This Is My Body

Abstract

This article will examine the difficulties involved in female embodiment facing as it does negativity from Church Fathers to philosophers and psychologists. The female body is hardly ever just allowed ‘to be’. I will argue that placed within the frame of radical incarnation and the dismissal of dualistic metaphysics gives the female body the freedom to be and further places those who would deny the freedom in the realm of those who commit blasphemy and not simply patriarchal misogynists.

While it may seem strange to announce that this flesh and blood is MY body, as a woman in a patriarchal society, it may also be seen as daring, indeed revolutionary. Daring, yes because during the course of living in this body, I have been subjected to a great deal of patriarchal abuse. Often told that my body is not ‘right’ in so many ways – too big, too strong, not strong enough, not the right performance to please patriarchs both male and female. The list is endless, so why revolutionary? Well, because many years ago, I realised no apology was needed for my embodiment, but rather I could present my body as a challenge to those who would prefer narrow and tidy embodiment. Maybe the courage for this came from having played an international sport despite voices complaining about size or from the fact I have been loved in this skin with no suggestion I should be different. There is no doubt in my mind that these things helped and that they enabled me to recognise the divine that lives in me. For now, who do people say bodies are?

Our bodies are central to social life but are rarely even consulted in any enquiry about the way that society should be shaped. They carry a lot within and through them and hardly ever get a voice. Howson locates the reason for this in the wordy and text-based nature of Western society, a denuded society really in which there are limits on language, and so many feelings and inner emotions have no words attached to them – they are silenced and therefore excluded from the debate. For Howson, ¹ there are further consequences that physical sensations can make no contribution to one’s subjectivity, the body becomes subdued and words become central as a means of knowledge accumulation, which in turn leads to individualism. We do not have to share experiences in common through our bodies; we simply have to acquire disembodied knowing.

Within Christianity, the Protestant work ethic encouraged the putting aside of bodily needs and desire to replace them with disciplined bodies and the pursuit of autonomous self-interest. We live in a world that values us as persons by success and performance in the workplace, and as we know, many of these occupations and places of work take their toll on our bodies, with stress being the major killer of our time, the silent killer as it does not thrive when we speak out our discomfort and make changes. Stress and other work-related illnesses are perhaps good examples of how the body, while present, is silenced, yet will speak.

While the Protestant Reformation was significant in this disembodied move, I think the damage was done much earlier. This was, in my view, when Sophia, the aspect of God that walked among the people feeling and touching, was replaced by Logos, the disembodied word, the removed and untouchable one who has dictated the lives of millions ever since. Of course, Protestantism with its emphasis on the word, through preaching and the bible, was well placed to further embed this wordy culture of autonomy and personal salvation within us. This made the body something to be disciplined and eventually escaped from. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church, while being very sensuous in terms of liturgy, had also viewed the body as a stumbling block on the way to heaven. A mere vehicle which needs taming in order for salvation to be attained, and history shows this church felt the female body was extremely problematic and needed special attention.

But what of bodies? They have a history, personal, political and societal.

Religion has not been the only stumbling block when it comes to how we are encouraged to see our bodies. From Plato to Hobbes and through Adam Smith to Luce Irigaray, the body has been seen as a means by which to diagnose social and political life. ² The body, then, is everywhere, yet agreement about what it can be is hard to come by. That is, beyond a general consensus that it is the very basis of our being in the world and the stuff that is open to disciplinary discourses seeking power over them. There is very little that is natural about it beyond its fleshy mass, and we have to catch it early to even assume that this has no cultural significance since from the moment of birth, we are either a girl or a boy with all that carries under patriarchy.

When it comes to speaking about the body, it appears we are in a crisis brought on by the waning power of metaphysics and the decline of the Enlightenment which have both led to the reassessing of reason as the motor of historical progress. If reason alone is not central, then it seems acceptable that the body should be at the centre of discourse, but at the same time, it is the victim of discourse. The multiplicity of discourses claiming both knowledge and normativity for their view of the body has meant, ‘the body emerges at the centre of theoretical and political debate at exactly the time of history when there is no more consensus about what the body actually is’. ³ The paradox then is that at the same time as opening up discussions about the body, the body itself has been closed down by learned discourses about shape, size, function and form, all of which are speaking to it and not hearing it.

