Love's Mysteries: The Body, Grief, Precariousness and God

Love’s Mysteries

If it’s true that our bodies are where and how we most fully communicate, where the meanings we live with (including the meanings we give to the word ‘God’) become real and serious, there is a challenging implication. What speaks is our fragility – the malleable, puncturable, ageing, unstable fact of our material life. Rachel Mann sets out, with compassion and imagination, the interweaving of what we call body and soul, and how touch is a crucial category in understanding both. At this unprecedented time of confusion, loss and grief around bodily closeness and bodily connection, this is a particularly valuable and searching meditation.

Dr Rowan Williams

Rachel Mann takes us to some difficult places in her latest, extraordinary book – a profound reflection on bodily and philosophical precarity. Both intellectually challenging and emotionally charged, it invites readers to plumb the depths of the grieving, wounded, infected and grotesque body. Here, if we can have the courage not to turn away, precisely where we might expect to face the loss of all things, hope rises unbidden in the punctured body of Christ. This is a book that speaks powerfully into our precarious and fearful time.

Professor Nicola Slee

This is a stunning volume from one of the ascendant stars of Anglican theology. Rachel Mann opens our eyes and our hearts to the incarnate Christ who is one with us, both in our physicality and in that precariousness of human life which Covid19 has brought newly back into focus. Drawing on her own experiences of sickness and transformation, she applies her poet’s grasp of words to offer her readers a spirituality at the same time challenging, compelling and ultimately comforting.

Bishop David Walker

Rachel Mann does not shirk from the messiness of the flesh as she reminds us of the theological significance of the body. Rich, powerful, and nuanced; Mann tells the story of the body interwoven with grief, trauma, sickness and death as she traces the precarity that runs through our veins. Skin, womb and faeces, no element of our human materiality is left untouched as she reveals the potential of embodied theologies and an embodied God who understands the precarity of it all. In the midst of a pandemic, Mann reminds us that our bodies are vulnerable to one another; the grief we encounter in this vulnerability is a theme of this world. A remarkable and timely reflection on grief, the body and our vulnerability to one another.

Dr Karen O’Donnell

Love’s Mysteries is a timely invitation to face our human precariousness and wounds rather than to run from them. A book brimming with lived wisdom, Mann invites us—through an evocative and candid weaving together of personal experience, scholarly insight and poetry – to embrace loss and grief as gateways to love, hope and holiness. These are pages to sit with, and to return to again and again.

Revd Dr Susanna Snyder

Love’s Mysteries

The Body, Grief, Precariousness and God

Rachel Mann

© Rachel Mann 2020

First published in 2020 by the Canterbury Press Norwich

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978 1 786 22281 7

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Who is Worthy of Grief?

2. The Glory and Decay of a Dying Body

3. A Study in the Punctured Body

4. To Risk the Womb with Gladness

5. The Gift and Wound of Relationship

6. God in the Company of the Kindly Ones

7. God in a World of Cruel Optimisms

8. The Precarious Word

9. How the Grotesque Speaks to the Precarious Body

10. The Precariousness of It All (or, The Odd God of Oxgodby)

Postscript

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

As ever, a book like this would not be possible without the love, support and wisdom of many friends, family and colleagues. I continue to be grateful, more than I can say, for the patient love of my parents, siblings and nephews. Even when they are bewildered both by the nature and intensity of my written projects, they are there for me. They keep me honest and sane. Thank you also to the congregation of St Nick’s, as well as colleagues, for being prepared to indulge my academic fierceness and creative impulses. I am grateful to colleagues in Manchester Diocese who invited me to be the keynote speaker at the National Social Responsibility Conference in 2018, as well as to Dr Susie Snyder who invited me to be the keynote speaker at a Leavers’ Event at Cuddesdon College. At each event I road-tested some of these ideas in this book. My gratitude also extends to friends at Hymns Ancient and Modern who gave me an opportunity to speak at the Church Times Festival of Preaching where further ideas were tested. I should also be lost without the immense love of my sisters, the Risen Women, as well as the support of friends and colleagues at the Manchester Writing School, Manchester Met University, and on the Church of England’s Faith and Order Commission. I am very much not the first to have explored the themes contained in this book. I offer a footnote on the work of countless others, from Shelly Rambo through to Karen O’Donnell and beyond.

Introduction

Perhaps there is someone out there who has not known grief. I suppose it depends on how it is defined. If, by grief, one means the loss of a loved one, then it may be possible to live for quite a period of time before one encounters grief’s sharp, bewildering and confusing effects. I was 11 before I became fully conscious of grief in this sense. The death of a grandparent triggered a flurry of emotions and signalled a whole new set of relations with the world, both private and public, inner and outer. I had to relearn how I related to the world. However, grief – as a word which gestures towards both emotion, as well as relationships with others – should not be so readily limited. Grief, understood broadly as bodies encountering the facts of loss, limit and fragility, is a kind of theme of the world. When one is born one loses the womb. One is born into grief. That first cry we all make as a baby is a cry of grief. I’m not sure we ever recover from this first encounter with loss. Nor should we. Otherwise, we might never quite learn how to live.

In many ways, this is a book about grief. However, as I hope my opening paragraph indicates, it is not a book about grief in the psychological or therapeutic sense of ‘how might I cope with this particular grief I am feeling or experiencing?’ As a spiritual director and priest, I have a great deal of respect for the processes and complexities of grief. I understand the value of schema like Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, and – heavens – there have been times in my life when therapeutic strategies have helped me cope. However, this book aims to examine the ways grief operates in the theological and philosophical realm. Lest anyone panic at that sentence, what I mean is that I am convinced – like many before me – that grief and what it tells us about human bodies helps us understand more about God and ourselves.

