Sabbatical Soundings 8 - 1 in 3

Our road trip was about more than wildlife - I'm interested in human animals too! A couple of years ago we were in the Henry Ford museum in Detroit, Michigan in which the bus that Civil Rights Activist, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat is exhibited. I knew something of her story, but we decided to make Montgomery, Alabama, where the events took place part of our trip.

It was an interesting journey in itself from Mississippi, through small towns, along highways and state roads rather than on bland interstate highways. Travelling like this we began to get a sense of an America that was unfamiliar from previous trips to cosmopolitan, northern cities or laid back California. 

Here we passed farms, big and small. Enormous agricultural equipment, run-down houses, vast mansions, confederate flags and Trump yard signs combined to remind us how polarisation of economic, social and political perspectives and inequalities dominate the cultural landscape of twenty-first century USA  - as well as the UK and much of Europe. Arriving in Montgomery, we found our way to our hotel - a pleasant Marriott constructed out of three historical buildings right in downtown Montgomery. 

Our first stop the next day was a short walk to the Legacy Museum,
opened in April 2018. I knew that it was a museum about the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade but I was entirely unprepared for the profoundly moving experience that the museum represents. It takes the whole sweep of the history of the Black experience in the US over the past 400 years and divides it into four eras: enslavement, racial terror, segregation and the era which we're in now - mass incarceration. 

The museum is one of several Legacy Sites in Montgomery, created by the Equal Justice Initiative, a law practice set up by Bryan Stevenson to represent those who have limited access to legal representation in the criminal justice system, the vast majority of whom are black.

There is so much that I am still processing and will continue to learn and process from this experience. I left feeling like I had only scratched the surface, but in that time, had my entire worldview re-orientated to a previously unknown perspective. It was a similar feeling to the one I had after studying at the Holocaust Memorial in Yad Vashem - something like profound horror mixed with deep sorrow, and a determination not to let this be the last time I ever thought or spoke about the issues raised.

The museum is not just a history of the experience of slavery and civil rights, although both of those things are covered. The Equal Justice Initiative's contention is that slavery was not abolished, no matter what the 13th Amendment to the constitution says. Rather than being abolished, it has simply evolved across the years since then, based on the perverted and pervasive view that a black human is somehow "less than" a white human. Racism takes different forms in the 21st century and different forms in the UK from the US - but it has certainly not gone away.

The website has brilliant articles and images on it, but the summary of the story is in this really helpful video. 

There's far too much for one blog post - and this is something that I want to follow up with but here are three


(from many) shifts in perspective that the museum helped me to make:

• the Atlantic ocean, that we had crossed by sea to get to the US is a mass grave for approximately 2 million Africans, ripped from their homes and communities and forced onto ships for six weeks of hellish conditions where their destination was forced labour and, often, cruelty.  I have been reading the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book, Tarry Awhile by Selina Stone  . In it she reflects on the experience of forced movement for Black people and had this to say about the sea:

                "The sea, though beautiful, can also be a traumatic place for Black people owing to our ancestral experiences of it. For generations, of Black people, the sea represented forced movement from their homeland to plantations...... The sea can be a traumatic place. The deep is not void at all."

        Our own crossing seemed much less romantic after that.

• that lovely hotel we were staying in made from three historical buildings? One was the house of a wealthy family and the others next door were their warehouses - containing slave pens. The historical sign outside the house which is now an upmarket restaurant neglects to mention this but  I slept less comfortably that night. The Legacy museum puts an emphasis on the importance of place. Montgomery was the place of one of the largest domestic slave markets in the South. It occupies the site of a  After the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, the domestic slave trade exploded and the enslaved population of Alabama rose exponentially. Whereas I had previously been focussed on the horror of the slave ships crossing the Atlantic, it was the domestic slave trade which persisted until 1865 and which was no respecter of familial ties, that traumatised the black population even further.

• 1 in 3 black male babies born in the US today will be imprisoned during their lives. I thought of my son and  his mates. Tens of thousands of young men like them are incarcerated - some of them in bonded labour - with little hope of a life not blighted by injustice, poverty and crime. It's not just a US problem. Here in the UK, in January 2024, Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) accepted that police forces in the UK were still institutionally racist and too little progress had been made towards  reducing disproportionate outcomes for black and other minority ethnic people in the UK. (Article here) 
  

Photography is not allowed inside the Legacy museum, but I have included this photo from the nearby National Memorial for Peace and Justice. 

Sabbatical Soundings 7 - a flying start and gentle giants

Before leaving Florida, we stopped for a few hours in St Petersburg on Tampa Bay and made an unexpected discovery. It turns out that this was the site of the world's first commercial flight - a "flying boat" piloted by the world's first commercial airline pilot, Tony Jannus.