The picture is even further complicated since, at present, there is not even agreement over how many bodies we have, let alone should we hear them. Mary Douglas declared we have two while Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock ⁴ prefer to think of three. For Douglas, we have both our physical and our social body. They are of course related, but the former is often seen through the lens of the latter. Scheper-Hughes and Lock favour three, the individual which is the lived experience of the body as self, the social which is a representational use of the body as a symbol of nature and the political which involves the regulation and control of the body. It is very clear that what is at stake in the struggle for control over the body is power in social relations. Against this background, I wonder if it is helpful to add yet another body to those that make us up, that of the divine body. I do not wish to imply any kind of dualism or metaphysics when I suggest this since, as a feminist theologian, I have a far more materialist starting point. This body is the transgressive signifier of radical equality. The body that attempts to subvert the weight of patriarchy upon it through enactment of counter cultural actions. To put it another way, living in the world but not chained by its narrow definitions and hierarchical power systems, it has a broader vision. The divine body ⁵ is the grounded, acting, stubborn objection to life as it is. It is this body that theology and religion should be attempting to empower rather than create competing definitions and restrictions for the physical body through emphasis on the virtual reality of the spiritual body. Much of the oppression of the subject is carried out because there seems to be no place to go, no place to stand that is other than the crushing reality of the present.

This is perhaps clearly illustrated in the answer given to Brock and Thislethwaite ⁶ about one of their books. This was a book about prostitution in which they used feminist theory and many other discourses to fully illuminate their case. They asked one of the prostitutes in their study to comment on their work, and her response was plain, ‘it’s sex honey, it ain’t discourse’. That woman does not have the privilege of using her body as a site of discourse nor does she experience the reality of her life as discourse, it is sex acted out upon her with all the cultural force that her client and society requires. Sex then, not just discourse, needs to be changed. It would seem that the body is more than a set of biological givens; it is a battle ground where women are constantly driven along the way or wrong-footed. There is nothing benign in this embodied ordering of people and society. While sex, understood as the enactment of unequal gender roles, remains foundational, discourse and location remain very thin veils indeed. I have argued that the divine body gives space for the creativity of rebellion to find itself while remaining rooted in life and not fleeing from practical solutions. I will say more about this later in the article and explain how one gets to this theologically.

Lacan ⁷ as we all know may well be called the father of the Phallus! For him, the Symbolic Order is what defines us as embodied persons, and this makes it very difficult for women to find a place at all in this Order of the fathers. For him, the acquisition of language is extremely important, and even this is different for boys and girls since girls do not speak the language of the father, which is the dominant currency. Sexual difference then is at the centre of the Symbolic Order, and the Phallus reigns supreme as the structuring principle; this of course is developed from a very uncritical acceptance of the Freudian notion of the Oedipus complex. It creates a world in which women and of course our bodies are always lacking. Indeed Lacan speaks of women as absences which need to be filled with phallic signifiers. There is no way to resolve this situation within the world of the Symbolic Order, and Lacan urges women to find their own economy beyond that of the Phallus. This can be done through female sexual pleasure (jouissance), but it is never likely to be achieved as it is beyond the phallic and therefore beyond language and meaning itself. There can be no subjectivity then, and women and their bodies can only find significance through the male body and the male symbolic. This situation permeates the whole of culture where women are constantly on the outside without a language to call their own. Our bodies then have no hope of a voice in the discourses that are played out on them. It has been argued by some that sociologists of the body have often forgotten the materiality and social contexts of bodies in their prioritisation of Lacan and the psychoanalytic discourse, the one that gets us in the most intimate parts of ourselves, our psyches. As Howson ⁸ reminds her peers, ‘sociology is a skin trade’, and the same is absolutely true of incarnational theology; it is a skin trade with infinite possibilities!

For me one counter argument is that given by Judith Butler, ⁹ who suggests that woman is in process and so not a finally defined other who can be placed outside an already defined space. Woman is a body becoming, this is a language of its own, a language of materiality which resonates with the notion of the divine body as we shall see.

