Jagged Edges: Stations of the Cross

Please note, you may find the content of this exhibition difficult, and it may resonate with you in ways you didn’t expect.

Please be kind to yourself and engage wisely.

If you need to speak with someone about anything that this exhibition raises for you, please seek out someone you trust.

Additional support is also available - find out more

FREE TO VIEW*

Jagged Edges:

Stations of the Cross

David Creese, Peter Locke & Sarah Troughton

18 February - 5 April at Canterbury Cathedral

What happens when survivors of church-related abuse use the Stations of the Cross as a means to speak both to their fellow survivors and to those who let them down in the communities where they were harmed?

Throughout Lent and Holy Week, to Easter Day, Canterbury Cathedral will host Jagged Edges: Stations of the Cross - a series of linocut prints, poetry and music based on the Stations of the Cross - produced by David Creese, Peter Locke and Sarah Troughton, in collaboration with the Chaplaincy to Survivors in Newcastle Diocese.

It arises from a project of engagement with victims and survivors of abuse and explores moral injury in the context of church-related abuse through the narrative of the Passion.

Three survivors have approached the Gospel Passion narratives, each through a different medium - linocut prints, music, poetry - to co-create their own Stations of the Cross.

About Jagged Edges Words from the creators Poems Music Feedback survey

‘Forgive Them’ - Linocut print by Sarah Troughton

* Free-to-view by anyone with a valid form of Cathedral sightseeing admission (including Cathedral Admission Ticket, Cathedral Pass or Friends’ Card), or those attending a service in the Quire.

Jagged Edges has been made possible with funding from the Bishop of Newcastle, The Newcastle Cathedral Lantern Project and the Diocese of Newcastle, and has kindly been loaned to Canterbury Cathedral by the Diocese of Newcastle and Newcastle Cathedral.

These resources are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

About Jagged Edges

An exhibition created by and for survivors of church-related abuse.

The stories of survivors of abuse, betrayed by the institution of their religion with the complicity of its leaders, may remind us of other stories. At the heart of the Christian faith are the stories of the betrayal, condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus with the complicity of the religious authorities. Told in the Gospel Passion narratives in the New Testament, they provide the contents of the form of Christian devotion known as the Stations of the Cross. Early Christians created the practice of ‘walking the way of the Cross’, tracing the path from Pilate's house, where Jesus was condemned to death, to Calvary, where he was crucified. By following in the steps of Jesus, participants sought to engage actively with his suffering. This form of devotion is still used in churches today, during the days leading up to Easter.

The Chaplaincy to Survivors in the Diocese of Newcastle brought together Sarah, David and Peter, all of whom have personal experience of church-related abuse, to explore the following question: What happens when survivors use the Stations of the Cross as a means to speak both to their fellow survivors and to those who let them down in the communities where they were harmed?

In Jagged Edges each survivor has approached the Gospel Passion narratives from her or his own perspective and through a different medium – linocut prints, music, poetry – to co-create their own Stations of the Cross. The title Jagged Edges reflects the unique elements of survivors’ individual experiences, which overlap but do not fit neatly together; it reflects the dissonant combination of God’s love and the harm done in and by God’s Church in those experiences; and it reflects the fact that survivors often engage with the Church from the periphery because that is where they feel safe. The new Stations draw meaningful connections between the shared narrative of Jesus’s suffering and the lived experience of individuals harmed in Christian churches. They invite us to look at Jesus’s trauma and to see it in a particular light: as a story of abuse and of God’s love for and solidarity with those who have been abused. They are also an invitation from survivors to the rest of the Church and beyond to engage in the work of repair, reconciliation and recovery.

Maggi Creese
Lead Officer, Chaplaincy to Survivors, Diocese of Newcastle

Words from the creators

David Creese

Visiting Fellow in Classics at Newcastle University

As a university student many years ago, I was invited to join a team of volunteers on a large project that was producing a new edition of one of the four accounts of the life of Jesus commonly referred to as ‘Gospels’. I was not studying theology, and I knew very little about the history of the text. I had been asked to participate because as a classicist I knew the language of the New Testament (an early form of Greek), and because the task was relatively simple: to read photographed pages of a Gospel-book copied by hand in the seventh century alongside a modern printed edition, and note any differences between the two. Hundreds of other early copies of the same Gospel were being read and compared by other volunteers.