There's more about him on this website, but it was fun to watch the small planes take off and land and do circuits at the small airport and flying school on the bay. We also couldn't resist a photo of Andrew with his "original ancestor" in the world of aviation! 

After St Petersburg we made our way to Crystal River, where we stayed in a gorgeous hotel near the shorefront. 

It's a small town  - and we saw a lot of those in our travels - they truly are a world away from the big cities of our last US trip. But it's a small town with a big claim as the manatee capital of the world. Seeing a manatee was another thing I wanted to do on our travels and we went out on a boat (again!) one sunny afternoon and saw several of these gentle giants. The Kings Bay in Crystal River is fed by about 50 warm springs and so the water has a relatively consistent temperature of around 20 degrees Celsius. This means that in the winter, hundreds of endangered manatees who are warm-blooded mammals make the Bay their home and the environment is actively managed for their protection.

This is a juvenile manatee

It's also the only place in the US where swimming or boating near them is permitted. They're not easy to photograph but I did manage to get a couple of shots!

Crystal River looks idyllic with lovely waterfront homes and many opportunities for fishing, kayaking and enjoying the environment. But our boat guide also told the story of last summer's hurricane in August 2023 (news footage here showing the storm surge) which was swiftly followed by a tornado in October 2023  - news coverage here . We commented on the renovation work going on in our hotel when we arrived - and now we understood the reason why. This community has a deep understanding of both the beauty and the destructive power of nature. When I asked the hotel staff about the impact of the storms they found it hard to talk about this double blow in such quick succession. The storm surge from Hurricane Idylia took the water as high as the bottom of the letters on the front of Pete's Pier.

Sabbatical Soundings 6 - Not so dry land

We were finally off the ship and it seemed pretty straightforward to acquire landlegs. We picked up our hire car and ignoring all the other undoubted delights of Miami, we set off for the Everglades. For this bird-deprived lover of birds, it was a treat for the eyes and the soul. I am particularly fond of birds of prey and the immediate sight of dozens of vultures soaring made my heart sing. But amongst the rivers of grass, we saw many different varieties of egret, anhinga, vulture, osprey, spoonbill, ibis, heron and kite.

I'm not sure why I'm so fascinated with birds. I'm not a real expert and I wouldn't go searching for miles or sitting for hours in search of a rare sighting, but little gives me more joy than watching the birds on the feeders in my garden or the huge eagles, hawks and vultures that are encountered at my favourite place for a day out, the Hawk Conservancy Trust. There are quite a lot of different birds to be found in the Scriptures, and special mentions for my favourite -  eagles. I find myself drawn to their ability to see the world from a completely different perspective - and to be able to change that perspective frequently and quickly - in contrast to the entrenched positions humans are so capable of adopting.

The Miccosukee village

But we went to the Everglades to see an alligator, and we were not disappointed. We went out in an airboat, at a site run the Native American  Miccosukee tribe, where we also saw some traditional alligator wrestling and learned more about the struggle for indigenous people to survive in North America after the uninvited arrival of European colonists. 

On our airboat, we found our first alligator (as well as a camera-shy crocodile) in minutes, and enjoyed a small taste of this vast landscape whose ecodiversity makes it of enormous environmental importance.

Everglades alligator

A couple of days later we found ourselves in the Corkscrew swamp sanctuary boardwalk where a different swamp environment is rich with two hundred year old Cypress trees - as well as birds, alligators, turtles and raccoons. 

The green at the bottom of the trees is not solid ground - it is weeds on the water

Exploring the Everglades and the Cypress swamps was balm after a journey devoid of green leaves and birds. What a blessing to have been able to experience some of the richness and diversity of creation, including the humans who call it home.

Sabbatical Soundings Part 5 - out of time

 I realise that I hadn't recorded anything here of a significant week at the start of my Sabbatical. I joined with 23 other clergy for a consultation at St George's House, Windsor.

Here we are on the steps of St George's Chapel.

It was a remarkable experience for all kinds of reasons but we met deeply with God in and through one another and also by virtue of our remarkable surroundings.

At our introductory session, the facilitators joked that they hoped to create a safe space for exploring personal growth, but that this safe space was also guarded by police with automatic weapons and very smart-looking soldiers in bearskin hats. In that sense, we were pretty safe in there.