A further helper in my case is Rosi Braidotti who speaks of figurations, which are politically informed accounts of alternative subjectivity. The living ‘as if’ is ‘a technique of strategic re-location in order to rescue what we need of the past in order to trace paths of transformations of our lives here and now’. ¹⁰ She continues, ‘as if’ is affirmation of fluid boundaries, practice of the intervals which sees nothing as an end in itself. While she does acknowledge that we as women have no mother tongue, we do have linguistic sites from which we both see and fail to see. For this reason then, we need to be nomads, taking no position or identity as permanent but rather trespassing and transgressing, making coalitions and interconnections beyond boxes. No language but we do have bodies, bodies that have been ‘the basic stratum on which the multilayered institution of Phallocentric subjectivity is erected [she] is the primary matter and the foundational stone, whose silent presence installs the master in his monologic mode’. ¹¹ These same bodies can be radically subverting of culture when they find their voice beyond the fixed language and meaning of the master’s discourses. Braidotti anticipates the objection that total nomadism will never allow for coalitions by suggesting that the only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular, to engage in a politics of positioning. However, this does not require us to be static or defined by male definitions because, as she tells us, it is the feminine that turns male disorders into feminine values, and not the female body, which is free to roam and express itself, to find new ways of being by thinking through the body. Perhaps by highlighting the constructed nature of gender categories, we begin to draw attention to their foolishness and restricting nature and begin to enflesh the Galatian baptismal formula, ‘In Christ there is neither male nor female’ – is this a Christian politics of positioning and can it be argued that it is the very nature of incarnation itself, a form of divinity we are told in John’s Gospel that pitched its tent among us, a moveable structure whose strength lies in its ability to move with the wind, to change shape, to be pitched in many different locations and to be permeable?

Turning to theology, Graham Ward ¹² is extremely helpful here as he claims that the gospels themself tell stories of shape and location change as salvation history. Ward argues that from the outset, the male body of Jesus is peculiar, and for a start, it springs solely from the body of his mother and so is materially unstable; even if virgin birth were possible, parthenogenesis would result in a female child. Right from the start, materiality is becoming metaphorical, and this is expanded throughout the gospel accounts where the man walks on water, is transfigured, ascends bodily into heaven and is said to be present in the breaking of bread. In each of these scenarios, the body of Jesus is displaced, and according to Ward, the sexed body becomes problematized and eroticised. Ward suggests that the gendered body of Jesus is malleable and capable of transposition and that the gospels chart this course of increasing destabilisation and many transformations. Each of these makes manifest more of the divine glory, and the important point to notice, for Ward, is that it is not the gendered body that does this but the body that demonstrates how these boundaries can be pushed. Ward does not only challenge gender but also the corporeality itself noting that the gospels see no limits for it. Taking incarnation as more than the person Jesus, as much of feminist works suggest, this presents a challenge to us all. Further taking on board Ward’s challenge to static gender and corporeality opens the way for an entirely different notion of incarnation.

Many theorists have argued that a place to start is heterosexuality as it is more than a set of sexual practices and it actually grounds and embodies a range of gender relations including gay and lesbian relations, which in turn underpin patriarchal society. Making the power of heterosexuality visible is very difficult because it is just assumed that the world works this way. The body as a symbol within heterosexuality expresses and legitimates the dominant values of the society, which makes them seem ‘embodied’, that is to say, born in us when in fact they are inscribed and prescribed and in that way become embedded in our acts and thoughts. We are not born women, we become women!!! We even sing it to ourselves, ‘You make me feel like a natural woman’. In short, I need you in order that I may know how to feel. As Butler muses, ‘you make me feel like a metaphor of the natural and without you some denaturalised ground would be revealed’. ¹³

Women living under patriarchy are under pressure to construct their bodies into a model of femininity which is both inscribed on the surface, through such skills as dress, make-up and dietary regimes, and at the same time are disembodied, in the sense of detached from their sensuality and alienated from their material bodies. The result being that women are made into passive and fragmented sexual objects, both of which are necessary if they are to be eroticised in cultures that see sexual relations as power relations. There are devastating psychological effects of this kind of social arrangement of sex exchange, but they may go unnoticed. Bartky explains that our subordination while harming our psyches does not have to hide deep within them. It can be visible ‘in the duties we are happy to perform and in what we thought were the innocent pleasures of everyday life’. ¹⁴ In this way, women suffer a psychic alienation through the internalisation of our own inferiority, and once this is in place, becoming autonomous is not only difficult but also calls into question our femininity.

