radical (ecological) receptivity

One of the things that I've found myself talking about a lot over the last few years (emerging from our intentional life nurturing community in Hodge Hill, and my PhD research that emerged from it) is what I've called (following radical democrat Romand Coles) "radical receptivity".

It sounds complicated, but it's really just asking a very simple question: "how can we be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our neighbours, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

It started, for me, as a question of "mission" - our relationship, as Christians, with our neighbours who wouldn't call themselves Christians: "how can we be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our 'non-Christian' neighbours, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

But then, when you start being attentive to power relationships - particularly those (de)formed by the social structures within which we live - it became a question of "privilege", at work particularly in the social structures of class, gender, and race: "how can we - as middle-class and/or male and/or white - be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our neighbours who are 'othered' from us by social structures, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

And when "mission" and "privilege" are themselves entangled, one of the biggest theological questions for multiply-privileged Christians becomes: where do you locate Jesus? I realised that so often, when thinking about mission in so-called "marginalised" communities, Christians - particularly Christians who are multiply privileged - do one (or both!) of two things. 

On the one hand, they locate Jesus in or with "the marginalised other" as lacking, in need - with the help of a biblical text like the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, for example - "I was hungry... I was thirsty... I was a stranger... I needed clothes... I was sick... I was in prison...". This allows those privileged Christians to identify with the "and you..." who feeds, welcomes, clothes, visits "the other".

On the other hand, multiply privileged Christians have been very good at identifying with Jesus ourselves - but a Jesus, now, in the active role of feeding, welcoming, healing, etc. In recent decades, that's often been expressed through the idea of "incarnational mission", or the question, "What Would Jesus Do?". But you can trace it back much further in the Christian tradition - through the 16th century saint Teresa of Avila, for example, who famously wrote, "Christ has no body but yours... Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good, yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world..."

And all of this is OK, except for the way it risks radically deforming our relationships with our neighbours. For me, this comes to its sharpest expression in the reflections of critical white theologian Jennifer Harvey, on the "What Would Jesus Do?" question:

"It just so happens that identifying with or as the central agent in the narratives we embody is one of the broken ways of being toward which white people are prone. It just so happens that being inclined to do “for” in postures that are paternalistic is another damaged side-effect of white racialization. And it just so happens that these tendencies are valorized in the social justice Jesus who is the central power-agent in his saga. Social justice Jesus is like a superhero standing up to evil forces around him and attempting to inveigh on behalf of suffering others. And, thus, while it is laudable that he stands with or works on behalf of the marginalized, it, therefore, just so happens that the broken ways of being toward which white people are already inclined are likely to be triggered, maybe even amplified, by identifying with such a figure. ... Simply put, identifying with the divine is about the last thing that a white person whose life is embedded in white-supremacist structures should be doing."  

(Jennifer Harvey, ‘What Would Zacchaeus Do? The Case for Disidentifying with Jesus’, in George Yancy (ed.), Christology and Whiteness: What Would Jesus Do? (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp.94-5)

Since I first read that, I've found myself returning to it many times - as a warning, and as an invitation to a different way (Harvey herself calls white Christians to dis-identify with Jesus, and identify instead with a character like Zacchaeus, marginal to the story in which Jesus is the central character, but on the receiving end of Jesus' challenge to repent, make reparations, and change). And I've found myself working with it not just in terms of race and whiteness, but in terms of middle-class-ness (within unjust economic structures), and maleness (within patriarchal structures).

But more recently I had another moment of epiphany. What if we translated Harvey's challenge into human beings' relationship with the Earth and its myriad other-than-human creatures? What if we acknowledged the ecocidal (i.e. earth-killing) dimension of our social structures?

"It just so happens that identifying with or as the central agent in the narratives we embody is one of the broken ways of being toward which human beings are prone. It just so happens that being inclined to do “for” in postures that are paternalistic is another damaged side-effect of anthropocentrism (i.e. a human-centered worldview). And it just so happens that these tendencies are valorized in the social justice Jesus who is the central power-agent in his saga. Social justice Jesus is like a superhero standing up to evil forces around him and attempting to inveigh on behalf of suffering others. And, thus, while it is laudable that he stands with or works on behalf of the marginalized, it, therefore, just so happens that the broken ways of being toward which human beings are already inclined are likely to be triggered, maybe even amplified, by identifying with such a figure. ... Simply put, identifying with the divine is about the last thing that a human being whose life is embedded in anthropocentric [human-centred], ecocidal [earth-killing] structures should be doing."

Now, that may well need some qualification. Because anthropocentric, ecocidal structures are, themselves, a product of patriarchy, of white western colonialism, of exploitative class relationships. Ecocide is, on the whole, a crime of the human beings of the global North for which the human beings of the global South - as well as the Earth itself - is suffering greatly. And a crime that, while almost all of us in the global North are complicit in some way or other, has been led and sustained by the richest and most powerful in our societies.

But, to go back to where we began, what if we asked the question again, like this: "how can we human beings be so open to the gifts, and the challenges, of our other-than-human neighbours, that we are changed by our encounters with them?"

That's the starting point, for me, of the next step of the adventure of what I'm wanting to call radical (ecological) receptivity. 

We might think we're quite good at being "open to the gifts... of our other-than-human neighbours" - through our appreciation of, awe and wonder at, what we call "the natural world" around us. But we're keenly aware that even that so often degenerates into relationships of consumption, exploitation and indifference.

But how do we even start opening ourselves to the challenges that come from our other-than-human neighbours? What does that even mean?

Australian ecotheologian Jan Morgan, in a recent book, explores the human - and Christian - vocation of attending to "Earth's Cry" - a cry that is not just (as the Hebrew bible often puts it) a song of praise, but also (in the language of the letter to the Romans) a deep groaning, a lament.

In the posts that follow on this blog, I want to try and explore further, and begin to embody, that radical (ecological) receptivity - and see where it takes us.