One of my favourite buildings is the chapel of St Peter’s-on-the-wall, the oldest chapel still in use in England. You can find just outside the village of Bradwell-on-sea, which is on the Essex coast. Near to the chapel is the Othona Community, a kind of Christian holiday camp first set up after the Second World War to promote peace and reconciliation. Ten years ago, my husband Adrian and I celebrated our marriage at Othona, holding a service in the chapel on a very cold April day. It’s a place full of very special memories.
It’s called St Peter’s-on-the-wall because the chapel was built in the 7th century out of the remains of a Roman fort by St Cedd. In the Church of England, St Cedd is remembered on October 26th. It’s been said that a saint is someone we haven’t done enough research on, but I have a big soft spot for saints and the inspiring stories we tell about them, as long as we remember that saints aren’t a special category of especially good people. All it takes to be a saint is to be faithful. If we are trying to be faithful to God, with all our imperfections, then that’s enough. The church is a community of saints.
Cedd didn’t originally come from Essex. He travelled down the coast to Essex from the island of Lindisfarne in Northumbria where he grew up under the care of another saint, St Aidan. Aidan founded a monastic community on Lindisfarne, after travelling from the island of Iona in Scotland. The style of Christianity Aidan brought with him was an Irish or ‘Celtic’ style. Cedd had a number of brothers, including St Chad whose relics are held by St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham. Just as Chad was sent to be bishop of Mercia (what we now call the West Midlands), Cedd was sent to evangelise the East Saxons in Essex, and so he built St-Peter’s-on-the-wall.
Cedd is played in important role during one of England’s earliest Christian conflicts. About the same time that Aidan was bringing the Irish style of Christianity to Britain from the North, a Roman style of Christianity was brought to Britain by Augustine of Canterbury from the South. These styles of Christianity organised themselves differently, their monks cut their hair differently, and they calculated the dates of Easter in different ways. The date of Easter became a particular problem when the King and Queen of Northumbria were following different styles of Christianity, Irish and Roman, and so were fasting and celebrating at different times. This made the life of the Northumbrian court very difficult. A decision was needed on which kind of Christianity would take precedence in Britain, and a Synod, a gathering of bishops, was held at Whitby, hosted by Abbess Hilda, another fascinating saint. The different parties at the Synod spoke different languages, including Old Irish, Old English and Latin, and this is where Cedd comes in. Cedd acted as a translator at the Synod, helping everyone to understand each other and come to a peaceable solution.
When thinking about language, translation and understanding one another, a couple of Bible stories come to mind: the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.1-9) and Pentecost (Acts 2.1-8). In the story of the Tower of Babel, everyone speaks the same language, and uses this ease of communication to build a tower. On the surface it might be hard to understand why this makes God so angry, as if God is jealous of our ability to build skyscrapers. But this isn’t really a story about building a tower. It’s about building empires. Babel is another name for Babylon, one of the largest empires of the ancient world. The word ‘Babylon’ has since become a symbol for all empires throughout history. The Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, talks a lot about Baylon, using it as a symbol of the Roman Empire. In the religion of Rastafari, Babylon is used as a name for modern day Western imperialism. Think of how Empires use language as a way to secure power. As a white English man, I was brought up to think I can travel anywhere in the world and find people who speak my language. English has spread across the globe because of England’s imperial ambitions. Indigenous languages have been supressed, whether that’s the outlawing of Welsh or Irish, or indigenous languages in the Americas, or making English the official language of government in British-ruled India. Even the idea that there’s a ‘correct’ way of speaking English, or the phrase ‘broken English,’ is part of this imperial project. Empires work on the assumption that one particular culture is ultimately superior to all other cultures that come under its control. The story of Babel is the story of God’s opposition to imperial ways of thinking.
The story of Pentecost has traditionally been seen as a reversal of the Babel story: from one language to many languages, back to understanding one another again. But theologian Willie James Jennings, in his book The Christian Imagination (2010), says it isn’t that simple. The gift of the Holy Spirit isn’t the gift of everyone speaking the same language. Everyone hears each other in their own language. The diversity of languages remains. What is different is that they understand each other. Whether this story happened exactly as described or not, the important thing I take away from this story is that the church we should expect to find filled with difference, where there’s a spiritual imperative to learn one another’s languages. We won’t understand one another by speaking the same language, by making everyone do Christianity in the same way. All we’ll be doing is imposing one culture onto everyone. We’ll understand one another only in a very limited way. Think of words in German or Welsh or any other language that can’t be translated accurately into English. One language can’t contain the breadth of human experience, just as no one style of Christianity can capture the depths of who God is. The true route to understanding and peace is through learning to talk about the world in each other’s languages. The way to unity is through diversity. The church needs to be a place where, like St Cedd, we commit to the hard work of translating and being multilingual.
There are two examples from science fiction that might help me make this point. The first is Doctor Who, the sci-fi tv series I’ve been in love with for most of my life. The alien time traveller called the Doctor, who until recently was always a white man, travels round the whole of space and time. Wherever the Doctor goes, everyone speaks English. This is because the Tardis, the Doctor’s ship, does the translation work. Rarely does the Doctor or their friends have to learn a new language and see time and space from a very different point of view. This is a Babel-style approach. A Pentecost-approach can be found in my second sci-fi example, the film Arrival (2016). This tells the story of aliens who arrive on earth and speak a language resembling nothing anyone has heard or seen before. They speak in low rumbles and clicks and write in circular inky splatters. Linguist Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) spends a lot of time learning this language only to find the language radically reshapes how she understands the world. In this film a different language isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a gift.
The church I worship at is called Inclusive Gathering Birmingham (IGB), and the congregation is made up of people who have taken long journeys to get here. We all live with a history of journeys, of people travelling the world by choice, of people being forcibly transported against their will, and of people taking journeys to find safety. The movement of people means the coming together of difference, different cultures and languages. We need to decide what to do with that difference. At IGB we believe the Holy Spirit has gathered us together, that the Holy Spirit dwells in each of us if we want it to, and that we’re each a precious child of God. We’re a church that wants to include everyone who wants to be a part of this. So often inclusion is promised with the condition that you must become like the rest of the group: “Everyone is welcome as long as you change to become like us.” At the Synod of Whitby, the decision was made that the Roman style of Christianity would become the official Christianity of Britain and that the Irish Christians would have to change for there to be peace. We perhaps lost a style of Christianity that could have proved useful for us today. Why couldn’t those different ways of being Christian have peacefully coexisted? I think there are ways in which IGB does inclusion really well. There are almost certainly ways we could do inclusion better. Are there ways in which we expect everyone to conform? What other languages do we need to learn? For example, are we able to see IGB through the lens of a wheelchair user, or are we waiting for a wheelchair user to turn up and do that work for us? The great challenge for me, as a white, English-speaking cis man is that I’m used to being at the centre of things. I’m used to expecting everyone to conform to my standards. How do I keep myself open to being changed by those who the dominant culture places on the edge?
Thank you, gracious God, for the diversity of cultures, languages, and perspectives in the UK, in my city of Birmingham and at IGB.
Thank you for all who follow in the footsteps of your faithful servant Cedd. Thank you for our translators and language teachers, for all the people who help us to communicate with one another.
Pour out your Holy Spirit on our community, give us ears to hear and tongues to speak. Bring down the dividing wall between us and make us one people, united not because we are all the same, but because we do the hard work of learning to understand one another.
In the name of the One who brings all to birth, Love’s Embodiment, and the Sacred Breath of Life. Amen
Jolly Quaker 