We had privileged access to the Chapel, open to us before and after the castle was open to the public. It's a beautiful space and the sense of history verges on the absurd. At Morning Prayer one day, the President remarked that this was the day the Church remembered Charles, King and Martyr, "who is of course buried just behind me" (Alongside Henry VIII and Jane Seymour which is itself another story)

11 monarchs are buried in the Chapel, including of course Her late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II and the late Duke of Edinburgh. Few of us who saw it will forget Prince Philip's funeral in April 2021 with the late Queen in a face mask, sitting on her own with only 30 people allowed to attend. There is something very moving about spending time at their graves, and it turns out that Windsor Castle had its own version of The Queue when it reopened following the Queen's funeral as thousands of people wanted to visit her final resting place. Interestingly, most visitors to the Castle now also visit St George's Chapel whereas before the late Queen's death, only about 50% of visitors did so.

There is therefor a sense of history and stability that is inescapable in that place.  It's in a place like Windsor that it is brought home to us that we are all part of something much bigger and many things will outlast us.

But it is also a place where the relationship between Church and State is very visible. The whole purpose of St George's is to pray for the monarch and the Order of the Garter, who are the monarch's closest companions. There are banners and crests for each of the Knights of the Garter - many former Prime Ministers, foreign royalty and members of the Royal Family. Earthly power and wealth are very much in evidence, and I couldn't help wondering what the vulnerable, utterly powerless infant Jesus in the beautiful crib scene  made of it all.

But the combination of the safe space and the sense of the importance of the place did, I think, help our group to create an openness to new insights and learning about ministry and ourselves, and it felt like we were there for much longer than five days.

One thing that only came to me on our penultimate day was also to do with the location. Windsor sits directly under the flight path for Heathrow airport and aircraft were our constant overhead companions. For my entire married life until now, we have been "under the aircraft", or at least had life greatly influenced by the demands of British Airways' flight schedule. There were times when my poor husband had no annual leave allocated during school holidays. It was impossible to plan far in advance for anything, unless he was awarded annual leave for things like family weddings and celebrations. I was a part-time single parent as his work took him away for things like concerts, assemblies, school events. All of this no longer applies since he has retired- and school concerts are not something we tend to go to any more. But it took a week of being under the aircraft at Windsor for this to truly sink in for me. 

It was a huge privilege to undertake that transition and to have space to contemplate a new phase of life in that place.

I have no photos of the Chapel as photography is not permitted inside - but there is the website where you can have a virtual tour. St George's Windsor

Sabbatical Soundings part 4 - All at sea

Random things I learned at sea (in no particular order)

• It is utterly mesmerising. It is in constant movement and never looks the same two seconds in a row. It is always interacting - with the wind, the light, the clouds, the sun. When the sunlight broke through the clouds and tickled the surface, it was a beautiful party that I felt like I wanted to dive into. I can see why people fall in love with ocean travel.
  
• 
  
  It is really boring (yes, I know, but I'm asking readers to do the grown up thing and hold two contradictory facts in our heads at the same time) It is endlessly dull and grey. When we were miles, hundreds of miles, from land, and all around was grey, I craved some other life. For days there were no birds, no life visible above the waves. For days there were no other vessels on the horizon. I can see why people go mad at sea for weeks on end. 
• There is a scale for sea swell. If you're interested, it's here  It goes from 1 to 9. On day three when it got to 7 (high seas, 6-9m swell) little packets of sick bags appeared on each landing of the stairs. There were certainly times when walking was harder than you might imagine, we were woken up in the night from the rocking and rolling, and when nausea kicked in. The highest we got was a Force 9 wind and a sea swell of 8 - very high. I was very thankful to be on a modern large ship with stabilisers and ginger ale. And in awe of those who choose to travel the same ocean on something much smaller
• 
  

• 

  It's very deep - at times there were thousands of metres of water below us. But the ship can also sail perfectly happily in quite shallow water as it approaches ports. On those days when I saw no other life, there was, of course plenty of it.  It was simply below the surface. When else might I miss the life that is abundant, but below a surface?

Sabbatical Soundings part 3 - Ocean perspectives.

It was something of a surprise to both my husband and I when I decided a Transatlantic crossing on a cruise ship would be something I'd like to do. Famously, I previously felt seasick on a canal barge.

But for me there was something about the length of the journey (11 nights on board with no stops) that appealed. It felt like we were placing the emphasis on the travelling itself -  and the time and effort involved in just travelling. Travelling 5000 miles at around 20mph was something I had never experienced. It was a significant investment of time compared with our 8 hour flight home. 

Of course, it was also a luxury! we were on board a large modern cruise ship - I really would not like to cross the ocean in something smaller! Our cabin was comfortable and the food was good (and plentiful) There was entertainment on board that we dipped in and out of (mostly out) but it was an opportunity to be off-grid and to read - both of which I took full advantage of. 

