In common with many churches, St James’s Piccadilly, where I am Rector, holds concerts and other cultural events. A few weeks ago, I sat in the dark in the church, listening to original music played live by an artist I had never heard of before that night. The American singer-songwriter John Grant was performing as part of the Piccadilly Piano Festival curated by our new Creative Team. I had been intrigued because Grant advertised the gig on Instagram and it sold out in 30 minutes. He has dedicated fans who must have missed hearing him play live during the pandemic, and this was his only performance in London this year, so it had become a hot ticket.
It’s always an interesting experience, seeing a place you know well in a different light and different context. His voice—rough, emotional—was mesmerising. And as I looked around, I could see that a significant portion of people had come to this gig on their own. As the songs began, and the vibe became more obvious, I saw that the power of this music was that it was reaching into the heart of each person there and was somehow singing them into believing they were not alone.
Another layer of meaning was added, in that Grant often writes from his experience of growing up in a household with conservative Methodist values, which became increasingly at odds with his own realisation that he was gay. That same day as he was singing in our church, the Church of England nationally had taken the decision to retain its traditional teaching that marriage can only be between one man and one woman, while simultaneously saying that parish priests like me were now permitted to hold services of blessing for same-sex couples. It occurred to me that the debates the church has about this—which can range from arid to toxic to anywhere in between—must seem either incomprehensible or downright cruel to a public who, most of them, live their lives without reference to organised religion. That night, at least in one church in central London, hundreds of people heard a different, compassionate and humane story.
One of Grant’s songs sounded to me like Easter in melodic form. Glacier describes the isolation Grant feels when people quote the Bible at him, condemning him for being a gay man. In thinking about this and writing it down, he has come up with a vivid picture: “This pain, it is a glacier moving through you. Carving out deep valleys and creating spectacular landscapes.”
The Lebanon-born poet Kahlil Gibran wrote something similar when, in the 1920s, he crafted the thought that “the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain”.
These are poetic and yet theologically orthodox ways of describing Holy Week and Easter. The suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus is a moving story: public adulation, false accusations, the turning of the crowd in response to the abuse of religious and political authority, the betrayal by friends, a sham trial, condemnation and state execution. The story is not for the faint-hearted. It is violent, convicting; revealing of human hubris, polarisation, fear and complicity. In short, it is a story for our time.
And yet the events are also woven with miracles: with the kindness of strangers, the enduring love of women, with the presence and promise of God. This promise is that the forces of death cannot triumph, however much evidence there is in this life to the contrary. The meaning of Easter is that life wins: and it’s a life that is not pain-free but abundant, fierce, brave, full of joy and, in the end, revealed to be eternal.
The inexorable tragedy of the last days of Jesus, and the inexhaustible mystery of the empty tomb, demand from all who encounter them not simply a logical consideration of the possibility of such events, but a willingness to listen for the lyrical melody that is let loose into the world by the death of Christ. Jesus dies alone and forsaken, hollowed out by the cruelty and collusion of which every one of us is capable. But Christians imagine that the melody unleashed by Jesus’ death and resurrection is echoed in the farthest reaches of the universe. It is a song that tells us life is eternal and love is immortal. That death is only a horizon, and that an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight (an image used in a prayer by Bishop Brent, 1862–1929).
This song tells us that the glacier of pain, isolation and suffering that human beings mete out to one another, on every continent in every language and for a thousand different reasons, is given irreducible focus and meaning by the sufferings of Christ in his last days. And it tells us that if human beings allow the worldly experiences of pain to move through us, the reality is that, rather than relying on a simplistic hope for a happy ending that never comes, a new landscape is carved, revealing—as John Grant’s lyric goes on to say—precious minerals and nourished ground. We discover an irreversibly changed scene: one that, for anyone who wants to look for it, is lit up by the enigmatic dawn of Easter day.
Some of the ideas in this article can also be found on the St James’s Piccadilly blog
