65: Little moments that have somehow been strung together, made up of fragmented conversation, that begin to make sense over a lifetime

Episode 65 In this conversation about conversation, Clare lifts up the grace to be found in our everyday encounters with each other. Conversation is 'that place where we forge together our understanding ... where God makes God's self known.' While truth and joy stand out for Clare in scripture, she says that 'if you really want to know what it is to get to know God. It's about those three things, faith, hope, and love.'  

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Professor Clare Watkins and link to her article 'Beyond Synodal Listening: Theological Action Research and Cultures of Conversation'

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Transcript

You're listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways we're living our faith today. Pope Francis used the image of a caravan for our travelling together on a sometimes chaotic journey. And Pope Leo, quoting Saint Augustine, reminds us, Let us live well and the times will be good. We are the times. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed, and maybe challenged now and then. I am too in these conversations. And if you're enjoying them, it helps if you rate and review on the platform where you're listening. Thank you. 

Listeners, thanks for tuning in today. I'm joined by Clare and along the way, we're gonna have a conversation about conversation. So I'm looking forward to it. Welcome Clare. 

It's good to be here, Theresa. 

Just to get us started, Clare, can you share a little bit about when your faith was first important to you in your life?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I was thinking a little bit about this preparing for today. And the extraordinary thing to me is that I've had quite a complicated life in one way or another. But the one thing that has been consistent is my faith. As far back as I can remember, really, I've had a strong sense of having a relationship with God. My parents were received into the Catholic church just before I was born. My mother told me I was her first attempt at natural family planning, so probably Catholic born. But I think from when I was really small, in a sort of slightly chaotic childhood, there was a sense that there was always God there and that God loved me. And I suppose that grew and grew through my life. I mean, I can say a little bit more about how that's changed, if that's helpful.

Yeah. Yeah.

II suppose the interesting thing for me, you know, now I'm in my sixties, is to see both the continuity of that and how actually I don't think there's ever been a time in my life where I've not had that some sense of faith and a strong sense of faith. But how that's changed, and I think one of the beauties of actually living longer is that you begin to recognise that faith takes all sorts of different shapes and colours and flavours depending on the context, which also makes you, of course, much more generous and understanding about the differences in the way people live their faith. So I think when I was this child, it was something that just kind of nurtured me, and I loved it, and I loved prayer. I've always prayed in my own words, so not a kind of formulaic Catholic upbringing, not least of all because I don't think my parents really knew that kind of tradition. But then I think going into, through adolescence and then into young adulthood, I think there was a risk that I could have become quite conservative. I suspect there are long term friends who would probably look back and say, Yeah, you were a bit kind of pious then. You were a bit kind of earnest then. Because, of course, when you're younger, it seems simpler. Very impacted by charismatic Catholic renewal, I think, as a teenager. And then coming through that, and then I suppose having a family, getting married to  - my husband's also a Catholic. And beginning to realise the importance of faith being ordinary and being shaped by the human contingencies, the human vagaries, the ups and downs. One thing - I've got four children and one thing I think that that teaches you is you don't get holy by obeying rules, basically. You know, you don't get good by keeping to certain kinds of bounded practices. But that learning to love is actually the way of actually learning to have faith through these different kind of phases of life. So the way our children have, I want to say challenged, but that's not a negative thing, that have kind of reshaped the way that we think about the world, the way that we've been drawn into different kinds of experiences, has sometimes stretched faith and sometimes been quite difficult, but has also been the way into deeper loving and deeper faith and fewer rules. And I think there's that pattern for me. I've always loved the sacraments. And then as I get older, I think I begin to understand more and more deeply the presence of grace and God in the very ordinary and the very mundane. 

I think that's fantastic. And I mean, that resonates so much for me. And I can certainly see too in my life how when I was younger, the rules did seem so straightforward because life was just not complicated, and so I was a massive rule follower. And I still am, I still am, but you can hear in my voice a little bit of stretching here and there, and certainly my experience of bringing up my boys and finding that you can't just crash in with rules and think that that's going to work and that, you know, that kind of flexibility and being challenged, like you say, and working through that. It has changed me so much, but I still feel very completely committed to my faith. But I think of it quite differently and I certainly am more, I think you used the word generous, I'm more generous in recognising that people are at different points in their faith and are expressing it different ways, and that's all fine. I think I too have grown through my life in some similar ways. I'm sure lots of that will resonate for listeners too. Although some listeners are at the very younger stage and it might - I don't know what they think of -whether younger people can recognise the kind of growth that happens until they're in it.

