Life support
THE recent 40th anniversary of Live Aid took me back to the 20th anniversary and the Live 8 concerts in 2005. They were timed to put global poverty on the agenda of the Gleneagles G8 summit, and I needed to be at Hyde Park to report on the opening London show. Unfortunately, I was on a retreat with a dozen other deacons before our priesting the following day. Fortunately, it was a silent retreat.
I got up early on the Saturday and left my colleagues to their meditations while I slipped across London for my own. I arrived backstage in time to see Paul McCartney bowing in prayer with the members of U2, before they all took to the stage to open the show with the Beatles song “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”: “It was 20 years ago today. . .”
The biggest pop and rock acts in the world followed all day as a global audience in the hundreds of millions tuned in. Watching it again on the BBC’s excellent documentary series Live Aid at 40: When rock ’n’ roll took on the world (TV, 18 July) — culminating in the G8’s announcement of complete debt cancellation for the poorest countries, and an additional £50 billion in development assistance — I was struck by how quickly everything changes.
Twenty years ago, global poverty was in the political conversation; now, the DfID is history, and UK aid is hoovered up by other cash-strapped government departments. Donald Trump and Elon Musk may have fallen out, but not before DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency — killed off USAID. A study in The Lancet estimates that US development assistance in the past two decades helped to prevent 90 million deaths. By 2030, the closure of USAID could lead to the deaths of an additional 14 million people.
Back in 2005, I filed my copy and swapped the rock show for the retreat house. If anyone had any questions, they couldn’t ask them. I settled in with everyone else to watch Match of the Day in silence.
Strong-arm tactics
WE ARE not long back from a few weeks living in the Abbey on the Isle of Iona. We first visited before we had children, returning every year since, now with children of our children. The allure of this maverick Celtic community, with its twin drives of action and contemplation, and its earthy liturgies, never fades. As someone who has an allergic reaction to many forms of institutional religion, I am always struck by the appeal of this community to those who have found church impenetrable or hostile. In recent years especially, LGBTQI people have found here a door into church which is open.
My partner, Meg, recently completed the two-year training to become a full community member, one of 300 around the world. Inspired by the Columban tradition and Benedictine communities, members commit themselves to a fourfold Rule of daily prayer, working for peace, meeting in local groups, and mutual accountability. The last is the weirdest to the contemporary mind: they disclosing to one another how they use their time and resources, from bank balance to carbon footprint. But it is an accountability of friendship, not fear, and less hard-core than the old-school Benedictine approach: “If [any pilgrim] has been found gossipy and contumacious in the time of his sojourn as guest, not only be he not joined to the body of the monastery but also it shall be said to him that he depart. If he does not go, let two stout monks, in the name of God, explain the matter to him.”
Sun without a sphere
WHILE on Iona, I joined a Zoom meeting with other members of our London congregation during which a team of Eco Church judges quizzed us on our green progress. A few weeks later, we were awarded the coveted gold status. The air-source heat pump replacing the gas heating will have helped, along with the new solar panels. But my hunch is that the decision was swung by a poetic remix of Psalm 23, written on a visit to Iona by Amelia Turncliffe, now in training for ordination: “God is my solar panel, I shall not be in the dark. . .”
Damage limitation
AS MOST of us continue to live in paralysis or denial, a climate emergency demands a multi-faceted approach. On the basis that most of the clergy, like most newspaper columnists, eventually run out of things to say, we often invite guest speakers on Sunday mornings. Recently, we hosted the climate protester the Revd Sue Parfitt, 83, who has time on her hands, since her local permission to officiate has been suspended while she awaits trial on charges of criminal damage.
The queer Quaker Bayard Rustin, forgotten strategic genius in the American civil-rights movement and the main organiser of the March on Washington 62 years ago this month, also had his “permission to officiate” withdrawn. That was by fellow leaders of the civil-rights movement, who voted him out of leadership as they couldn’t handle the fact that he was a gay man and proud of it. Rustin’s once said: “In every community we need a group of angelic troublemakers.”
Rhythm of life
IN LONDON over the summer, I need to hawk my new poetry collection, and most weeks I’m on the lookout for a poetry night with an open-mic slot.
Inexplicably, I am sometimes among the older contributors. While there are generational stylistic differences in form and delivery, I am struck by how poetry is our common attempt to process this baffling life. It might be therapeutic, but it is often quite religious. Twenty- and thirty-something writers, in particular, routinely document their world of uncertainty, where anxiety is a daily companion, rent is impossible, addiction is commonplace, and sleep is never assured.
Comic, caustic, or confessional, a poem may be prefaced by a trigger warning, perhaps about sex or suicide. Sometimes, it’s more general. As one put it the other night, “Trigger warning: existential dread.” Few of their poems would be heard in the settings that we call church today, but some would sit well in the Bible, among the prophets or psalmists.
After a reading I gave in a pub in Finsbury Park, in north London, I was approached by a man wearing a Prince of Darkness T-shirt in honour of Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne, who had recently died. A heavy metal aficionado, he had appreciated some of my poems and, looking me up online while I was reading, had discovered that I once studied theology. So had he: “In my other life, I’m a praise and worship leader in our local church.”
The Revd Martin Wroe is a self-supporting Associate Vicar at St Luke’s, West Holloway, in north London. He will be reading from his new poetry collection, This Heart: Poems from the universe inside (Wild Goose Books) at the Greenbelt Arts Festival this month.