order to have her children baptized: with the first child, her husband was not a member of the church. With the second child, she was not married to the father of the child. Our Lady, with its welcoming attitude and practices, stood in stark contrast to a church that idolized civil legal status and hetero-patriarchal family values.
A common denominator in Gudrun’s interpretation of the practices of Our Lady is that, in different ways, they contribute to the experience of reciprocity and equality between the guests and volunteers. As such, the practices of inclusivity and hospitality are not token acts. Although Gudrun does not explicitly use the word, the discourse she evokes is a discourse on justice. Cultural justice happens when the drug addict who has never been to a concert is given a free ticket. Social justice happens when guests and hosts who suffer from isolation and loneliness sit together and share a common meal or are given space to show their talents during Open Microphone. Ecclesial justice happens when people who behave in unruly ways (often due to drug addiction) are given a space where their faith and spirituality are catered for, whether by the access they have to a beautiful medieval sacred space or by participation in the Thursday service or by lighting candles. Existential justice happens when guests who on numerous occasions have experienced scorn and contempt are treated with respect and dignity by both hosts and employees: What made the biggest impression on me in the beginning was to see how much it meant that we said “hello” when we met them in the street. It didn’t take more than that, just a smile, a friendly gaze, a “hello”. To be looked down upon, to be scorned, harassed. . .this is a very vulnerable point for many of the guests. Sometimes they perceive it this way even though it might not be meant that way, because they have lived with it for so long.
To Gudrun, the moments when Our Lady becomes the site of these different forms of justice are sacred moments. Once, when the leading bishop (preses) of the Church of Norway (who is based in Trondheim) celebrated a midday prayer in Our Lady, a drunk and noisy man participated throughout the liturgy: The midday prayer was not only for priests and posh people, but there was space for him as well. That was a sacred moment’.
A Queer Theology of Kenosis
The queer theology of kenosis occurs at the intersection of queer theology and the theology of kenosis. Queer theology is the theological reflection on the production and critique of gendered identities through a hetero-patriarchal theology and ecclesial practices. Queer theology also destabilizes the concept of identity in general. Its ontological goal is not only the inclusion of people with gay and lesbian sexual identities into the hetero-normative paradigm, but also a questioning of the very concept of identity and how the idea of stable identities reproduces discourses of normativity. As such, it demarcates positionality vis-á-vis the normative, not positivity (Loughlin, 2007: 9; Cheng, 2013).
The biblical home of kenosis is Philippians 2, where – in verse 7 – Paul describes Christ as having ‘emptied’ (kenoo) himself. This dispossession of substance is textually augmented in verse 8 with ‘taking the form of a slave’ and ‘taking human form’ (in verse 10). Verse 11 follows by describing Christ as ‘humbled’ and being ‘obedient (10), even towards his own death on the cross’ (11).
The reception of Philippians 2 into theological discourse is the site of numerous exegetical, hermeneutical and dogmatic entanglements. The interpretations are so diverse that instead of a coherent discourse, Sarah Coakley argues that the Wittgensteinian metaphor of family resemblances is the most effective way to describe the discourse (Coakley, 2002). One member of such a family resembles the issues of power and the dispossession of power: the theology of kenosis construes the relationship between the divine and humans as a function of power or dispossession of power. Philippians 2, juxtaposing power and powerlessness, qualifies the Christian god to be God. 4
There is an extensive and expansive discourse on kenosis in queer and feminist theology 5 . In contrast to mainstream theological discourse on kenosis, the concern of queer and feminist theologians is not kenosis as a speculation on the divine nature of Christ, but kenosis as a theologically sanctioned template for the behaviour of the baptized, both the individual Christian and the ecclesial body (Mercedes, 2011). Philippians 2: 5 preludes Philippians 2: 6. In 2: 5, the listeners are asked to let themselves be transformed 6 by Christ. 7 Thus, Anne Mercedes refers to Philippians 2 as Pauline identity politics (Mercedes, 2011: 14). 8 Understood as identity politics, the theology of kenosis goes to the heart of the ecclesial economy of representation: how should the individual Christian and the ecclesia appear in the world? This means that in the feminist/queer kenotic discourse, kenosis is understood as both ecclesial and individual practice and as the politics of this practice.
