Remembering Kenneth Leech

I met the Rev. Kenneth Leech several times on his visits to the University of Michigan.  He died the weekend of our Apple Festival.  One of the things that struck me about Leech and his writings (and lectures) was how grounded his theology was in the place that he lived and ministered. It was very real.

Here is an article (from years ago) about his ministry:

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2004/23-april/features/farewell-to-the-days-of-birettas-and-cassocks

Here is an obituary from the US:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlmccolman/2015/09/in-memoriam-kenneth-leech/

What can we learn from Kenneth Leech?

"Liturgy is dangerous stuff, for it is an opening up of self and community to the possibilities of transformation." ~ Kenneth Leech, Experiencing God, 288.

"The cross of Christ then is not a call either to resignation in the face of unutterable pain or to a life of masochistic pursuit of suffering, often called "the way of the cross." It is a call to recognise solidarity with the Christ who has confronted pain and death once for all, and a call to minister to the wounded Christ as he is found broken and bruised on the highways of the world. And here we see both the concrete significance and, in a profound sense, the irrelevance of Bethlehem and Calvary. Bethlehem and Calvary were the concrete, historic locations, the "sites of significance," chosen of God and precious, the redeeming places. Yet Bethlehem is wherever there is no room; Calvary is all sites of cruelty and oppression. "Just as you did it to the least of these...you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40)." ~ Kenneth Leech, We Preach Christ Crucified

The politics of the Magnificat
By Kenneth Leech

The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated throughout most of the Christian world, is not a feast to arouse wild enthusiasm among English Christians.

Seen often as a polemical and divisive dogma, an ecumenical embarrassment, or arrogant assertion of papal claims in the pre-Vatican 2 atmosphere, the dogma is now widely seen as more than an irritant, at best a peripheral factor, at worst the most outrageous of the Marian heresies.

Yet in the Eastern churches this is Mary’s feast par excellence, while Jung hailed the dogma as a sign of the restoration of the feminine dimension to the deity. Some feminist theologians such as Rosemary Reuther have pointed to the potentially liberating features of this andother Marian dogmas in an overwhelmingly male and cerebral Christian tradition. “Liberation Mariology” is certainly on the North American agenda.

Undoubtedly much Marian devotion has been based on a distortion of the Mary of the Magnificat, the prophetic woman who according to the Anglican Consultative Council in 1973, “praises the Lord for the radical changes in economic, political and social structures.” [...]

But the raising up of Mary represents also the exaltation of the poor, the anawim, God’s little people. Small is not only beautiful; small is Queen of Heaven. It is this reversal of power structures which Mary predicts in her “hymn of the universal social revolution” (as Thomas Hancock called it).

God has looked lovingly on her humble state, her littleness, and as a result she will be Makaria, blessed. God puts down the dunastas and fills those in need. “It would be easy to over-spiritualize the meaning of these verses and ignore that literal interpretation,” notes the evangelical scholar Howard Marshall. “The coming of the Kingdom of God should bring about a political and social revolution, bringing the ordinary life of mankind into line with the will of God.”

The Assumption is also a pointer towards the recognition of the feminine dimension in God. Not in the sense that Mary is exalted to the status of a fourth person of the Trinity: but rather that, through the raising of this woman to share the divine nature, we should face the necessary consequence that womanhood, as much as manhood, is involved in that nature.

God is not male, and the “motherhood of God” needs to be taken seriously. Marian devotion can only too easily be used as a safety-valve, a way of transferring the feminine dimension away from God to an idyllic, virginal creature. So we relate to Mary, while retaining the essentially male-dominated symbolism of deity.

There is much to be wrestled with before we can assert positively that Mariology is a potentially liberating tradition. But the place of Mary alongside her Son can hardly be questioned. As the late Fr. Raymond Raynes once said: “If Our Lady is not in heaven, where the hell is she?” The truth of the resurrection demands that, whatever else we say, we must at least say that Christ is in heaven and his Mother with him.

From David Bunch and Angus Ritchie, ed., Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech (New York: Seabury Books, 2009)