Although I'm also very aware, especially in the work I'm doing now, that I meet lots of younger adults who have the same - who actually have a maturity of faith. I'm not sure how much it's related to age as it is to kind of individual stories. And I think one of the differences it might be is that the young people whose faith has most impacted me have actually been about people and service first. It's to do with whatever stage of life we are, when we actually meet people and recognise that what God wants us to do is to love people. Basically, that's kind of simple, isn't it? And but that means actually, genuinely, meeting that person that God has made with all their history, with all the kind of stuff that all of us carry, and being able to see them and genuinely delight in them. And when we do that, whether it's with our peers or our children or with people in particular kinds of need, that shapes faith, I think, in some really maturing and authentic ways. And that will come to different people at different times in their lives, I think. Related to that, maybe the kind of journey of faith is also what happens to our sense of vocation. So I think I had a sense of vocation when I was very, very young. And I think when I was a child, I probably - the Catholic imaginaries - thought of that in terms of religious life. It became clear to me as I went to a convent school. That was not something I could actually do and be sane. But then the question, I think, for lots of committed Catholic women particularly is, well, what do I do? How do I how do I respond to this sense of call? And for me, it was theology. It was the kind of intellectual apostolate, the thinking, the striving to know God so as to be able to communicate that and to serve through thought. But of course the downside of that is it can take you away from so called ordinary people, you know, it can become a little bit separated out from ordinary faith. So I think there's always been this really important thing for me that I've tried to pull it back, and then in the end I've forged this way of doing theology which requires an engagement with the people on the ground really, rather than just something we can only do from books. 

Yeah. And that brings me on nicely to why I reached out to you about making this episode. I did hear you speak at something a few years ago, and I thought you were great. But I just stumbled across this paper you wrote last year about conversation, the culture of conversation, and I was, I just was amazed to find that you were saying things that I had kind of felt myself. In starting this podcast, one of the things that really inspired me, I mean, I felt a sense of calling, honestly, and it was about  - in work that I'd been doing with Catholic organisations, I met lots and lots of Catholic people, I was doing engagement, so I met lots of different Catholic people and had really, really interesting conversations with people, everyday conversations, but about our faith and about our lives, and I was so inspired by those conversations, and I always have been when I was kind of looking back in my life. It's always been conversations with people, you know, other mums in the school playground, people I went to school and university with, those ordinary conversations that were outside of the kind of formal structures of the church, but they have shaped my faith. And I just thought, I just discerned that, you know, actually I could raise up those conversations. If I have conversations with people and put them out in a podcast, I can raise up those conversations for everyone to be part of in a sense. And so it was amazing to read your paper, you know, holding up the value of those conversations. So tell us a little bit about what your research and thinking is around this. 

Just to say, Theresa, I absolutely get you on that. And I think probably all my life I've been aware of the ways in which conversations with people well, it is the way in which we encounter people, isn't it? And that the way grace works in that has been a kind of constant for me all the way through my growing up and learning and maturing. And also in the family, I mean I think one of the things -  which my adult children talk about it now - always we would come home and, if I wasn't working, and we'd have something to eat, or they'd come back from secondary school on the bus, so we'd have something to eat, just a biscuit or something, and we'd have a conversation. And sitting around, people talk about family meals as some kind of, you know, semi liturgical event. I mean, it really isn't. When people sort of say, Oh, it's like it's this eucharistic - I mean, they obviously haven't had breakfast at my house. But there's a place there where conversation takes place. And I think that for me was the, really kind of, the heart of the relationships that we managed to have, managed to be shaped by, and shape in our family, which have been real blessings. The way in which conversation as a kind of idea has dominated my own kind of professional work, I suppose it has two origins. One is the experience of understanding the way in which qualitative research, interviews, focus groups, those sorts of what's normally understood as sociological data, people's stories really, can inform theology. And that's something that I worked with James Sweeney and Helen Cameron, and Cath Duce and others at Heythrop. It must be twenty five years ago we started doing that work. And using those accounts from so called ordinary Christians, as a theological source alongside our reading of scripture or Rahner or Vatican II or whatever. But one of the things that struck me there, my own kind of initial studies was in Vatican II studies, was the way in which what I was experiencing and hearing from these so called ordinary Christians had a really profound theological and spiritual basis. That it wasn't simply  - though this would be enough -  that I enjoyed listening to people having conversations, though I do. But it's also that when you, I don't know how much detail you want, but Vatican II has a beautiful document on divine revelation, and in that it talks about the way in which revelation makes progress is the word, or develops, depending on the translation, in the life of the church. And it lists all ways that that happens. And obviously the teaching of the bishops and the magisterium has its part there. But there's also this really profound two or three sentences which talks about the way in which the Spirit guides revelation in the church and its understanding through the ordinary experiences of the faithful and the spiritual realities that they experience, and that this isn't even just contained in the, the kind of visible practising church, this is all the baptised. And then you put that alongside what the same council has to say about the working of the Spirit beyond the visible confines of the church in Gaudium et Spes, the pastoral constitution. And there's this strong kind of compelling sense that I was kind of overwhelmed by that actually if you want to know what the Spirit is saying to the church or to the churches, if you want to understand that, if you want to discern God's work in the world, you have to attend to that. And that for me, informed by those sociological social science methods, the way to do that was to engage with people in conversation of various kinds. And we might say a little bit about how conversation might work differently for different kinds of people as well. So as to together discern the Spirit. Too much, not just in the Catholic church. I mean, I've worked ecumenically, certainly in the Church of England, Methodism, to a great extent. And I think it's true in  all our groups. Too often we assume that it's either the leadership or the hierarchy or the active minority of - what's the word  -actively involved parishioners who do the discerning. And that's absolutely missing the point about the way in which the Spirit works which is that we need these diverse voices and we need the voices. They're very open. It's those very voices that God chooses. You can see that in scripture to kind of lift up and enable us to take the next step. So that was the beginning of a kind of mission to engage those. And the more I became aware of this, the more I realised that if you simply interviewed someone and asked them questions and got answers, what you were doing is you were harvesting information. And that's a thing, but I'm not interested in that. I don't want people's opinions. What I want is the experience of the conversation with them because it's in that place that together you forge an understanding. And that got me interested then in kind of reading more about the various theories of conversation, but it's - this is disclosive. This is the place of personal encounter where people together want to discern God, where God actually makes God's self known. That must be the heart of theology for me. 