Marcella Althaus-Reid: A Queer Kenosis
While feminist theology on kenosis has mainly focused on critiquing the compatibility of the Christian ideals of female submissiveness and kenosis, the queer post-colonial theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid expands the horizon of the theology of kenosis to encompass the question of theological epistemology (2003: 23–59; 2004: 72).
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To Althaus-Reid, kenosis is a theological device for theorizing on and critiquing the traditional production of knowledge about God.
10
She understands the biblical basis of kenosis as denoting the whole incarnational story of Jesus as the Messiah. Althaus-Reid de-essentializes the notion of messiahship, understanding messiahship not as a predefined category, but instead as fluid and collective: Christ is a Messiah-in-process; he is a Messiah who had to learn how to be the Messiah from the people whom he encountered throughout his life. Christ is an ‘un-just Messiah’ when he operates as a Messiah outside the law dictating how a Messiah was supposed to act (Althaus-Reid, 2000: 155; Althaus-Reid, 2004: 48). Christ as the Messiah-in-process, as the Messiah who transgresses, involves the kenotic loss of traditional stable ontological grounds for theology. Kenosis is another term for ‘the questioning of God’s own identity’ (Althaus-Reid, 2003: 55). Understanding kenosis as an epistemological template for the production of theology today means to question and investigate our own images of God and how they are the sureties of various sexual and political normative discourses: to ‘lead God astray, that is, facilitating God’s own disempowering act without presuming to know what original power is there to let go of’ (Althaus-Reid, 2003: 56). The theology of the God-self leading God-as-a-stable-entity astray is potentially self-iconoclastic but profoundly ethical. God needs to be led astray from the hetero-normative, imperial (and thus racist) discourses by which God throughout the centuries has been taken hostage. Thus, Althaus-Reid argues for the need to: empty theology of ideological methodologies and therefore transform its message deeply. A kenosis of theology. Who knows, but perhaps we are only going to know if theology is more than ideology when and if kenosis happens (Althaus-Reid 2004: 72).
This is the accusative model in which the act of kenosis asks the individual believer and the ecclesia to partake. However, in contrast to contextual theologies, Althaus-Reid does not advocate inclusion as a strategy for obtaining transformation (Althaus-Reid, 2003: 51). The epistemological target of queer kenosis is not charity nor the inclusion of sexual, cultural minorities or marginalized people into discourses of normality, but the destabilization of normality itself. Thus, at the core of Althaus-Reid`s kenosis is the destabilization of epistemological normativity in theology. What is at stake is not the inclusion of the marginal other, but a questioning of what is regarded as the norm and the centre. 11
The Queer Kenosis as Ecclesial Practice?
Althaus-Reid understands ecclesiology as ‘hermeneutical exercises on organizational structures’ (Althaus-Reid, 2003: 30). Hence, queering theological hermeneutics will result in new ecclesiologies and new ecclesial practices. She writes: Queer theologians do not disregard church traditions. However, the process of queering may turn them upside down, or submit them to collage style processes of adding and highlighting from them precisely those elements which did not fit well in the constructions of the church tradition and thus were excluded or ignored (Althaus-Reid, 2003: 8).
and: the powerful theological praxis of transformation usually comes from the direction of aliens working through these systems. It is only from the body of aliens in the history of theology (for instance, women, natives, people working outside the heterosexual or racial hegemony) that hermeneutical avenues bring us new promises to old theological practices (Althaus-Reid, 2003: 30).
An example of how a queering of church traditions and spiritual practices can be transformed into ‘hermeneutical avenues [which] bring us new promises of old theological practices’ is Althaus-Reid`s queering of Sarah Coakley`s understanding of contemplative prayer as kenosis.