When the page is undamaged and the writing is clear, the work is straightforward, but it requires close observation and patient attention to minute detail. It is a kind of reading that cannot be hurried.

The first pages I was given contained a passage from the Gospel of John recounting the civil trial of Jesus before the Roman provincial governor, Pontius Pilate, and his torture by Roman soldiers under Pilate’s orders (John 18-19). I was by no means unfamiliar with the story, but to read it like this - slowly and carefully in the original language, paying close attention to every stroke of an ancient pen - was an entirely different experience. The words hurt. They had not hurt this much in English, in the churches of my childhood.

The churches of my childhood had taught me this story, nevertheless: of what it is to be betrayed by people you trusted, to be harmed in body and mind by those whose actions are at variance with their words, and to be excluded by your own religious community and its leaders for speaking the truth. It was not by reading and preaching the Gospels that those churches taught me this story. Actions always teach us more than words.

Still, words can make meaningful connections: between times and places, between past and present, between one person and another. Sometimes these connections are too painful to bear, and we turn our attention elsewhere. I was not ready, as a student, to trace the pain to its source. Over twenty years later, the invitation to co-create this Stations of the Cross with two other survivors of church-related abuse has provided an opportunity to revisit more safely the difficult connections the biblical story raises for me, and for the three of us. In these words, images and music, we speak not only for ourselves, but to and for those who have either lived through similar things, or have felt betrayed, outraged or forsaken by a Church whose leaders have exercised power without love and failed to protect the vulnerable.

The connection between our experiences of abuse in the Church and the sufferings of Jesus may not seem as obvious to some as they do to us. Evoking such a connection, let alone exploring it creatively as we have done, may even seem inappropriate. But as Serene Jones puts it in her book Trauma and Grace (2009), ‘the mirrored cross reflects our own stories of suffering back’. In the initial stages of the work we found Michael Trainor’s readings of the Gospel Passion narratives in The Body of Jesus and Sexual Abuse (2014) a particularly rich source of ideas and inspiration. For many survivors of church-related abuse, the visceral connection between this story and our own is as painfully clear as it was to the apostle Paul: ‘For I bear on my body the marks of Jesus’ (Galatians 6.17).

By exploring this connection together in this way, we are attempting a kind of reparative work that begins simultaneously from the jagged edges of the Church and from inside its wounded heart. One of the problems we have had to face throughout the creative process is how to do reparative work at all in a Church so deeply morally injured by its own failings. Quite early on we realised that it would be essential to set aside the traditional Stations of the Cross, and allow ourselves to be guided by the ways the story spoke to each of us through our own individual experiences not only of harm, but of the painful pairing Jones calls ‘trauma and grace’. This led us to conclude that our Stations of the Cross must extend beyond Jesus’s death to include his resurrection and the incipient repair of his broken relationship with Peter on the beach. By framing our Stations so as to look forward to that moment, and to look backward from it, we have confronted the challenge of addressing a morally injured Church by envisioning repair through the lens of trauma, and trauma through the lens of repair.

In approaching the Passion narratives for this project, I began where I had left off: with the Greek text of the Gospels. The uncomfortable intimacy of working at such close quarters with these accounts of Jesus’s suffering, death and resurrection is what gave rise to the form of the resulting poems. Each begins with a phrase from one of the Gospels, quoted in English and in Greek. The lines that follow draw on this phrase, or on a single word which may have more than one meaning, or on another word or phrase it evokes from another text. Where relevant, such words are noted at the foot of the page. I have drawn widely from passages elsewhere in the Bible that intersect with the themes of each Station.

References to these passages are provided below:

I Mark 14.37, Luke 6.41–2.
II John 19.1.
III Isaiah 6, Mark 14.63–4, Matthew 23.5, 2 Chronicles 26.19–21, Matthew 26.67–8.
IV 2 Kings 18.21 (Isaiah 36.6); Matthew 27.28, 12.20 (Isaiah 42.3).
V Hosea 10.7–13; Luke 23.27–31, 21.6.
VI Lamentations 1.12, Mark 15.26, Luke 10.2–4, Mark 12.7–8.
VII John 1.22–3, Matthew 11.7.
VIII Mark 15.33–7 (Psalm 22.1), 1 Kings 17.6, John 19.28, Genesis 8.6–8, Luke 12.24.
IX John 18.28; Exodus 32.4; John 18.13–14, 18.24,19.21; Exodus 10.14, 12.3, 7.20, 8.5–6; John 19.32–4; William Blake, And Did Those Feet (from the preface to Milton); Matthew 23.25, 2.14–15, 27.24 (Deuteronomy 21.6–9); Genesis 2.17; Matthew 27.5; Luke 22.48; John 19.22; Exodus 24.8; John 18.38.
X Matthew 28.4.
Epilogue Matthew 14.30.