Yeah. That's great. Another way that I can connect with that is that I was a speech and language therapist previously. We studied conversation, you know, as part of my training, and I often think about how we talked about how a conversation is negotiated live between the people having the conversation, proper conversation. You haven't planned you're gonna say that and then I'm gonna say that and then you're gonna say that. Sometimes we structure things a little bit, but a real conversation, an ordinary conversation, you're negotiating that live between you and the person or persons you're speaking with and therefore it's really complex actually because everybody's got unwritten rules about conversation which may not be the same as each other. And so you capture really well in your paper how it's a bit stumbling and things go wrong and you go off on the wrong track and then somebody's trying to remember something, but the other person speaks and you've forgotten it, and all sorts of things happen in that live conversation. And so it is really complex, and there is something about doing that together when you're talking about your faith or aspects of your life that are informed by your faith, maybe, that is connecting, I think, with the Holy Spirit, with something much deeper than the words that you're managing to dredge up, you know. So I think you captured that really well in your paper. That really, resonated for me. 

And I think that's again, it goes back to how we understand grace and God at work in the world, that one of the risks of the way in which the Catholic tradition centres our attention on the sacraments and particularly the Eucharist, and just to be clear, I'm absolutely centred on that too, but one of the risks is that it makes the encounter with grace seem not restricted exactly, but it has to take a particular kind of form. And in fact, you know, our theology of Eucharist is much more that this should train us, should help us to be able to see the same grace at work in the world. But too often it's kind of like, well, I go to Mass because that's where I meet Jesus, rather than saying that's where I do meet Jesus at Mass. And because of that, I can actually begin to understand the ways in which I meet Jesus outside of that one hour a week for most of us. And why am I saying that? But yes, because of the ways in which I've had to learn to trust, I think, in the kind of stumbling, interruptive, imperfect nature of conversation and say, This is the way in which people encounter God. And it's not perfect. It doesn't have full sentences. It is interruptive. I mean, I've got -  one of my problems with the synodal spiritual conversations is they're not really conversations. You know, they're controlled discourse, which of course has its place. But there's something about the kind of messiness of conversation, which is proper to a grace that finds its fullest expression in a human being, in Jesus, you know? That why would we expect this to all be neat and tidy? Because we're not neat and tidy. The recent research that we've done particularly with the way in which faith is formed demonstrates, I think, really clearly that for most people, if you ask them where their faith was formed, it wasn't because of some course or some spiritual experience, Eucharist or preaching even. It's to do with a collection of moments, almost like little beads on a, I rather controversially say, ecumenically, beads on a rosary. It could be beads on a necklace, but, you know, they're kind of little moments that have somehow been strung together, made up of fragmented conversation that begin to make sense over a lifetime. And for most people, that is the way in which we learn our faith and come to understand more about God. 