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To Coakley, kenosis may be understood as the askesis of contemplative prayer, where prayer is ‘a gentle space-making’ (Althaus-Reid, 1992: 108): the act of silent waiting on the divine in prayer. This is because we can only be properly empowered here if we cease to set the agenda, if we “make space” for God to be God . . .What is sure, however, is that engaging in any such regular and repeated “waiting on the divine” will involve great personal commitment and (apparently) great personal risk; to put it in psychological terms, the danger of a too-sudden uprush of material from the conscious, too immediate contact of the thus disarmed self with God, are considerable. (Coakley 2002: 34–35)
In her reading of Althaus-Reid’s queer kenosis, Hofheinz points to the lack of queerness in Coakley’s understanding of kenosis. 13 According to Coakley, kenosis as contemplative prayer involves the risk of being led astray by another non-coercive agent, but only for the human part. The God of Coakley is not iconoclastic.
Following Hofheinz’s intriguing development of Althaus-Reid’s queer theology, I will argue that one way of queering Coakley’s kenosis is to ask if kenosis may also be understood as the ‘silent act of waiting’ by God. When Coakley writes ‘This special kind of self-emptying is not a negation of a self, but the place of the self’s transformation and expansion into God’ (2002: 36), the queer theologian may swap the roles and call for a kenosis of the traditional secure ground by teasing or threatening God out of God’s (imperial, heterosexual, ethnic) closet: this kenotic act happens then not as God`s negation of the God-self, but as a place of God`s ‘transformation and expansion’ into the human and into matter. If kenosis is ‘an invitation to enter into Christ`s extended life in the church’ (Coakley, 2002: 24), what does a queer version of such an invitation look like, according to two informants from an ethnographic field work?
Analysis: the Church of Our Lady as Kenotic Ecclesiology
When Our Lady reopened in 2007, the creation of the café-area and the extended opening hours meant an abnegation of control of what and who had access to the space: compared to the previous context of Our Lady as a congregational church open on Sunday from 11.00–12.00, post 2007, the space became exposed to urban city life. The planning committee facilitated the anticipated change, but the transformation they envisioned was to see Our Lady growing into a new role for a church as a sacred space within the urban space: in the middle of the busy city centre, the noises of daily life and the silence of the sacred space could be juxtaposed in order to create space for times of reflection, fellowship and an 800 year-old witness to a belief in Christ embodied in the material structures of Our Lady. Such a spiritual practice could resemble Coakley’s unqueered kenosis as residents and employees from local shops could gather to await the presence of God in the silence of the beautiful space or during the simple liturgy of the midday prayer.
However, as queer sexual practices interrupt hetero-normativity as a model for doing theology (Althaus-Reid, 2003: 9), the orgy of the urban agora interrupts the new tentative role of a medieval church as a supplier of tranquility and silence for local residents and busy shoppers. The interruptions happen in the form of the misery and joy of guests who live with drug abuse (like Anne’s friends). They are embodied in a group of guests living on social benefits who – like Anne –use the sacred space as a social extension of their living rooms, spending all day in the church. Numerous Romanian beggar guests dry their wet socks on the radiators and fill their plastic bags with empty bottles collected from the tables in the café area. The sacred space is, in this way, led astray by bodies of aliens in the history of theology (Althaus-Reid, 2003: 30).
