On Wednesday morning 17th April, in Holy Week we'll be doing something a little different and hosting a meditation on the Stations of the Cross with a queer theme. Using the art work of Mary Button who has painted a series of Stations of the Cross using images from LGBTQIA+ History.

You're invited to join in this meditation as part of marking Holy Week and preparing to mark Good Friday and Easter.

Why do this? We'll allow the artist to explain in her own words:

"Around the same time I started incorporating the visual vocabulary of Christianity in my artwork, I read a book that changed my life: The Cotton Patch Version of Luke and Acts: Jesus’ Doings and the Happenings by Clarence Jordan. In it, the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles are translated into a Southern vernacular. Jew and Gentile became ‘white man and Negro’ and the crucifixion was described in terms of a lynching. Published in the 1960s, the Cotton Patch Gospels sought to translate the Gospels into the language of the Civil Rights Movement. Of his translation of crucifixion to lynching, Jordan writes, “Our crosses are so shined, so polished, so respectable that to be impaled on one of them would seem to be a blessed experience. We have thus emptied the term ‘crucifixion’ of its original content of terrific emotion, or violence, of indignity and stigma, of defeat.” Reading an account of Christ’s passion that ends not with Christ nailed to a tree in Judea, but hanging from a noose tied to a pine tree in Georgia, compelled me to begin to re-imagine, re-define, and re-contextualise the crucifixion.I believe that we can only begin to understand the meaning of the crucifixion when we take away our polished and shiny crosses and look for the cross in our own time, in our own landscape. When we look for the crucified body of Christ in the stories of people on the margins of our societies, then we are able to live the Gospel and not simply read it."