Discourse, then, places women in a place of psychic alienation which is a no-win situation as we are both purely associated with our bodies and at the same time alienated from them. As de Beauvoir so movingly noted, women apprehend their own bodies not as ‘instruments of her transcendence but as an object destined for another’. ¹⁵ This destination is usually the physical male but can also be the great Phallus in the sky, the patriarchal father who invades all manners of relationships. Once invaded, the ‘intimate recesses of the personality . . . it may maim and cripple the spirit for ever’. ¹⁶

The Great Phallic Father is evident in Christian theology and, as mentioned, has done a great deal of damage, and as I have argued for over 30 years, if we wish to free women to live fully in their bodies, we have to dislodge this great almighty ONEness. There are bodies at stake!

Divine Embodiment/Radical Incarnation

As a Christian theologian, I have had a long history of body denial and oppression to deal with but also a beginning of the story that allows for some hope. Hope lies in the declaration that God became flesh; traditionally, through the ages, this has meant that God took male flesh in a once and for all way. However, my theological projects are always rooted in incarnational theology that is an incarnation that is erotic, sensuous and powerful; one that urges us forward to relationality and flourishing, to the unfolding of life in abundance.

One that is materialistic and becoming. Incarnation tells us that our bodies are our homes, that is to say our divine/human desiring dwelling places; therefore, our Christological journey is home, to the fullness of our incarnation, the co-creative reality of our fleshy heaven . The Christology that this assumes is not one of denial and narrow boundaries but one of embrace and expansion that wilfully wishes to move the edges of the world in which we live. It is a theology/Christology that takes as read that radical politics is not an added extra to an internal relationship with an ethereal Christ, but rather radical, countercultural politics is the skin we put on, the Christ we incarnate. Therefore, matters to do with the body are very much on the agenda of this approach to theology. The body is not seen as an inconvenience that battles with the spirit, it is rather the flesh and blood in which God acts in the world.

I have come to understand the incarnation to be an invitation to embrace our own inborn divine natures. For myself, I have imagined this as a spiralling of incarnation ¹⁷ , a process of unfolding, rather than a straight path to the full embrace of the human and divine that we are. In more recent years, I have come to appreciate that this divine indwelling is not for humans alone but rather the very nature of all the lives, human and non-human alike.

This is not simply a wish but rather a theological stance based on the work of many feminists who came before me. Carter Heyward ¹⁸ made a close analysis of Mark’s gospel in which she reread the meaning of, as she saw it, two significant words throughout the gospel. These words were exousia and dunamis. Exousia she noted meant power over and was routinely rejected by Jesus throughout the gospel. However, she concluded that dunamis is an inborn erotic energy, the birthright of us all that draws us to others and the world. Erotic in this sense may be sexual but is also that exuberant energy in all that lives; it propels us forward and is the energy of relationality, even across species as we shall see. This human/divine energy makes us friends not servants of God and so enables Jesus to include us with him in what is traditionally understood as Trinitarian words, ‘In that day you will know that I am in my Father and you in me and I in you’ [Jn14:20]. For me, this and the fact that biblical scholars tell us Mark did not originally end his gospel with a resurrection story enable a greater understanding of dunamis, this birthright of us all. I am able to suggest that it was no mistake by the author to alert us to our innate potential and then leave the story unfinished in the way other writers finish it; the story goes on with us in the human/divine nature we are now part of. We are pilgrim and resurrection people in the here and now through the generations.

This approach highlights that we are part of a multi-dimensional divinity, the reality of the divine is not removed to another realm or outpouring from above it is within and between us. For Heyward, Dunamis significantly destabilises dualistic metaphysics and yields new understanding. For her, transcendence carries a new understanding and has no hint of the above and beyond within it. Rather, it signals movement across and within, opening to new views and locations among different companions all engaged in this dance of embodied transcendence. Heyward it is true does hold on to a difference between our divine incarnation and that of Jesus, but this is nothing more than a breath, not the large chasm and the absolute model of purity and perfection that dualistic metaphysics produce. I am indebted to Heyward as her work enables me to further develop a queer theological method through her development of what she calls ‘godding’, and I prefer to call radical incarnation as the birthright of all. Godding is a process just as radical incarnation is and carries a spiralling element in it, while we have dunamis as a birthright, we, just as Jesus did, grow towards greater fullness through life and experience. Heyward’s insights have helped me to understand the flesh made word/s rather than the reverse. ¹⁹ Once we acknowledge the innate indwelling of dunamis as our birthright, then indeed our flesh and that of others does become the outpouring of incarnational possibilities. The flesh made word enables us to find a voice and to make our desires known. This radical incarnation enables a discourse which impacts matter and shapes it because matter is already discursive. The body speaks and often screams! This is radical materialism which, due to its discursive nature, spells a future that we set through our actions, limited or otherwise in the present. Heyward and I differ very slightly here. She would, I believe, wish to see a slightly lesser degree of the divine nature within people. I, on the other hand, see in the life of Jesus a process of divine becoming, a spiralling of incarnation, which I feel sure is also available to all who embrace it.