Gudrun too becomes an alien to the vision of the planning committee when she states that it was the acts of uncontrolled kenosis – the unruly drug addicts in the Thursday liturgy – that made her feel welcome and comfortable in Our Lady. She feels included when the drug addict is given a space to transform her/himself from being an object of pity or the receptor of help into partaking in the traditional domain of the priest, the estate of teaching. The interruptions to a sermon can – according to Gudrun – ‘turn out to be quite meaningful’. The sermon is led astray in an act of homiletic kenosis. Gudrun’s story of how and why she felt included in the first place is a queered version of Coakley’s understanding of kenosis as contemplative prayer: it is no longer the human who waits for God in sensitive attention to traditional practices of liturgy, happening in traditional sacred spaces. Rather, God is waiting for the human: the potential of the sacred space for becoming an inclusive space and the potential of the sermon as meaningful is realized only when the traditional liturgical forms are broken by interruptions. The tranquility of the sacred space and the order of the liturgy become the ‘gentle space making’ of the divine when risking – and experiencing – its own collapse. Queering Coakley’s vocabulary, the liturgy may set the agenda with the music of the preludium and the words of the introitus (In the name of the. . .), but it has to be willing to let go of this agenda and cease to control who will speak and when, and what is to be said. According to Gudrun, when such yielding of control happens, Our Lady becomes a sacred space. In the ecclesial practice of a queer kenosis, the sacred space and the liturgical practices are asked to risk their ontological and ritual safety endowed by culture, folklore and theological tradition. Gudrun does not feel uncomfortable around the unruly, hungry and sometimes violent guests. On the contrary: one year, the leader of the Norwegian confederation of Trade Unions, Gerd-Liv Valla, was asked to preach in Our Lady for the service on the 1st of May. Afterwards, Valla remained in the church to spend time with the guests in the café-area. Gudrun narrates how Valla approached the table where she and guests living with drug addiction were sitting and engaged her in conversation, obviously mistaking Gudrun for a guest. Gudrun narrates the story with a smile, enjoying the unplanned kenosis of her predefined social role as host. However, ambivalence needs to be maintained in order not to inflict violence on the complexity: even though Gudrun fully supports the politics of inclusiveness and does not mind being identified as guest, she does not advocate an indiscriminate queer kenosis of Our Lady. Gudrun does not favour a total and uncontrolled emptying of control of what is going on and who has access. Even though she thrives in Our Lady, Gudrun has an equal commitment to non-kenotic forces. To her, what is important is that the guests experience liturgical, social, cultural and spatial justice through being offered the opportunity to be included in practices and spaces that are held to be of cultural and religious esteem and value. Gudrun’s reasoning takes place within a discourse of inclusion, a discourse of which Althus-Reid is critical. To her, inclusion into discourses of normativity does not produce transformation, but rather affirms the power of the centre. However, from Gudrun’s perspective, one might criticize Althaus-Reid’s rejection of the strategy of inclusion for disregarding that, on a psychological and existential micro-level, strategies of inclusion in the form of friendliness and access may be sources of transformation and increased self-esteem for people who have experienced scorn and ridicule on numerous occasions. 14
Reading the stories of the two informants in the light of a queer kenosis, the complexity of the ambivalence and risk occurring in Our Lady reveals yet one more layer: one of the guests who has come because of the uncontrolled kenosis is Anne. Anne’s articulation of her appreciation of Our Lady is not charged with the different kinds of justice discerned in Gudrun’s vocabulary of inclusion. Anne comes to Our Lady to escape the silence and boredom of her apartment. Instead, Anne capitalizes on the script of the teaching estate (priests at the high altar and the pulpit) and the listening estate (the congregation in the pews) of the Lutheran traditional service. Anne’s male drug using friends coercively force the sermons into a state of kenosis by interrupting the priest. Anne uses the legitimate arenas (Open Microphone, lighting of candles during midday prayers) to take part in the teaching estate: speaking publicly about her own life, her friendships in the church and her role as self-appointed missionary who invites people into the community of Our Lady by approaching strangers in the street and inviting them in. As such, Anne is a producer of public discourse on Our Lady in her own right. By creating spaces like Open Microphone and the midday prayer, the normativity of the theological epistemology is challenged because it opens it up for legitimate paths into the teaching estate for people who have no means of accessing the teaching estate through formal means. As a former alcoholic-turned-public-preacher, Anne is indeed an ‘alien working through’ the ecclesial tradition and ecclesial practices. In the void left by the kenosis of traditional ecclesial and spatial social and theological control, the agency of guests like Anne is given space to flourish.