I'm reminded that some people that I talk to on the podcast, when I talk about prayer, some people talk about having a conversation with God as their kind of prayer. Not everyone. Some people seem to feel, I don't know whether they just don't say that that's how they pray, or whether they really stick to kind of more formal prayers. But a number of people talk quite freely about having a conversation with God and finding that the most comfortable way for them to pray, and I think that's quite interesting too. 

Yeah. That's absolutely right. I mean, a colleague of mine has written a little book on prayer. Ashley Cocksworth brought my attention to this. You know, one of the earliest words, Latin words used for prayer in spiritual writing was conversatio. It is to do with conversation. Of course, Teresa of Avila talks about prayer as the conversation between two friends. When you asked that first question about my own kind of faith, where it started, I don't know, other than it was a gift, where this came from because it wasn't my parents for sure. But ever since I can remember, I’ve talked to God conversationally. I just assumed you could do that. The kind of experience of the Catholic charismatic movement in my teens probably strengthened that instinct in sort of saying, Well no, this is a thing. And that you can expect in some complicated ways, and sometimes they need discerning, to have God answer you. And yeah, I'm always slightly horrified when I meet adult Christians for whom prayer isn't like that. I just wonder what it is we're failing to hand on about our faith. All the saints, all our tradition talks about that kind of conversation with God and yet you still meet faithful, committed lifetime Catholics and other Christians as well for whom the idea of actually conversing with God is still rather strange or troubling or even suspect. 

Yeah, I'm with you on that. I like a conversation with God. 

I don't always like what He says back, but you know -.

Just because you have studied conversation at a deeper level in this context, I just wondered what you think. So listeners are hearing an edited version of the conversation. So I have the conversation with my guest, and I try and give space to my guest more than myself. But then I go away and edit it, and I kind of use my own judgment, and I tidy up some of those pauses and gaps and mis-steps just to make it flow for the listener. Okay? And so I'm really conscious that what the listener is hearing is a sanitised version of the conversation. And I kinda think that's okay because it's for a podcast and you weren't there and you're doing your ironing and you don't wanna be waiting holding the iron, waiting for the conversation to get going again to keep ironing or whatever. But I wonder what you think about whether there's something I ought to be thinking about in the way that I do the editing or whether there's some pitfalls there, whether there's something people are missing by - of course, it's not quite the same as being in the real conversation. But what are your thoughts about the editing process?

Yeah. It's such a difficult thing because the same thing happens in in the research I do in that you can't when you look at the -. Particularly if you look at a transcript of a conversation, sometimes it's just incoherent. It amazes me sometimes when I read these conversations that we actually understood each other at all, but we did. And I think that's part of the mystery. And I've thought about this over the years, and I think there are things we can do to witness to that messiness and that bumpiness. But at the end of the day, the products, whether it's a podcast or a book or an essay, whatever it is, is not the conversation. And I think that's the thing that I have to keep coming back to. You notice a lot in my kind of academic world, people will often use the term conversation to describe a sort of discourse between two sets of ideas or a kind of correlation of different points of view and I’m thinking that is not a conversation. It just isn't. Not in the sense that I want to talk about conversation. And similarly, when I write about conversation, I've stopped having a conversation. But what I always try and do, and the people I, the co authors that I, work with as well, what we always try and do is to name the problem that what we're doing is something which is tidied up and that there may be other people who may have had that same conversation and come away with other things. That's the thing about conversation, that when you edit, when I reflect on conversations, when I integrate them with theological thinking, this is just, this is my interpretation. And when we do that, we've already lost the conversation. But what this means is at the end of the podcast, at the end of the book, at the end of the paper, there needs to always be a kind of push outwards to sort of say, Okay. In doing this, I'm making a certain kind of privileged contribution to what I hope is an ongoing conversation out there in the world. But this is not a finished product. I don't yet do podcasts. I am not aware of the kind of fine arts that are involved. But I think there may be ways of not making things too tidy and allowing certain kinds of overlapping of speech, for example. One of the things we try and do, myself and James Butler, who I've been working with for the last seven years or so, when we write, we try to sort of almost subvert the expectations of a linear text and actually try and think about different ways of presenting material so that people will be challenged into less neat and tidy ways of reasoning. You know, the academic training is that you have a kind of linear way of thinking. It's not how conversations work. We work in a much more kind of spiralic way where you go over the same ground, but you get somewhere new. You know, it's not just round and round in circles. It is sometimes, but hopefully not always. So, yeah, sort of keeping some of the rough edges, I think, is important, but also the invitation to treat whatever the product is, whether it's written or recorded, as not a thing in itself, but a contribution to a bigger conversation that needs to take place elsewhere. Otherwise, all we've got are products, and that's not what I think is gonna stimulate growth and renewal and openness to the Spirit. 

