New writing GOD Guest Editor MICHELE ROBERTS introduces her pick of poetry and prose on the theme of God WRITING about God represents a challenge for several reasons. Are fiction and poetry the best ways to approach the subject? Perhaps God can only be understood through the non-fictional approach of theology? Karen Armstrong, for example, writes about God by understanding Him as a human, linguistic construct; she argues that that need not diminish our sense of sacredness, of the historical importance of religion. Is it blasphemous to try to represent God at all? Or simply impossible? In the Middle Ages, western Christian mystics were influenced by the writings of the wonderfully-named Dionysius the Areopagite, who claimed that God, the supreme Other, was essentially unknowable. God was a spirit outside human existence; above us; completely different. All we poor humans could do was name Him as what He was not. The medieval mystical text called The Cloud of Unknowing imagined a thick, dark cloud between us and God. All the mystic in search of union with the divine could do was send up prayers, what the monastic author called sharp darts of longing love, to try and pierce that darkness. Telling us how we can only apprehend God through the negative, he yet produced some unforgettable writing. I originally became interested in the subject when I was trying to think my way out of Catholicism and into the confidence necessary for beginning to write. The two were connected, since Catholicism, as I experienced it, was in one way a fecund, if contradictory, source of sensuality, art, transcendence and marvellous stories, but, also, a misogynistic religion based on fear of death, thus fear of sex, thus fear of women’s bodies and capacity to give birth. Catholicism necessarily denied women’s power and creativity even as it told tales of women saints fighting back. I was lucky enough to get to university and study English literature, where I became a feminist and a heretic. I discovered a rich vein of mystical writing by women dating back to the early Middle Ages, poems and plays by writers who were nuns and heretics, and who, unlike the Areopagite, claimed you could write about your union with God in positive and assertive ways. They used metaphor for this. Often the metaphors referred to sexual experience, sexual bliss between a man and a woman. God and the human soul dissolving into each other were represented through imagery of heat, sweetness and light. God was sometimes also portrayed as a mother eager to breastfeed and nurture her children, willing to die for them. The crucifixion overlapped with childbirth. For the complete essay, and for Michèle's full selection of poetry and prose on the theme of God, read issue 21 • Subscribe! Read a poem selected by Michèle Roberts: Agnostic by Carol McGuigan For more on MICHELE ROBERTS, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
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