Sarah Coakley, the ABC bunker, and a quest for erotic saints like Derryn Hinch ...

There I was, wandering around the Ultimo bunker of the ABC, spiritual home to latte sippers, cardigan wearers, and keen knitters, admiring the preparations for next week's launch of the Chairman Rupert beard-tweaking 24/7 news channel, and hoping against hope to catch Gerard Henderson turning up to rail once again about the ABC while making yet another appearance in the place.

But watching the technician try to get the screens working, so that trailers could be played showing that we'd be entitled to wondrous news from all around the world, grew tiring, so I strolled across to a couple of screens providing access to the ABC's site.

Naturally one didn't work, but by sheer luck, the other led me to the ABC's new branch of its website, Religion and Ethics, which apparently had been launched on the 12th July, but which inexplicably had passed me by.

Then I clicked on Rethinking the sex crises in Catholicism and anglicanism, part three, and I had an inkling why the full to overflowing intertubes hasn't paid much attention.

In it, one Sarah Coakley, a Cambridge academic, attempts to make sense of sexuality, desire and asceticism, and left me at the starting post:

As I have tried to demonstrate, Gregory of Nyssa's treatise "On Viriginity" is unique, and puzzling, within the Christian tradition precisely because it is written by a married person and cuts across the usual dividing categories of lay and ordained, married and celibate.

As such, I suggest it not only provides a potential key for a different kind of reading of other forms of ascetic literature, which has commonly been regarded as literature written by monastics for monastics. Gregory, I believe, helps us read such literature against the grain, and across traditional separations (for instance, between married and celibate).

Indeed, indeed. No doubt Gregory has many followers, and fans, and it turns out that he has his own wiki, here, but sadly like the ABC's website, he'd passed me by. It turns out we can blame Greggers for the notion of the trinity, in all its modern absurdities, and also tag him with the concept of the infinite nature of the long absent god, not to mention the notion of constant progress.

So that's where Julie Gillard picked up the "moving Australia forward", "go forward" routine, which promises to be at least as irritating as all the Liberal talk of great big new taxes these next few months.

We should not fear the future. The best days of our nation lie in front of us not behind us.

We are privileged to live here and we best respect that great privilege by working together, shaping a better future, going forward not back. (here)

Enough already, Gillard of Altonaess.

As if any of us have the option of going back, since not one single person in the country has managed to demonstrate a friendship with Doc Brown and practical access to his nifty back to the future machine.

But I digress, because that's what happens when you think about religion - it ruins a capacity for logical coherent attempts to go back from the future into a going forward way with the eternal present.

Live in the moment! What are you, some kind of Buddhist? Hang on, I digress again. Back to Coakley:

I have attempted to demonstrate, in the spirit of Gregory, that marriage and celibacy ought to be re-thought alongside one another. But I have also tried to suggest - doubtless more contentiously - that heterosexual and homosexual desire ought to be examined together and subjected to the same exacting standards of ascetic transformation through discipline and "right direction."

In this way, I believe, homoerotic desire could potentially be released from its cultural - and biblical - associations with libertinism, promiscuity and disorder. Gregory's vision of desire as thwarted, chastened, transformed, renewed and finally intensified through its relations to God - which would then produce spiritual fruits of love and service in a range of other relationships and communal bonds - represents a way beyond and through the false modern alternatives of 'repression' and 'libertinism'.

Yes, yes, but what does this all mean? Can we have a casual fuck or not? Preferably with a life partner of one's choosing, but if not, any handy port in a storm?

Paradoxically, my proposal has far more in common with the thinking of the real Freud than does the imaginary Freud of American popular consciousness.

Well that's a relief, but actually Freud was a stitched up, hung up Austrian of the very worst kind, judgmental when it came to women, and making going with Jung, as the more tolerable eccentric, the only choice. Still, we've always been fond of his idea of the polymorphous perverse, which allows a handsome inclusiveness for the oral, the anal and the phallic (but naturally, in that phallocentric way of his, manages to overlook the vaginal).

Never mind, I'm sure it will all become clear:

The re-thinking of celibacy and faithful vowed relations (whether heterosexual or homosexual) in an age of instantly commodified desire and massive infidelity is a task of daunting proportions, of which no-one can be very confident of wide-spread success.
But as Gregory himself warns, we cannot believe it unless we see it lived. He writes, "Any theory divorced from living examples ... is like an unbreathing statue." And there, perhaps, lies the true challenge for us today: the counter-cultural production - not of film-stars, sports heroes or faithless royal families - but of erotic "saints" to inspire us.

Say what? Erotic saints as inspiration, and a solution to the current Anglican fuss about homosexuals within the church? (More Anglicans warn of split over gay bishop nomination).

What about that erotic saint Derryn Hinch, who only today has discovered that It was wrong of me to oppose gay marriage. Why he likes marriage so much, that according to his wiki, he's tried it four times, and twice to Jacki Weaver (oh so brave Jacki, so brave).

If Derryn Hinch can hang out his shingle, isn't it possible for Coakley to offer a simple acceptance of homosexuals to be homosexual, and to enjoy sex? It seems not ...

The conclusion, therefore, to which I have brought us, finally, is that we cannot solve the Anglican crises about "homosexuality" unless we first, all of us, re-imagine theologically the whole project of our human sorting, taming and purifying of desires within the crucible of divine desire. Such is the ascetical long haul set before us, in which faithfulness plays the indispensable role endemic to the demands of the primary love for God.

To re-think the homosexuality crises in this light, I have suggested, would be to re-invest the debate with a theological and spiritual wisdom too long forgotten.

Dear lord. It was at that moment, I looked around the ABC lobby, in search of an ABC technician who might begin their witty repartee with an opening gambit: Any chance of a fuck?

It would have given me a chance to let off some steam, by telling him to fuck off. But whether this might be termed part of the whole project of human sorting, taming and purifying of desires within the crucible of divine desire will have to be left to any gentle reader still with me at this point.

Meanwhile, I commend the new religion and ethics branch of the ABC site to any interested atheist wanting to frolic, cavort and have fun - why there's the first two parts of the Coakley thesis, or should we call it, the Coakley gambit, or perhaps the Coakley ultimatum (watch out Bourne), and then there's the welcome by the site's editor:

... in our morally 'flat' culture, in which expediency, generalizations and cloying prejudices often replace patient and sympathetic disagreement, it is the hope that ABC Religion and Ethics will deepen our engagement with some of the most pressing ethical issues of our time.

Indeed. But I'm still none the wiser as to whether the Anglicans will appoint a homosexual bishop. And I find in The Australian that Derry Hinch suddenly discovers he approves of gay marriage.

It's a funny old world, as you can find by dabbling in this site dedicated to Gregory of Nyssa.

Me? I'll stick with Nietzsche:

The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly has made the world evil and ugly.

(Below: St Derryn of talk backiss, in the nineteen seventies, as found here. Ah, now that's back to the future).