Reflections on this year’s Northumbria Community Easter weekend talks

A few weeks ago a physio was chatting to me, talking about the impact of the pandemic on her and her patients. I was interested, because I was aware I had struggled to pinpoint the precise effects of COVID on me. ‘They are all so angry now’, she said. ‘I have to absorb their anger as well as doing the work I’ve always done’.

I’ve been mulling over her comment ever since. Why so much anger? I think the anger comes from fear: life feels less safe now. The disintegration of the NHS leaves many patients fearful. The loss of trust in governments, the fear of environmental destruction, of bankruptcy and of war bring more anxiety now to all of us. We are all exiled from the life we knew.

For me my particular fear is of not belonging anywhere; my relationship with the church I worked in broke down in the pandemic and institutional church is no longer a safe place for me, which is a huge loss. Since I was a child I have belonged in a church: now traumatic experiences mean I can only stay on the edge. I have to look for belonging elsewhere, and it’s harder to find.

How can we sing about the faithfulness of God in such a context, when everything we have ever known feels less secure? Singing praise doesn’t feel like the right response, if we’re honest. Singing requires a level of trust that is hard to drum up.

When I took my fear and dislocation to a standard Good Friday service it didn’t connect. Being told Jesus died to forgive my sins didn’t help with the brokenness I brought. It wasn’t my sins I was bothered about. It was the fragmentation of the structures that held my life together. I know the Cross can speak to so much more than a need for forgiveness, but the service I attended only gave the standard unidimensional description of salvation.

How grateful I was, then, to find Catherine talking about the Hero’s journey as her introduction to the Community’s Easter weekend. When the urgent issue is insecurity rather than personal sin, thinking about the cross as Jesus accompanying us through the Hero’s journey is so much more helpful. Jesus was the recipient of appalling injustice, and what is currently most important to me about the Cross is that it means he walks with me in empathy when I face my own crucifying moments. The Cross speaks not only when we are sinners (as we are repeatedly told) but also when we have been sinned-against, betrayed, when our world has collapsed around us, and when we are full of fear. He knows how it is.

Sarah H and Dan talked of facing fear on pilgrimage: Sarah in the fog, Dan in the desert. Both found Jesus there with them, understanding the fear. How come Jesus knew to do that rather than whisking the problem away? How come Jesus knew that simply being an empathetic presence would make so much difference?

Because he learned it from a woman.

This was my biggest revelation this Easter. Jesus was prepared to learn from a woman. For me, a woman who has struggled with being sidelined and silenced in the institutional church, this is the most enormous relief. Jesus washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, because (unlike certain of my colleagues) he was prepared to learn from a woman. I understand Edward made a similar observation in the Maundy Thursday liturgy. Mary of Bethany, with her pound of nard, had taught Jesus to express empathy through the washing of feet. Whereas his disciples had refused to tolerate him talking of his impending death, she had quietly listened. After deeply hearing him, she then attended to his fear and emotional pain with the perfume, recognizing his impending burial. His profound gratitude for her empathy lies behind his support of her in the face of Judas’s complaint.(John 12 :7)

I think that is why he washed the feet of his disciples a few days later. He had experienced the power of this action himself. He wanted to use it to express his participation in their distress. He wanted them to have a ‘share with him’..(John 12: 13 NJB) to have shared something with him that might help to carry them through the next awful days. He was going to enter into the pain of the world the next day in a way they couldn’t possibly understand, but he was relying on bodily knowing to enable them to receive his empathy through their feet.

So as I face my loss of trust in the institutional church and the loosening of my social networks, my Hero walks with me. My Hero with his huge heart knows it all and aches with me. My Hero, who is prepared to kneel at my feet if that is what it takes to communicate how much he cares, comes with me in the descent of my Hero’s journey. And his solidarity and empathy give me something to sing about – a song of home, as Sarah P put it – as I begin to emerge from the depths of exile.

The Northumbria community talks that I refer to in this article can be found here – scroll right down to Easter 2023