One of the aspects of the journey I knew I'd enjoy was the big skies. I love living where I live, but its abundance of trees means that my horizon is at least 50 feet above my head, and only a patch of sky is visible from any window. I wanted to put myself somewhere that the horizon would make me feel small and to experience something of the size of our planet in a way that modern air travel tends to deprive us of.

On the Atlantic ocean the sky was utterly enormous. Sometimes the horizon was close to the ship - we had some days of poor visibility with the result that the ship frequently deployed its fog horn. But on other days it stretched into the distance as if the ship and the sea were the only things to exist. So, although the ship itself was huge, it was more than possible to feel small. 

All too often I find there are things in life or in ministry which completely fill my horizon in an unhealthy way. What I need in those moments is a proper perspective. During our days at sea, as I sat and thought and read and prayed, I was able to find different perspectives on some things that I had been finding difficult. While there was learning and some healing in that itself, it turned out to be only the first of several shifts of perspective that the trip would bring about.

The gift and privilege of this sense of size, so hard to describe, has also brought a fresh meaning to some familiar hymns and songs.

Sabbatical Soundings - Part 2 Ash Wednesday - dust or water?

I had an odd Ash Wednesday this year. Not only because my Extended Study Leave (Sabbatical) has taken me away from parish ministry altogether for the whole of Lent, Holy Week and Easter, but because it was the second day of our Transatlantic crossing from Southampton to Miami. 

I saw a meme about Ash Wednesday coinciding with Valentine's Day this year, which it does, every so often. It went something like this:

Q:(addressed to a priest) "What are your plans for Valentine's Day?"

A: "I'm rubbing dirt on people's faces and telling them they're going to die."

It is my privilege every year to do just that. Or at least to say to people who come forward to have an ash cross marked on their forehead, that they should:

"Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ."

It's a profoundly moving moment for me, not least as I look back on seven years in this parish and remember those people whom I've ashed and whose funerals I have subsequently conducted. 

Ash Wednesday, like the whole of Lent invites us to consider our mortality. Not in a morbid way, but because through Lent we move inexorably towards the death of Christ on Good Friday. But it's also because we're invited to consider how we will spend the days of the life that we have. Lent is an invitation into the fullest possible life - life with God - and that's why we examine our disciplines of prayer, worship, reading, fasting, generosity, and through these practices (as the Common Worship Eucharistic Preface has it) "learn to be your people once again".

Making ash from
the previous year's Palm Crosses

One of the reasons for using ash on Ash Wednesday is because the Biblical tradition tells us that humans were made from the dust of the earth, and we return there after death when we're buried. The first human, named Adam, deriving from the Hebrew word for soil or earth was so named because God created humans from the dust of the earth. (You can read all about that in Genesis Chapter 2.)

Anyway, this year as we headed out into the Atlantic ocean, I discovered that dust and ash are quite hard to come by on a cruise ship. I should perhaps have thought of that before I left but I had other packing issues. There is no soil on the ship (not even any artificial plants as it turns out) and very little dust because they keep the place scrupulously clean in the aftermath of Covid. No dust to use to mark the start of Lent and to remember our mortality. 

However, we were completely surrounded by water.

The finished ash!

That got me thinking. Israel was a people more accustomed to the desert than the sea (think Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Elijah) so their understanding of where humans began will have been influenced by this. But water is essential for life  - and desert people certainly knew that. While the desert is an important part of the story  of God's people, Israel, water is significant too. They were saved from their life of slavery in Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea. The Spirit of God hovered over the waters at the time of creation. They passed through the Jordan river to enter into the Promised Land. Some of this is echoed in the Christian Baptismal rite where the prayers say: 

"Over water the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation. Through water you led the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land." 

(Common Worship Baptism, prayer over the water)

We have a different understanding of where life began from those who wrote down the stories of Genesis. We know now that all life on earth began in water, and that humans are made of about 60% water. 

In the Christian tradition, water is most often associated with new life through Baptism rather than mortality and death, although there are some interesting connections. Some people still request that their coffins are sprinkled with water at their funerals to signify and recall their Baptism. But the words I couldn't quite remember on the ship (no internet to look them up!) were these ones:

"We thank you, Father, for the water of baptism.

In it we are buried with Christ in his death."

(Common Worship Baptism, prayer over the water)

Easter is the traditional time for Baptism in the church and Lent was the traditional time for preparation for Baptism when candidates for Baptism would learn about the spiritual disciplines of the Christian faith in preparation to "die with Christ and be raised to new life in Baptism" on the feast of the Resurrection. For us, Lent usually begins with dust and ends with water.

However, this Ash Wednesday, I found a way to reflect on the meaning of the beginning of Lent, my own death and Christian life with an entirely different set of imagery and metaphors, something that I'm still pondering. 

It was no less meaningful for being different. And there was a lot of water!