Carol Kellas, writing from Croydon to the Times’ Letters page recently commented on the exciting idea pitched by the Anglican Archbishop of York that the Church should re-think calling God our “Father”. The Most Rev. Stephen Cottrell wanted to represent those people who had had poor fathers. For them the association might be toxic.
“Sir (replied Carol), I’m surprised that Anglicans should find “Our Father” problematic owing to the existence of abusive fathers. We Catholics have no difficulty with “Hail Mary” even if our mothers were a nightmare.”
I don’t want to speak ill of the no-longer-here, but my own mother was a bit of a nightmare. People who know me well have suggested I look at both sides of the argument and point out that any mother who had to suffer a child as “independently-minded” as I was would have lost a bit of maternal tenderness.
She was an extraordinary woman, of fierce Celtic beauty, who married her way up society step by step. In one of the most impressive photos taken of her was of her receiving the Nobel prize for medicine. Actually, if you look closer the rather undistinguished smaller man on her arm with whom she swept up to receive the prize was the actual winner. It’s just – and the camera never lies, obviously – that she was the force of nature to whom the eye was inexorably drawn rather than the smaller introverted scientist who accompanied her.
But our relationship was too much like the unstoppable force encountering the un-moveable object, and led to testing struggle that no doubt scarred us both. As it happened, my mother was on a different religious team, much given to the consultation of mediums and other “channelling” women, unsurprisingly disliking Christianity. One of her more generous objections was expressed as, “Darling, can’t you take your Christianity less seriously and pursue it as more of a hobby like other sensible people do?”
But, pace Stephen Cottrell’s observations, none of this stopped me discovering Our Lady as the Mother of the Church and indeed the mother of my soul as I approached becoming a Catholic.
I remember the first time I began to read Abbe Père Laurentin’s dictionary of Marian apparitions after I had met him and was struck by the depth of his learning and his holiness, astonished at the vividness of the history of the apparitions, and finding that Our Lady was not a theological but a living figure. I was astonished to encounter the reality of her intervention in the life of the Church, persistently calling it back to prayer in repentance to the adoration and obedience of her Son.
The encounter through the rosary of what was to become a friendship with Our Lord’s mother and perhaps most movingly, being grateful for the sense and experience of protection and mutuality in the love of Jesus, was a discovery that was indescribably powerful.
Far from becoming stuck in resentment and memories of the frustrating conflict with my poor and much provoked biological mother, I found myself saying, “So this is what a real mother looks like – how wonderful to discover it even if late in life.”
And it may be that the discovery of Our Lady, is an essential element in balancing our theological apprehension of sex (and theological gender) in the faith.
And this brings us to the telescope. Stephen Cottrell was (one presumes unknowingly) reversing his theological telescope. He was looking at the relationship between God and humanity through the wrong end of the telescope.
Revelation, as a concept, looks at humanity through the eyes of God. The projective scope works one way only – from outside time and space to inside. But it is the perpetual temptation of those who either don’t trust or don’t believe in revelation to reverse it.
One of the most striking and problematic examples reverse-scope perspective was at the hands of the philosopher Feuerbach. It was he who set the hare running that there being no God, all ideas of God were nothing more than the projection of human longing onto the vacant screen of the blank universe beyond us. In fact he was right about projection, but wrong about the direction. God does indeed project Himself onto matter, time and space and in particular onto humanity. We are made in His image and invited to grow into His likeness.
But the reverse-scope position is not confined to atheist philosophers; it has been taken up by relativist secularised Christians. And this is why Stephen Cottrell, fully equipped with degrees in Media Studies, is so ready to reduce God to the image of the contours of human psychological preference and transient ideology.
There are all kinds of reasons for preserving God’s own self-disclosure as Father even though He is obviously not contained or confined by our experience of biology. And one of the most telling ones is that in the Old Testament there was as constant struggle between notions of God as creator and god as creation.
The whole project of Canaanite fertility worship lay in the possibility of placating and influencing “mother” earth. The theological mechanism for making this all-important distinction between Creator and creation was in part, difference between sky father and earth mother.
And in case we thought that this was an old trope we were free from, the whole developing emphasis on the primacy of ecology, the emergence of Gaia and to some extent elements of the climate crisis, are all located in conviction that the top of the epistemological scale the feminine needs to displace the masculine.
But this is where Carrol Kellas of Croydon comes to our aid. There does not appear to be a great struggle over the gender or sex of Mary. She is allowed an uncontested femininity. No-one, not even the Archbishop of York has suggested that the damage we have endured from any poor experiences of mothering should result in our suspending our reliance on her motherhood.
And the reason for that may be more complex than we think,
What is at stake it not really the psychological woundedness of human beings incapable of allowing the healing of knowing the true God to heal their wounds and resentment. But instead a contemporary assault on all things masculine. Are we allowed to suspect that this may reflect a metaphysical assault on the accessibility of God the Father?
If the work of the Holy Spirit is to enable us to recognise God’s parental live and call out “Abba” father as our side of a moment of miraculous mutual recognition, is it possible that a contrary wind might work to diminish rather than amplify that encounter?
The toxification of all things masculine continues with such determination and vigour and may have more to it than simply an attempt at historical and psychological re-balancing by an over-energised feminism.
I remember being warned by a Catholic-minded theological lecturer during my years at Anglican theological college that the loss of Mary in Protestantism may have had a wide variety of unintended consequences that affected everything from art, to spirituality, theology and prayer. It may too have played a part in the Archbishop of York coming to the wrong end of the theological telescope and mis-gauging the direction of projection.
One powerful element in Mary’s place in the Catholic Church is to give us a sense of redemptive balance in the way in which masculine and feminine find complementary roles to play in the history and experience of salvation.
The answer to Stephen Cottrell’s concerns may lie not in changing the theological language God the Father attributes to himself, but in considering becoming properly Catholic and discovering the fuller and deeper implication of Mary, Theotokos, Mother of God and the Church that go some way to balance our redemptive experience of God, in the words of Jesus, as “Our Father”.
(Getty Images)
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