However, a closer look at Anne’s agency reveals an ethical ambivalence. A key feature of her agency status in Our Lady is the kenosis of her monetary funds. Her friends point out the fine line between being exploited and being generous. Indeed, her kenotic act of sharing her weekly allowance forces her to beg from her friends. However, Anne’s actions are not void of rationality. Possibly, to Anne, the relations created and maintained through her kenosis of funds are of greater value than conforming to the capitalist rationality of saving and planning. Anne’s behaviour can be understood as queering the idea of biological relationships as the most fundamental type of relationship where one can count on unconditional financial mutual support without consideration for the personal survival of the giver. Anne performs Jesus` queer dismantling of the social importance of blood relations in Mt. 12: 46, inverting biology by behaving and expecting other guests to behave as though equally socially and economically committed to each other as they would be in a biological family. However, the ambivalence of Anne’s agency opens the theological pain of the distance between the kronos of the present day and the eschaton of the queendom of God. 15
Ecclesial Practices of Risk and Ambivalence as a Kenosis of Philippians 2
The theological conversation that Wigg-Stevenson asks the theologian to enter into is a dialogue between biblical story, theological theory, historical account and empirical material; this involves a breakdown of any kind of privileged position – even the biblical story as norm. In this article, this dialogue has resulted in a theological reading of two stories of risk and ambivalence. The advantage of juxtaposing kenosis and stories of risk and ambivalence is that it opens new ways of interpreting aspects of Our Lady. A reading of Gudrun’s and Anne’s stories in the light of queer kenosis opens an understanding of their stories not as embarrassing testimonies of what went wrong with the past planning and current running of Our Lady. A queer kenotic reading of risk and ambivalence acknowledges that the presence of such features may result in departure and deviance from human plans. However, this does not mean a departure from the story of the Christian God. Theologically speaking, the kenosis of human spaces and practices takes place within the narrative of a God who, through the incarnation and the crucifixion, let herself be led astray into the uncontrollable diasporas of the Samaritan and Roman courts, queering the legitimacy of religious purity codes, social codes and eventually deconstructing the total power of the Roman imperial super-power, by rising from the dead after being sentenced to death by its courts. Speaking from the perspective of queer theology, risk and ambivalence are not a deviance, but are embedded in the biblical story. Such theology is an alternative hermeneutical broker, offering a non-privileged yet different story of how to interpret the uncomfortable creation of risk and ambivalence in social work conducted among people living in marginalized life situations. Paraphrasing Susan Sontag’s iconic statement addressing the excess of theory in American art critique in the 60s, ‘in place of a hermeneutics of art we need an erotic of art’ (Sontag 1990: 14), queer theology may well argue that the ecclesia is not in need of more theologizing on the nature of the kenosis. Instead, queer theology tempts the ecclesia into performing an erotic of the kenosis through the fleshing out of the ecclesia: the use and displaced use of the built structure, liturgical practices, offices and symbols are the erogenous zones of the ecclesia. Our Lady as a site of risk and ambivalence may be understood as such an erotic of the kenosis: a lived experience of the messiness, complexity and danger of the incarnation. Hence, the ambivalence and risk of Our Lady does not represent a discontinuity relative to the incarnation. It is the church space undisturbed by ‘aliens working from within’ and where ontological and physical security are not allowed to be disrupted, that is the deviation.
