You’re welcome until you’re homeless.
Until you’re drugged up, or drug dealing.
Welcome until you’re angry, or angsty,
or anything other than sane….
Welcome until it’s harder to let you in
than keep you out. Until the questions
you carry are a gospel of sound. Until your
words become a threat to the easy.
Until calling the Kingdom threatens the peace,
these passed-over prophets call power to cease;
these structures you’ve built would be trampled
beneath the levelling might of our Saviour’s feet.
Jay Hulme, ‘The Church of Middle England’, The Backwater Sermons, Norwich Canterbury Press, 2021, p. 34.
But... 'Our Lord has, in his great mercy, called you and led you to him by the desire of your heart.' (Fourteenth century anonymous; 'Cloud of Unknowing', Chapter 1). Jay Hulme writes, ' I found God in November 2019, having been brought up so Atheist that at 23 I didn't know what date in December Christmas Day was.... Despite spending my entire life feeling drawn to churches and cathedrals, I'd spent years in denial, certain that I was too poor, too queer, too dodgy, to even enter them, let alone belong in them.'
To be 'angsty' is to have ' a general feeling of anxiety produced by awareness of the uncertainties and paradoxes inherent in the state of being human.' (Chambers Concise Dictionary, 1997).
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