I have total confidence that radical incarnation, that is taking incarnation seriously without the comfort of metaphysics and delayed parousias, is the key to our living this profound reality. This is an understanding of incarnation based in empowerment and the shared heritage of dunamis, that raw energy, which is our birthright, the energy that attracts us to the world and those in it. This is the concept spoken of by Jesus in the gospels that urge those who come after him to claim their empowerment to live in vulnerability, mutuality and relationality. The raw dynamic energy that exists between and within us is, according to a feminist reading of Mark’s gospel, the power of incarnation – it can also be seen as the cosmic explosion that still resonates through the universe, that raw dynamism that empowers all that lives. In calling it divine we have perhaps enabled ourselves to shape our understanding of who we are and how we should live, but we also run the risk of disempowering its wild and challenging core by attempting to capture it in systems and dogmas. However, incarnation as the Christian story illustrates is a risky business because it throws us into any number of possibilities. It seems then that risk and potentiality go hand in hand in radical incarnation as was clearly evident in the life of Jesus. With both, we are wrenched from fixed and static certainty, from the Alpha and Omega, the unchanging and propelled towards greater complexity, creativity and becoming, towards ever new possibilities. It is this ground that many contemporary feminist theologies occupy making and making again in the face of unmaking as we hear one another speak and joyfully dance theologies on the earthquakes of becoming.

Traditional theology has it that the only enfleshment required to satisfy the divine taking flesh came in the shape of Jesus. This brings us to the implications of the Word dwelling among us. Well again what about these words, if only we paid attention to the actual words, this time in John’s Gospel – this ‘being’/Word pitched its tent among us, which allows for an entirely different meaning from a pre-formed almighty divinity coming among us and bombarding flesh as it inhabits it or stamping itself on flesh. A tent is not a fixed structure with immovable sides but rather a moveable structure which even blows and changes shape in the wind; it is moved and carried to different locations with ease. Divinity imagined in this way has multiple sites of becoming rather than a fixed being and location, the flesh thus carried and placed among different realities, is softened and appears more malleable rather than rigid, static and unyielding. It is expansive and embracing; therefore, Christians may not project the abject or consume difference but should rather be open to change through the adventure of expanding incarnation, an incarnation that is breaking out from the heavens and the narrowing dictatorial voice. It goes without saying then that politics is not an added extra for people of incarnate faith, but rather radical, countercultural politics is the skin we put on as we spiral in incarnate living.

However, even those who accept this view can draw lines around the body when the body gets too vocal in the creation of Christology. It has to be silenced and brought into line; there are edges, and they are narrow. We can, perhaps, just about cope with a female Christ as long as we are not asked to look at questions of gender, a nice suffering-contained figure is acceptable but a kick arse, leather-clad lesbian warrior is quite another thing. This is Xena, lesbian warrior, who declares she will climb off the cross to save the woman she loves who is hanging next to her, and to do so, she will kill those who have put them there. ²⁰ This is no passive woman giving up her soul to a distant God. She is willing to fight, to be passionate and to change the narrative. For me, this graphic novel character demonstrates that we have lost the truly transformative power of incarnation. We have contained the glorious passion of the outpouring of the divine within a frame that makes it impotent. The dualistic Christ has removed from Jesus’ followers the ability to protest vehemently against the blasphemy committed against their human/divine natures, our bodies.

Marcella Althaus-Reid ²¹ speaks of an obscene Christ, and by this she meant that obscenity uncovers what needs to be made visible. For example, she says that the black and feminist Christs are obscene as they uncover both the racism and sexism inherent in Christology. They embody the exclusions made by the disembodied Christ who may be imagined to be inclusive of all. Even these images cause concern in some traditional circles where it is often claimed that the white male Christ does not lead to any exclusions or biases. None so blind as those that will not see!

