Beattie's Redeeming Sacramentality

This is a student's paper submitted to PI. You are encouraged to help the author of this essay. More ideas, and some possible material are on the related discussion page

Carl Heinrich Bloch – Agony in the gardenHow right is Beattie to say that angels appear “everywhere except in the Church” and that they have “migrated from their home in the Church to populate the postmodern marketplace, … that world of fantasy, creativity and imagination” (note that she uses the phrase “constipated rituals of the Christian Church” to explain why they left!) ¹.

This is a result not only of the way Churches handle the sacred, but a consequence of the general indifference and indeed disgust of patriarchy for childishness and womanliness: the child in 1950 who was advised to listen and talk to his angel at every moment of his life is now a repressed memory; the women who read popular magazines or TV shows on the 'unknown' and decide to do some “channeling” (for instance) are condescendingly treated as weak(ened) minds.

Some people, both in the industrialized world and in traditional cultures, still “inhabit an enchanted liturgical space populated by 'countless hosts of angels'”, and it would be a collusion with the (post-)modern derealizing ² oppressor not to mention them as those subalterns who could speak, even in an academic context.

I think Beattie, following Irigaray and probably others, tends perhaps to engage angels in a sexed dialectic while in fact, as she says later, what is at stakes is the “opening up to the play of difference, (…) a genuine coming together of male and female, adult and child, priest and people, old and young”. I understand that Beattie is talking here about the Mass, not the angels, but isn't the mass, this place where the ultimate truth, this “turbulent, incomprehensible encounter between Word and flesh” ³ a collective event of the same nature as the personal, deificating encounter with an angel? After all, isn't it how Beattie describes angels: they “inhabit the cusp between language and the body, space of turbulence” – again this turbulence... If so, and what Aquinas tells us about them ⁴ clearly suggests angels as the wild competitors of formalized liturgy, its tamed spiritual counterpart, then I would reframe the debate: if the Mass is the genuine coming together of ages, sexes, etc., then angels are that as well.

This, this carnivalesque queering, is what we encounter in ancient theologies, where Christ is alternatively an infant, a child and a mature man, Mary is alternatively a mother and a male-like deity capable of burning the whole world. Angels are probably beyond time and space – age and sex – to such an extent that they can appear to us, and signify God, as all these modalities of being at the same time, in this same turbulent space.

Perhaps this is what makes angels so hard to see and hear – and relatively easier to see and hear for those, children and women, who have not internalized patriarchy and its hierarchies of differences so profoundly. Under the patriarchal order, it appears unlikely that angels should be nurtured, consolated as children, or should be approached with an attitude of courtship. We tend to expect angels to be to the likeness of the Big Powerful Male up there.

This being granted, for the sake of the argument, I would say that Beattie's academic advocacy for female priesthood might be perhaps strengthened if it were made along with an advocacy of a new priesthood: an infantile priesthood. One doesn't need to believe in reincarnation to promote a child to the status of priest, like the young nepalese lamas. If a child were to celebrate the Mass with his angel... inviting him, his friend, to take part in the liturgy, whispering the messages of God to his ears, the child might be freed from the contempt for the pre-sexed, unlearnt, turbulent part of ourselves that is repressed since the beginning of time. ⁵

This gradual recognition of the role of the child in the Church — despite of the abuse scandals – must follow its course. The age of the child, in Catholic history ⁶ is not over.

The maternal priesthood that will be accomplished when “the female body steps into” the void left by patriarchy will not make complete the “Christian revelation of the mystery of God”. The maternal priesthood will make us like children again. But this is a religion for our own adult's needs. Actual children want to play with angels. Their dreams and daydreams are in heaven.

A maternal priesthood will reveal this realm, because the “maternal body is associated with desires and drives that overflow the boundaries of our orderly, rationalized identities and institutions” – including, first and foremost, our obsessions with sex, sexuality, sexuation, e tutti quanti; our anxieties about education, which smother the breath of the Holy Spirit; our institutions, built on the fear of annihilation, that children can alleviate, because they are coming from where we fear to go. The Christian mystery is made of the great Father, the Holy Ghost-Mother and... the Christ-Child.

Beattie's claim, however, is that sacramentality is, in fine, the union of the Motherly Church with God the Father (p. 310), and that the “porous boundaries of heaven and earth” will be discovered there through this carnivalesque “coming together” I discussed above, under the auspices of these Father and Mother. We, of course, will be the children, who will experience a “corporeal commitment to embody new ways of being in the world”. After critiquing, rightly so, I believe, Irigaray's angels as being prisoners of the word (without a capital W), Beattie seems to become oblivious of the potentialities opened in a Mass as the place where we behave like lovers or children at play, to end up in the confines (that's how I see it anyways) of an anti-intellectual ritual, where the intellectual knowledge of God is defenestrated, and the angels, who enable knowledge, with it. Especially notable is the quote of Kunzler, invoking a man becoming 'God by grace' by means of deification, a communication of God with its creature, because it presents this communication as something that occurs without the Messengers. As the picture above, Agony in the garden, illustrates, even Jesus needed angels.

I understand, however, that Beattie's goal is to develop our “capacity for silence, mystery and unknowability”. Despite of what my criticisms suggest, most of her essay is a remarkable testament to the fact that theology can be moving, humorous, challenging, inspiring and activist. It was extremely difficult for me to respond to Redeeming Sacramentality until I decided to speak with my own voice and concerns. Reading and rereading this text felt like watching a work of art.