That's really helpful. I think a product is not a living thing, is it? I will reflect on that a bit because I am always struggling against being a perfectionist myself. So doing a podcast has been really helpful for my own growth in that I have to park the perfectionism, and I think that's really good for me, but I'm sure there's more rough edges I can leave in conversations. But I do think when the conversation goes out into the world in its edited form, not the real conversation, but in the podcast episode - Listeners, I hope you are hearing it and making sense of it yourself and taking something away from it different from each other, you know, and that it's part of shaping your faith in some tiny way, even though you aren't here for the actual conversation. I feel we're drawing to a close, but I often ask people towards the end about whether there's a particular prayer or scripture that has spoken to you over the years that comes straight away into your mind. 

So many things kind of rush into my mind, I suppose. There are two phrases from John's gospel that stick in my mind. One is ‘consecrate us in the truth’. I think that for me, there's something about my vocation, which I understand in terms of consecration towards truth. So there's a sort of sense that the heart of the kind of theological task for me is the desire to know God, insofar as God can be known. And so this is always, particularly within the Catholic tradition, about knowing truth. And that that can be truth about electronics or truth about philosophy or sociology because it's all true, and so it takes us to God – that’s a very kind of Aquinas thing. So I've been consecrated in the truth, but alongside that in John, in that long high priestly prayer, it's constant references to joy and the fullness of life that God wants us to be joyful. And in the Johannine letters as well, I'm writing this to you so your joy can be complete, you know? This constant kind of call to joy. 

I'm very interested that truth came up there because I think sometimes we can imagine that those ordinary conversations in all their fumblingness are lacking, but actually truth is there too, as we've discussed. So I think that's really helpful. 

You just reminded me of a story there that there's a big Catholic tradition that we have an instinct for truth. So, but you're right that people are very suspicious. Some people are very suspicious about my emphasis on conversation because it doesn't seem to get at the truth. People think the truth is this definite thing that you can sort of state and then you know it's true. And an example of that, I was giving a presentation of this work to a group of Christian educators. I was talking about how, you know, people learn their faith through conversation, you know, with their neighbours at the school gates, with God, whatever. One of the remarks was, 'But how do we know they're learning the right things?' And I just thought that was a really telling omen about an epistemic inequality, I suppose, which defines clericalism really. Sorry, that's a bit technical, but the sort of sense that we know what they should be learning rather than actually trusting what is part of our Catholic social thought, which is, you know, that every person, that a part of our dignity is that we have the instinct for what is true and what is good. And actually trusting that people of goodwill are actually figuring this out and learning about it. Not without scripture or, you know, we need those other things as well. But that there is that basic work can be done daily by people, in faith. 

And it's being done.

Absolutely, it is being done. Even without people knowing it's being done. And if I'm allowed a third thing, and this figured very significantly in in the most recent book, it's the theological virtues. People always think about Corinthians, the thing on the body, and then about love. And people focus on the body as an image of the church, And I find that unsatisfactory in all sorts of ways that I won't bore you with. But more and more I find compelling the fact that that ends, all that stuff of that we think of in terms of church order and gifts and talents and all the stuff that, I have to say, church leaders draw on to make things happen very often. In the end, it all comes down to faith, hope and love. That's the more excellent way. And I think in a way you can see that in the conversation we've had that that is not only the end point, but that's also the start point if you really want to know what it is to get to know God. It's about those three things faith, hope, and love.

I'll put links to your work in the episode notes, Clare, so people can follow-up because I think people will want to. Listen, it's been really great talking to you. It really has. I've enjoyed our conversation about conversation. I think there's so much more we could say, of course. Another thing about the podcast episodes I find is that it’s just a glimpse into our shared understanding of faith. I think your own summary there about the scripture that means something to you and to finish on Faith, Hope and Love, I'm not going to try and improve on that. Thank you for spending some time today then, Clare. That's been absolutely great. This is a worthy episode of the podcast.

Really good to be with you, Theresa, and thanks so much for all that you're doing with this podcast, which I love. 

Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time. I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. A new episode is released each Wednesday. Follow all kinds of Catholic on the usual podcast platforms. Rate and review to help others find it. And follow our X, Twitter, and Facebook accounts @KindsofCatholic. You can comment on episodes and be part of the dialogue there. You can also text me if you're listening to the podcast on your phone, although I won't be able to reply to those texts. Until the next time.