Debating Theologies of Liberation and the Challenge of Ecofeminist Spirituality
- Debating Theologies of Liberation and the Challenge of Ecofeminist Spirituality
- Debating Theologies of Liberation and the Challenge of Ecofeminist Spirituality
My first visit to Africa in 1997 was marked by surprise, disturbance and delight. Not prepared for the 'culture shock', I described it as being like 'visiting another planet' at the time the African landscape; the beautiful skies; the people I was privileged to encounter. So it seems to have been for Professor Mary Grey when she had her first experience of Africa, visiting Rwanda in December 2004, which she reflects upon extensively in her book To Rwanda and Back. I was visiting friends in Arua, northern Uganda. Grey was in Rwanda at the invitation of the World Council of Churches. 1Northern Uganda was afflicted by poverty, tribal divisions and the terrors of the 'Lord's Resistance Army' (LRA) 2and still bore the scars of the Idi Amin regime. Mary Grey, a leading ecofeminist liberation [End Page 95]theologian currently based at St Mary's University College, was entering into another African trauma, that of the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide, when an estimated 800,000 people were brutally murdered in just 100 days in 1994.
Grey's sense of 'personal disturbance' comes across in the opening pages, and causes her to reflect upon her own place in relation to the people whose 'depth of suffering [she] would never be able to fathom'. She recognises that she is 'a part of the tragedy' (p. 6) and can no longer stand aside from it. These deeply-affecting challenges to faith and spirituality, as a person alert to her own responsibilities, even complicity, will be recognisable to any people who have been similarly 'shocked awake' through encounters with the lived suffering of others as a result of injustices. This then is Grey's starting point, for an exploration of the demands of justice within a spirituality that has reconciliation at 'its core' (pp. 110 and 168). This sense of overwhelming suffering is something we shall mention often.
This book is a personal 'thinking aloud', a dialogue between her spirituality and the questions that arise for her now. She is wrestling for a hopeful-way forward, a spirituality that can make a difference, bringing hope out of collective and personal traumas (p. 169).
Many examples of suffering and conflict make for uncomfortable reading. Alongside these examples, from Rwanda to Palestine; the subjugation of women and the complicity of the Church in the maintenance of injustices; globalisation and climate change; she describes people of faith from many traditions offering resistance to injustice, as active agents for healing and hopefulness. These examples, though, point to a depressing reality: most of the examples are some time in the past or seem so small in consequence. The poverty of examples reflects the reality: authentic signs of hope are hard to find. The reader may experience, as I did, a sense of being overwhelmed at times.
Using themes of 'liberation theologies', Grey constructs ways of drawing on her faith tradition that might be helpful. She emphasises the necessity of painful 're-membering' for reconciliation to be possible (p. 17); each person as precious in God's eyes, as a possible entry to repentance for the oppressors (pp. 19 20); the necessity that truth be told if right relationships are to be restored (pp. 41 2); the re-imagining of sacrifice, as an empowered act of radical love that enables victims to forgive (p. 43); compassion as cornerstone of reconciling justice (p. 76); and the need for a renewed Church, that emerges from below rather than as a powerful elite, in solidarity with the poor, where we not only risk vulnerability because of love, but discover the fullness of life in the process (p. 95).
In chapter five, Grey links the human face of suffering to the suffering...