Is it too outrageous to suggest we need an obscene Christ when we realise that the life of Jesus, only one of the enfleshed divine, presents us with a reading of rupture that is, his life challenges, the accepted norms of his day. His whole story kicks a hole in what was considered reality, and through the sharing of dunamis, he desires us to make reality bigger. This is not done by believing in promised kingdoms and perfect eschatons but by living in the flesh as an ongoing process of imagination and creative engagement with even those considered to be on the margins or even the unclean. It is not the task of theologians, therefore, to heal the rupture that the divine incarnate makes, but rather it is our task to continue the discontinuity as we embrace our own incarnate flesh. This is a very different understanding to the one that traditional theologies have upheld as they seek to close down and control the divine energy that flows in our veins and pulsates in every fibre of our being.

Catherine Keller visits Paul’s writings in 1 Corinthians on the body of Christ and reminds us that in the Greek, energeia is used in 12:4-6 when he tells us that there are differences, but it is the same God who is in all. For Keller, this disables any theology of distance and separation. God is not above, nor is the divine simply androcentric but rather the very bible itself declares God to be eco-centric, all in all. Energy then is not something we have but something we are, and it is the same energy that gives life to all, it is the stuff of entanglement. She writes, ‘feeling the pulsations of our bodies in our planet and the pulsations of the planet in its universe our earthly interactions are rendered simultaneously intimate and virtually infinite’. ²² This is the energy of incarnation which comes from the free flow of these energies uninhibited by repression, exploitation and denial.

There is much to be said here about connections to the non-human world in terms of how these connections are deeper than we ‘think’ and more essential to the well-being of all that carry the divine energy. The idea of new possibilities can be seen clearly in feminist theological engagement with the new cosmology. Starting from our enfleshed cosmic story that moves us away from a search for perfect origins and back to beginnings. This suggests that there is no place from which we were cast out but rather a place that grew us, that nurtured us and generously gave and gives us life. The creator, who tradition tells us sits apart with all the power, is challenged, and we are thrown back to cosmic beginnings, to void and chaos, and asked to make our theology from that ground, to understand who we are and who we might be from tohu vabohu, the depth veiled in darkness. Once we give agency to void and chaos, there can be no creation out of nothing as our power-laden dualistic origin. The divine speech in the pages of Genesis is no longer understood as a command uttered by the Lord who rules over creation, but as Catherine Keller ²³ tells us, ‘let there be’ is a whisper of desire, and what comes forth emanates from all there is rather than appearing from above and beyond. In this shift, we also see the possibility for incarnation to be understood as the rule rather than exception of creation because the whisper desires enfleshment and connection.

Some feminist theologians are beginning to question the wisdom of holding to a Mono-God who they believe has dragged us from our cosmic home and embeddedness in the theologically constructed natural world in order to find salvation in a heavenly realm. This has done us no favours as it has resulted in repressing the rhythms of the human body and the pulsations of desire, which leaves us adrift in our own bodies and the world. If we, as Christians, are to take incarnation seriously, we have to lessen our grip on absolute monotheism and give space for bodies and lives to be narrative realities in our creation of theology, to be more uncertain than we have previously dared to be, to perhaps be ready to embrace the chaos.

Schneider reminds us that without incarnation, there can be no Christianity, yet with the logic of the ONE, there can be no incarnation. ²⁴ So, again for her, the choice is clear, do we settle for the world of categories and abstractions that the ONE presents us with or do we embrace what she calls the multiplicity which is the diverse nature of embodiment? Schneider speaks plainly when she says, ‘to follow God who became flesh is to make room for more than One it is a posture of openness to the world as it comes to us, of loving the discordant, plentipotential worlds more than the desire to overcome, to colonise or even to “same” them’. ²⁵