Peter Locke

Organist and composer

Aside from the daily round of practice for liturgies and concerts, I have been devoting much of my time to composition and arranging and to the creation of these soundscapes. At the initial stage of composition, I use traditional methods: piano, pencil and manuscript. Notation programmes enable my work to be formatted in a virtual instrumental medium (e.g. a String Quartet or a Jazz/Rock Combo). Once the composition is in the digital domain, it can be further arranged and scored. I then use synthesisers to enhance the traditional instrumental texture and to create ambience.

Suffering. Shame. Solitude. Silence. These all find a voice. Through the process of disclosure and peer support we, who have been morally harmed, can articulate that voice. We are listened to. We are not treated with contempt or disdain. As measured against the stature of our Lord, flawed and frail we are. As human beings, we can nevertheless stand up and be counted. As Christians we learn that above all else, the only power worth having is the power to become children of God (John 1:12).

Disclosure and the subsequent process of engagement with peer support is not a soft option. For the individual survivor, navigating the complex topology of his or her inner space, that which, at various times, in various locations and in various ways has been violated or crossed, requires strength and courage. Healing begins in the place of pain.

My experience with peer support has encouraged me to look deeper into events that form the substance of my story. Things happened to me that should not have happened. I blamed myself. I felt ashamed.

The experience of working on this project with Sarah and David has helped me to rebuild self-confidence and trust in others. I have a long way to go, but I am using my musical skills and knowledge to help others, and I hope that this will continue.

The Collect for purity reminds us that, from Almighty God, no secrets are hid. We are all accountable. We are all entitled to trust, and to be trusted. We are all entitled to have our voices heard. We need confidence to speak and to be listened to in confidence, and with confidentiality. We need neither gossip, nor slander.

I hope that the Church will continue to work to be a Christian presence in every community, including the community of the hurt, injured and wounded.

Sarah Troughton

NHS psychiatrist and Associate Dean for Veterans’ Health

The process of lino printing is symbolic: a perfect sheet of lino is cut into or damaged - relating to the experience of trauma. Then it is covered in ink - relating to the shame, guilt and self-condemnation experienced after the abuse. Next, a sheet of paper is laid onto it, hiding it from view - relating to our stories being denied, avoided or dismissed. However, after a process involving significant pressure and effort, an image is revealed with its own story. And it is beautiful and powerful, even with its imperfections - this represents our story as it is before you now.

The details of the faces are intentionally absent in the images. This is to leave space for you to consider the emotions of the individuals involved in each scene and to put yourself in their place, in order to reflect on their experiences.

When recalling a traumatic event, no two versions are the same. This is because the laying down and retrieval of memories can be impaired during a trauma. Individuals who experience extreme stress or threat can become detached from their emotions, thoughts and surroundings. This helps them cope at the time by distancing themselves from the overwhelming emotional intensity of their experience. In such experiences, recall of individual details of an event can be enhanced, whereas the ability to connect and sequence events or remember contextual details can be impaired. This leads to
a fragmented or disorganised memory of events, which may include memory gaps or distortions. The usual narrative structure of such memories breaks down. Replacing a coherent, linear recollection, the memory might be recounted as disjointed images, emotions, or sensations. This fracturing can make it difficult for the traumatised to process and make sense of what has happened to them.

The four Gospel accounts of the traumatic events leading up to and including the crucifixion of Jesus seem to reflect the fragmentation that occurs in traumatic memory.

The events recounted in the Passion narratives were transmitted by people who cared deeply about Jesus and who were affected directly not only by what was happening to him but also by a direct threat to their own security and by their own moral injuries. The accounts of the events vary as they get closer to the most distressing parts of the trauma, where the stories are even more fragmented or dissonant, don’t flow in the same way and focus on different aspects of what was happening, with some details altogether absent in some of the accounts. The edges of these stories are jagged.

In our work, Peter, David and I are recalling our own individual traumatic and morally injurious experiences in the Church, with all their commonalities and differences. Our pieces don’t map on to each other directly, and this is intentional. The edges are jagged.