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.
