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I have learnt, and hope to go on learning, more than I can say from what a former teacher of mine has recently called & #39;liberation, local, "practice based", black, feminist, queer, trans, disability, etc etc’ theologies.
I have learnt, amongst many other things, to recognise the particularity of my own location and voice, and to recognise our differences not as a threat but as the site of a gift – the possibility of music.
As that same teacher once said, & #39;true community means the freedom of people and groups to be different’.
He insisted that & #39;where difference is acknowledged, this is no agreement in an idea, or something once and for all achieved, but a consensus that is only in and through the inter-relations of community itself, and a consensus that moves and “changes": a concentus musicus.’
He decried the temptation to think that one could & #39;secure peace’ by trying ‘to draw boundaries around “the same”, and exclude "the other”’. I remember his ringing, provocative cry that ‘Christianity should not draw boundaries’ – except the boundary that excludes violence.
He also taught me to look out for & #39;a violence that might not normally be recognised, namely any stunting of person& #39;s capacity to love and conceive of the divine beauty’ –
and that included the kind of stunting that left people unwilling to see the beauty of God refracted through endless, glorious human difference. To which, today, I can only say ‘Amen’.