A relatively new voice in the transcendence debate is that of Rivera ²⁶ who approaches it through a postcolonial theology of God. Right from the start, she makes her position plain: God is beyond our grasp but not beyond our touch just as we find that in human touch, we touch, but can never fully grasp, the other, creating what she suggests is a ‘intimacy of transcendence.’ ²⁷ Situated as her argument is in postcolonial theology where she demonstrates how the dominant imperial theology of the West has never acknowledged anything beyond itself, as indeed according to Schneider and others it cannot. While using the disembodied nature of the ONE God to set in place the Western masculinist symbolic, it, at the same time, stops the world, both physical and symbolic, at its own narrow vistas. Rivera of course is also aware that falling into the untouchable, vertical transcendence that usually follows on is no place to go for those who sit beyond the vista of the western mind, those who have not been seen or acknowledged as inhabiting land and ways of life that fall beyond. It is precisely because of this that she sees the need for a form of transcendent theology that breaks down the western stranglehold. For her, there is nothing abstract about transcendence as in the hands of the powerful, it even controls the creation of time and our spatial perceptions. Her argument is that western industrialism needed to move beyond the rhythms of natural time and impose a universal time in order to maximise the profits it wished to extract and to disconnect people from their land and their natural ways of being. This also separated the public and private spheres, with the private time being seen as feminised and trivial while public time was of the greatest importance, the masculinised time of uninhibited production and detached transcendence. ²⁸ She argues that horizontal transcendence has divided space itself with what is north as being understood as closer to God while the south is nearer the depths of stagnation and even depravity. She believes that such overarching systems of knowledge produce rather than discover all-encompassing foundations, they create the illusion of totality and suppress anything that is at odds or, as Rivera sees it, anything that is beyond. They create a very bounded world view.

It is this view of the world she wishes to challenge, and she states her hope in ‘the ineffable affinity that links all creatures in open relations of mutual transformation which may help us to envision the beyond in the world without losing sight of the transcending character of all creation. This world is indeed more than it appears, calling us to apophatic alertness. God, the creatures and even we exceed all our representations’. ²⁹ Rivera is happy to declare that the profane no longer exists, but, contrary to how this has been understood, it is not an elimination of transcendence but rather a refusal to understand it as identifying God with the status quo. Transcendence is understood to be in history because if we see God as external, then the liberation claim that salvation lies in a re-making of history, undoing injustice and replacing it with inclusive and just systems in the here and now is a false hope and an empty theology. It is the possibilities lying in the living of history in the material body that allows for the great hope of human kind. Things may happen that have never happened before, ‘newness is not just discovered as being already present in nature, nor is it externally imposed upon reality. Genuinely new things come into existence from the actualisation of possibilities through collective choice’. ³⁰ Rivera claims that this notion of historical transcendence is dynamic, allowing for contextual structural difference without implying dualism, and for intrinsic unity, without strict identity categories imposed.

Jesus can be said to be the supreme form of historical transcendence as he is present in the material form as the dynamic outpouring of God, signalling that divine transcendence is not distance and absence but actual material presence. It could be said that in the material existence of Jesus, what Christians are claiming is that God is touching the very limits of God’s own divinity. Keller’s ³¹ approach and the further work of Schneider and others enable us to move from monotheism, which has been named as a stumbling block to true relationality and inclusion.

But what has this to do with bodies, my body? Everything! And of course it moves my body into relation with others in a dance of divine becoming. My body is no longer subject to religious and secular discourses about the correct form of embodiment, and there is no ONE God revealing this to those in authority who then have a divine right to impose holy behaviour on my flesh.

So, this IS my body, and it has a right to speak and not to be spoken about. This right lies in its very flesh and blood, which is the carrier of divine energy and becoming. It also carries within it embodied knowledge. Our very flesh sings with ways that are far more authentic than the mere exercise of the mind, a small part of who we are. Our minds have been so trained in logical thinking and capitalist inevitability, all components of patriarchy under which we labour, that we find it hard to allow our flesh to speak to us. Perhaps, it is even harder to hear the flesh of others, even those we say we love.

This body which holds within it divine energy also has a right to be approached with love by those who come into contact with it. I might say even with awe due to what mutual and relational connections might reveal of the divine incarnate, good, bad and indifferent. Each contact is a potential encounter with the divine, be that with a human or a non-human since divine energy is not contained only in holy humans. Radical incarnation asks us to be open to that in every encounter, to risk loving ourselves and others. Incarnation is a risky business due to the spiralling nature of its becoming, but it is a risk worth taking if we wish to enable the vision of Christianity to be more than a mental exercise, a theological discourse!

Nelle Morton told us that our journey is home, and under the weight of a disempowering rhetoric about sexuality and gender, this is a journey back to our bodies, to a place of once again inhabiting this vacant flesh that holds within it the divine incarnate. We are asked to touch and revel in our passions and desires, to touch, taste and see our female flesh is good and holds multiple realities within it – multiple worlds and the possibility of endless entanglements.