Categories: uncategorized
Date: 01 February 2012 18:35:54
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is the title of the latest Jeanette Winterson book - a biography of sorts. It deals with her early life with her adopted family, which was the basis for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and her more recent experiences of looking for her birth mother. The majority of adult life is missing.
I had intentionally steered clear of Oranges. The little I knew about it suggested that it was not a good book for somebody struggling with the relationship between faith and sexuality to be reading. So it was with a little apprehension I picked this book up...but having read several reviews it seemed like a book definately worth trying. I was glad I did decide to read the book which deals with: adoption (key theme), lesbianism (sub theme), religion (sub theme), relationship between the latter two (strong sub theme), mental health issues (strong theme), the process of growing up (strong sub theme), the changing nature of Northern industrial towns (strong sub theme) and the nature of art / developing a love of literature (strong sub theme). As you can tell from the list it is not necessarily an easy book in terms of content, but Winterson's genius is that she deals with the topics in a very human way which contains laughter at the dark humour aswell as torment.
The bit I found myself most strongly agreeing with was when she spoke about the contradictory relationship she had with faith. Some of it she explains was wonderful, whilst other bits of it were abusive and destructive in their nature. She is careful to recognise the good in the faith she had as a young person as well as rightly explain the ways in which it had a negative impact on her life. This is a message which I think needs to be broadcast more strongly by people of a variety of positions - i.e. those who no longer profess the faith they had and those who still hold faith, whether parts of faith communities any longer or not. Faith communities do great good but they can also do great harm...it is up to us within them to recognise this and be careful to ensure we do all we can to ensure that psychological harm, and physical harm, are not by products of our faith. As somebody who has lots of friends who happen to be gay and Christian I have heard too many stories of how harm can be inflicted by good people with all sorts of negative effects.
In recent weeks I have been discussing my faith journey with various groups of people - in relation to the candidating journey - and within nearly all those discussions I have touched upon the way the position I am now in is not where I have always been. I was lucky and was generally surrounded by good people who nurtured me but I was also aware of the dominant teaching in the churches I was part of and as a result I was careful not to go beyond my own self-errected boundaries - boundaries which meant others didn't have to decide what action, if any to take with me. I have become ever more aware of how life changing my engagement with Methodism and particularly Wesley's Methodist Quadrilatteral has been. It took me until that point of discovering that it was legitimate to reflect on experience with reason, scripture and tradition tounderstand/ believe that I might actually be who I am (i.e. a Christian who happens to be a lesbian). The relationship I have been in for the last couple of years would never have been possible without that discovery; I would have been in a self-imposed state of singlehood for ever. All a long winded way of saying, as Winterson indicates, it's all far more complicated than many on either side of the secular/ religious debate would have us believe.