However, the dialogue envisioned by Wigg-Stevenson has not yet reached its completion. According to her, there can be no prefixed script or ethos that yields historical or empirical material conforming to dogma if the dialogue wishes to continue to be identified as Christian. The whole empirical (and theoretical) story needs to be told, even if its progress and conclusion do not support conventional dogma or biblical narrative (Wigg-Stevenson, 2015: 4). This empirical freedom of non-complicity in dogma and biblical narrative must always be defended, even if the co-reading of empirical material and biblical narrative is queer and indecent, as the one above. This refusal to conform to the ‘answer’ as given by biblical narrative and dogma plays out in Althaus-Reid’s theology of the kenosis vis-à-vis Paul’s. According to the biblical story of Paul, the consequence of the kenotic act is celestial elevation (2: 9) and triumph (2: 10–11), where ‘every knee should bow’ and ‘every tongue’ confess Christ as kyrios. For Althaus-Reid, this description does not speak truthfully about the world. The subversive language of Paul, emerging from within a tiny religious minority trapped in escalating conflict with the Empire, became oppressive and blood-stained when it acquired a majority position and wedded its ecclesial structures and ideology to secular power. Religious dissidents, black, post-colonial, queer and feminist theologies bear witness to the indigenous, queer and female victims and the epistemological catastrophes resulting from the power hoarding of Christendom. Hermeneutically building this theo-political shift from a persecuted minority to the persecuting majority into her theology on kenosis, Althaus-Reid takes an opposing position relative to Paul. To her, the act of kenosis needs to give up any aspiration of a telos. The risk of kenosis only becomes real when the question of purpose is totally abandoned (2003: 57). How does this refusal to conform to dogma – even an indecent one – translate into the stories of risk and ambivalence from Our Lady? Our Lady places itself in a middle position on the spectrum between the poles of kenosis-as-path-to-victory of Paul and kenosis-as-potential-nothingness of Althaus-Reid. The space and practices of Our Lady have not proved themselves to be a step on a steady path of acquiring an uncontroversial new role for the medieval sacred space in contemporary Norwegian society. On the other hand, the kenosis of Our Lady is not a place without a normative telos. According to Gudrun, Our Lady continues to try to include marginalized people in practices of normality (eating together, going to a concert, celebrating the liturgy). To perform as the expansion of different kinds of justice, it must maintain and reinforce the value and esteem in which these spaces and practices are held. This requires the reinforcing of societal ideals and norms. To become an inclusive community, it has to offer spaces and practices in which marginalized people want to be included. Redistributing access to spaces and practices as a means of creating justice is highly paradoxical because it inevitably means reproducing societal norms (‘a sacred space is a place of cultural esteem’) while at the same time destabilizing this norm by making people who are not held in high esteem in Norwegian society the prime guests of the very same spaces. From this perspective, Our Lady is a profoundly ambivalent act of kenosis including both discourses of normativity and resistance to the same discourses.
Conclusion
Following Wigg-Stevenson’s call to imagine theology as a dialogue between empirical material, theological theory and biblical narrative and Althaus-Reid’s positive evaluation of ethnography, I have argued that a theology of a queer kenosis is meaningful when used as a lens for a theological reading of stories of ambivalence and risk in ecclesial practice. Although many queer church communities are involved in social action and advocacy practices (Braunston, 1997), queer reflections on ecclesial contexts and practices as involved in social work and social action are scarce. 16 Books and articles on queer ecclesiology often use ‘church’ and ‘ecclesial practices’ as synonyms for ‘liturgy’ and ‘sacraments’ (Stuart, 1997; Stuart, 2007; Ward, 2007; McCarthy, 2007). An example is found in Elisabeth Stuart’s article on the queer church where the term ‘hospitality’ refers only to the inclusion of gay marriages into the repertoire of civil unions blessed by the church (Stuart, 2007). If queer theology really wants to advocate ‘identity without essence’, it needs to de-essentialize which interruptions are considered relevant in a queer theological discourse.
This article has shown that social action performed through ecclesial practice may tease out new aspects of queer theology. Such aspects are overlooked if ‘ecclesial practice’ refer only to sacraments and Sunday liturgy and excludes the social action and justice-seeking work of many churches. Rather, if the reservoir of meanings for ‘ecclesial practices’ is widened to include practices of social justice and responses to marginalization, the empirical field will be expanded beyond the question of same-sex marriages. Ecclesial practices of hospitality towards people suffering from different kinds of marginalization harbour the potential for being queer: when the diasporic bodies of the drug addict and the migrant worker occupy ecclesial spaces where their presence is surprising and disturbing, the queer kenosis is transformed into embodied practice.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.