The power of grief and what it gestures towards – our relationships, our fundamental precariousness and limitations as creatures of flesh and bone – has long been important to me. Indeed, this book is arguably part of a loose trilogy.¹ In the first book, Dazzling Darkness, I sought to speak theologically and spiritually into the personal and particular facts of my life.² It involved an attempt to be unsparingly honest about my experiences of transitioning from male to female, and of ill health, from an almost unrelentingly first-person perspective. As one of my closest friends astutely put it, it is a lonely book. In the second book of this loose trilogy, Fierce Imaginings, I sought to examine the theological threads that run through a family caught up in world-shaking events – in that case, a world war – and how family, culture and country weave in and out of those practices one typically calls ‘religion’, ‘ritual’ and ‘theology’.³ It considers the strange and often-troubling intersections between ‘memory’ and ‘memorialization’. While it began to wrestle with some of the social, political and cultural implications of memorialization, ritual and God, it remained centred on family. One family. My family.

Love’s Mysteries, in one sense, widens the theatre once again. It is about bodies and, crucially, bodies under pressure. It is about what happens to bodies – mine, yours, potentially anyone’s – when living under conditions of trauma; when violence is committed, or bodies are placed in pain and distress or pressure or isolation. It is about grief in this wider sense. It is about what it means to be enfleshed and, thus, what it means to live with fragility and what is sometimes called ‘precarity’.⁴ There is a profound sense in which we cannot be bodies, subjects, humans, without the facts of precariousness. Fragility is simply inscribed into life, life lived both badly and well.

Crucially, Love’s Mysteries attempts to keep attention on the theological and philosophical possibilities of bodies thrown into a precarious world. It is not so much about family or about me, or even individuals, but community. It is about bodies as fragile community realities, existing in relationship with each other. It is about the kind of community that is possible in a fragile, compromised world. It is about those bodies when we place them in the context of a God who enters such fragility and compromise in Jesus Christ. I return again and again to the theatre of the body as it is found in political, human and theological nexuses and fields. Wherever I range I aim to come back again and again to this disputed and wondrous site: the body. Quite often that body is mine, but not always.

Love’s Mysteries, then, is a series of explorations into the modes of ‘precariousness’. I’m not going to lie. For the casual reader, I suspect a book about the ‘precarious’ doesn’t exactly feel like a ‘come-and-get-me’ sort of subject matter. However, as the events of 2020 have definitively reminded everyone, the precarious is everywhere. It should matter to each and every one of us. Precariousness is the stuff of life. The impact of Covid-19 on human culture, politics and economics may not be clear for a long time yet, but the coronavirus pandemic surely reveals, even to the most determined optimist, that everything we take for granted can be thrown up in the air at any moment.

If this book suggests that precariousness is the very substance of life then it also makes a bold claim: when properly contextualized, precariousness is a crucial dimension of the good life too. Fragility is inscribed into it. Precarity can seem abstract and perhaps a little intimidating, but the precarious is the substance of the everyday. For while someone who lives in a country such as the UK – at least before the impact of coronavirus! – could end up believing and acting as if their life or culture or way of going on is not especially precarious (and indeed is less precarious than the life lived by the vast majority in this world), there is a certain amount of self-deception about that. To live has an openness to it, which, despite our dreams of safety and attempts at insurance, has risk inscribed into it.

Indeed, after reading Judith Butler’s book Precarious Life a few years ago, I began to encounter precariousness everywhere.⁵ Precarious bodies, precarious lives, even precarious ideas. However, given the seeming solidity, stability and immutability of institutions and personal lives (of many) in a nation like the UK, I feel the need to adopt a variety of strategies to treat with it. In the context in which I live, even with the destabilizations of Brexit, an emboldened Far Right and a febrile Left, as well as pandemics and climate change, the idea of ‘precariousness’ has a kind of gift for elusiveness. To offer a definition of it – one that is actually useful rather than tautological – feels forever just out of sight. Add in the notion of the Living God – utterly real and yet seemingly so often absent or problematized – and one can feel like one is reflecting on matters that have the complexity and delicacy of a spider’s web.

So, this book aims to be, by turns, poetic, analytic, playful, forensic and discursive. If that sentence creates the impression that reading Love’s Mysteries will induce dizziness, please do not be alarmed! I hope that the chapters in this book – which cover subjects ranging from the politics of grief through to the readiness with which our bodies give up on us and on to the glorious fragility of relationship – will be disruptive. However, there is another side: God is most alive in these places of precariousness and fragility. Jesus Christ is not afraid of embodiment. Christ knows our precariousness from the inside. This is thrilling and terrifying and indicates the extent to which Christ not only participates in the worlds we know, but invites us into the fullness of life, in all its fragile wonder and precarious love. In a time when we are negotiating the meaning and effects of a viral pandemic, I am minded of those words of Simone Weil written to a long-distant friend: ‘Let us love this distance, which is thorough woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.’⁶ The fullness of life and friendship has glory and cost inscribed into it.

This book takes its title from a brace of lines written by John Donne: ‘Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,/ But yet the body is his book.’ These lines are taken from his poem ‘The Ecstasy’, a substantial and profound meditation on the possibilities of love and desire between souls. Donne reflects on the extent to which