Slow and urgent

You will not be expecting us to write anything to you, brothers, about ‘times and seasons’, since you know very well that the Day of the Lord is going to come like a thief in the night. It is when people are saying, ‘How quiet and peaceful it is’ that the worst suddenly happens, as suddenly as labour pains come on a pregnant woman; and there will be no way for anybody to evade it.

1 Thessalonians 5:1 - 3

Jesus spoke this parable to his disciples: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a man on his way abroad who summoned his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to a third one; each in proportion to his ability. Then he set out.

Matthew 25:14f

Written almost 50 years after the Resurrection, Matthew's Gospel records a community that is experiencing anxiety about and for the second coming. The Council of Jerusalem in 50 AD has settled, for some, whether the Mosaic Law applied to Gentile Christians (it didn't). The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD had provided them with evidence that the end times were close. It wasn't so much that they had given up, rather they had lost their enthusiasm. The sense of urgency, of immediacy had dissipated.

As a child in a large family patience was the most valued gift. If you waited long enough you might get - instead of hand-me-downs - new clothes, a bike (always a hand-me-down), your own bedroom (rare, if unknown when we were all at home). We also had this unspoken expectation for us elder siblings that when we turned 18, we left home. And we did. Inevitably money was always tight, and I don't think for a minute that any of us expected a handout (or got one). This was pretty much the same for my cousins, neighbours and friends. Surprises were few and far between.

Yet there were surprises. My mother was sparing of firm discipline. As seems now typical of those days, Mum would say, 'Wait 'til your father gets home.' With few exceptions, it was either forgotten by the time Dad got home, or Dad was compassion itself, biting his tongue and waving his hand in a mock attempt at smacking. And there was the brand new bike I got for my fifteenth birthday. Out of the blue. A gift from my parents for caring for my brothers and sisters and our home when Mum was hospitalised with her last two pregnancies.  

The long pay-off arrived for the youngest of our parents' brood when we were long gone from the nest. But there was never any sense of urgency going about our lives. Life wasn't fast. All food was 'slow', we measured the seasons by the fruit and vegetables we ate and by the regularity of Ordinary Time.

Like all our families Matthew's community had got on with daily life, the rhythm and pattern of family, work, friendship, worship, celebration and mourning. The Gospel they first received was tense with anticipation and the parables of the ten virgins and the talents were intended to enthuse, revivify, enliven and challenge the community, to not let go of the important things in life (and faith), to remain focused and to be ready for whatever happens.

Today is no different to Matthew's community or to the Thessalonians. We will not be able to evade the Day of the Lord, because it will come - not when we expect, but in God's time, in time's fullness, in the gathering of the cycles of life and death. We must await as good and faithful servants.

Peter Douglas

THE PENALTIES FOR SAYING NO: A THEOLOGIAN REFLECTS ON HER EXPERIENCE IN AN AREA WHERE SEX AND POWER COLLIDE

by Janet Soskice 

The furore over sexual harassment at Westminster, which this week led to the main party leaders agreeing to set up an independent grievance procedure, is not about sexual banter – the older guy who might touch your breast in a pub, or grab your knee, or make a lewd remark.

All women of my generation are familiar with this experience and know how to write it off, though it is a pity it’s still happening. Fundamentally, it is about sex and power, sometimes the power to make or break the career of a young woman – or man.

When she was interviewed on the Today programme last week, the journalist Petronella Wyatt cheerfully related a family story about an amorous Hugh Gaitskell,  friend of her father and a former leader of the Labour Party, chasing her mother around the kitchen table.

Wyatt missed the point. The Wyatts could share a laugh about this incident because there was nothing was a stake. Things were very different in my graduate student days at Oxford, when women like me were routinely subjected to propositions and veiled threats from supervisors.

One biologist, whose supervisor had impressed on her the importance of attending a conference on slime mould, found on arrival that he had booked a double room for the two of them. Another read her philosophy essay to her tutor while perched on his toilet seat as he shaved. A friend, a member of a religious order, felt her supervisor run his finger down the zipper in the back of her dress as she sat at a conference dinner. 

Sometimes it was a matter of evading a sloppy kiss after a tutorial sherry; at other times it might be receiving outright, almost contractual offers, of advancement in return for sexual favours. A distinguished philosopher once suggested to a friend that he could get her invited to a top-level colloquium where he would introduce her to “all the right people”, if she came as his bed-partner.

She was free to decline the invitation, but the implication was that should she say “No”, the eminent philosopher would not only not introduce her to all the right people, but he, being a world renowned expert, would quietly say on a research panel or grant-awarding body when her  papers come up, “Ah, I don’t think she’s quite got the stuff for this grant/post-doctoral studentship …”. 

I have a story to relate myself. (Spoiler alert; this ends well.) Hoping to follow up my interest in religious language as a social anthropologist, as a final-year undergraduate I was invited to an interview for a graduate place at a prestigious faculty in the United States. My interview with the professor of anthropology was at 6 p.m. in an otherwise deserted faculty building. We had a lengthy, and for the most part excellent, conversation, during the course of which the professor explained that he felt especially close to me. This was, he told me, because he was member of a First Nation tribe and had spiritual intuitions about certain people. The second or third time he expressed these warm sentiments I offered the suggestion that he probably felt so close to me “because I was a Christian”, this being the most passion-killing observation I could think of.

Discovering I hadn’t a place to stay, he offered to put me up in the guest room of his family home, clearing this in my presence with a phone call to his wife. This put my mind at rest as to his intentions, yet on the drive over he asked me, “Did I realise the effect my eyes had on men?”

The conversation was awkward, even though I knew I was in the presence of a much admired spiritual guru. His wife, an attractive blonde woman, made me welcome. As she made dinner, the professor showed me to the guest room, where he tried to plant a big kiss on my firmly closed mouth. The next day we parted amicably; his last words were, “See you next year!’

There was no “next year”.  When the letter arrived it said I had not been offered a place in the programme. I was hugely disappointed, for I’d taken “See you next year” at face value. Undoubtedly, I reckoned at the time, there had been other, better qualified candidates. The result was a year spent waitressing, during which I began my study of theology, leading to graduate study in England and a wonderful academic life working on religious language as a theologian.

I have to confess it was only some 15 years later when, already a lecturer at Cambridge, a women student (not, I hasten to say, in my own department) sought me out with an analogous case, that it even occurred to me to wonder whether, had I responded “warmly” to the professor’s overture, I might have got that graduate place?

And it’s really only really in writing this article that I’ve realised its corollary – that the last thing a sexual predator wants in his department is a student who, having rebuffed his approaches, might in due course tell someone else about his interviewing technique. It was a win-win situation for my interviewer, and I doubt I was the first or last female applicant to whom he felt “strangely close”.

These stories are less common now in academia. But no institution is immune; and clever people have clever ways of covering their tracks. Petronella Wyatt’s mother could laugh afterwards about the lunges of a randy politician because she had nothing to lose in fending off an unwanted kiss. But where there is an imbalance of power, where careers are at stake, the situation demands more than drollery.

Janet Soskice is Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Jesus College. Published in The Tablet 8 November 2017.