Jesus' Spirituality of Authentic Subjectivity and COVID-19's Shadow Pandemic
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Violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, is a "shadow pandemic" growing amidst the COVID-19 crisis. According to the United Nations it needs a global collective effort to stop it.1 In my own country, Ireland, while almost all other crime type fell during the period of the most severe COVID-19 restrictions, attacks on women aged in their 30s and over surged.2 The Irish Policing Authority has dubbed the surge in domestic violence during the period "the second pandemic."3 An Irish Catholic bishop warned of a "hidden silent pandemic" of domestic violence which becomes more prevalent when COVID restrictions are introduced.4
In this article I will focus on the biblical Jesus in his relations with women and do so from within a spirituality studies framework. My aim is to highlight his practice as a spirituality resource in the Christian tradition for addressing this violence.
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AUTHENTIC SUBJECTIVITY AS A SPIRITUALITY FRAMEWORK
The spirituality framework that will guide my reading of the practice of Jesus is authentic subjectivity.5 Truth and goodness do not exist in the out-there-now, waiting to be looked at, as though human subjectivity could be bypassed in order to arrive at knowledge of what is so and of what ought to be done. Instead, we journey to truth and the good to be done consistent with it through our subjectivity. Self-attention discloses that there is an inherent and normative desire at work in the human subject when they are engaged in knowing and choosing. Living in fidelity to the orientation and standard of that desire is what I mean by authentic subjectivity. This form of subjectivity is the route to objectivity which means that authentic subjectivity and objectivity are correlative. We detect this desire for authenticity through being attracted as experiencing subjects to attend to relevant data; we detect its dynamic structure by the inner effect of being pressured within our subjectivity to move beyond experiencing data to raising questions for understanding; continuing evidence of this exigent desire is provided when we are not content to settle in our subjectivity for any interpretation arrived at through understanding, and are led instead to move on to become judging subjects by comparing different interpretations until we are satisfied which one is true, or most probably true; evidence that the dynamic desire is still not satisfied can be detected by an inner call requiring us to evaluate different possible courses of action in order to choose which is at the standard of forwarding what is good and worthwhile in the light of what we have come to know; and, finally, this unfolding receptive, relational, reflective, responsible, and reflexive desire to do what is beautiful, true, and good can enter the sphere of gratuitous loving.
When we are engaged in the dynamic process of knowing and choosing the methodological6 desire for authenticity in our subjectivity sets the standard for the quality of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding needed7 if we are to correlate objectively with the reality of ourselves and the historical world to which we are always already connected from within our subjectivity. The effort and commitment to live from such a foundation and in its concomitant horizon of meaning and value is a spirituality. It makes us ask and answer along the journey of our lives: what am I saying and making of myself and the world in the way I attend or refuse to attend to experience, question or refuse to question experience, judge or refuse to judge my understanding about my experience and that of others, decide to act, or not, on the basis of my judgement, and become, or refuse to become a better and more loving person. We receive, relate to, reflect on, and respond to ourselves, each other, and the world through how faithful we are, or are not, to this normative, dynamic, and methodological desire at the core of ourselves as human. [End Page 90]
It must also be said, of course...
