Hope my Sydney friends can see it….

Tickets for Thiry-Six

When I was a child, my dad always told me that Sheffield steel was the best in the world.

Sheffield cutlery was the best in the world.

He was a great believer in Britain being the best country in the world,

and the British Empire being the best, and British pottery being the best, and British food being the best, and the British parliamentary system being the best.

He would have been really distressed, I think, to be alive today and to see how the British parliamentary system is totally failing to meet the demands of the present time.

And he would have been upset, I think, to learn that the Industrial Revolution in Britain, of which he was so proud, was actually funded by profits from the slave trade.

Or that the industrial success that he was so proud of actually came from the fact that because we had an empire, we were able to rig the economy in our favour.

And once the empire had gone, that no longer held .

And that destroyed his own business, the pottery business, and much else besides.

He always used to tell us to look at the back of a spoon to see what it said.:

“Stainless steel. Made in Vietnam”.

It’s a hard thing to manage the decline of an empire, as you’re discovering in the United States, and it’s always tempting to try to go back to some imaginary past.

That’s kind of what the whole Brexit nonsense was about here in Britain,

And it’s very much more dangerous and destructive over in the States.

We have to move forward. We have to accept change.

I was performing in a town near Sheffield, my play, “The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven,” which tries to imagine a different form of religious expression, a different form of understanding what it is to be a man, what it is to be a woman ,

And that helps us dream of a post-capitalist world.

The was a beautiful choir in the Australian production of “Queen Jesus.”

And their last words as the show ended were:

“Change is coming.

Change is coming,

And one day the world will be free.”

Otherwise we may lose them forever…

We have been entrusted with the world… and if we misuse that trust,

we will suffer.

Not ‘will’.

‘Are’.

We are suffering…

You could read it as being about the arbitrary nature of disasters.

When a tsunami comes, who is swept away and who stays safe?

But perhaps it’s also about revelation, about the moment of inspiration that just seems to come out of nowhere.

But whether good or bad, these great natural forces have nothing to do with our sense of what is good or what is bad.

They just happen. Hugely happen.

And we are helpless in the face of them. In some ways helpless.

All the more important to live in a way that is open and aware and trusting.

There is a distinct sense of impending doom.

I saw it coming back in 1985, in my “Losing Venice”:

“You remember the story our teacher told.

Of the wise man who built his house upon

the rock and the foolish one who built

his on the sand? We built ours on the mud.

We compromised.

And now we are sinking.

Year by year the tide water rises.

Already it has flooded our cellars;

Soon it will beat against our doors.

Then the waves will come and wash us

from the face of the earth.

The clouds gather. The storm is rising.

And it will come. Nothing can stop it.

We know. We laugh when we can;

We live, as we must.

Fear eats away our hearts. Will it spare us,

We wonder, will it spare or children?

Yet what can we do? Tear down our city?

Label the stones and move them, stone by stone,

Rebuild them on the higher ground?

All our energy is taken up with living.

Besides, is there any mountain high enough

to hide us,

Is there depth enough in any cave?

I doubt it. Crying is easy, Quevedo,

Laughter requires a little more strength.”

Back then I saw the need to resist despair, and create art that had the strength to dream of a better future.

I was right then.

And even more right now….

As so often, the opposite is true.

And I wanted to say it, and relate it to my experience. As I do.

I published this piece on Instagram and Facebook on 17th June.

That was 11 days ago. It’s been seen 41 thousand times; and the vast majority of the 93 comments have been positive and supportive, humane and beautiful.

Perhaps we live in a kinder society than we tend to imagine…

…even as everything becomes increasingly unpredicatable.

When I sit outside in the sunshine, it’s not the sunshine I used to know.

It used to be such a treat living in Scotland when the sun came out, and the days were warm.

But there’s fear in it now,

a sense that this isn’t right, it being so hot in June.

Alarming statistics are beginning to appear.

One in six babies in England is living in an overheated home, a home that is dangerously too hot for the baby’s health.

One in six.

The economic orthodoxy that has said that we need to cut back public spending is causing terrible human suffering,

as well as appalling structural damage.

Couple this with the belief that dealing with the climate emergency is unpopular,

And you get a recipe for inaction.

it’s tempting to despair.

But today I have a sense that these sayings were not intended to inspire despair.

But hope.

Because things do not have to be this way….

And it’s in our hands to change them.

The end of the world perhaps, or perhaps the collapse of the society, of the world that he and his followers knew about.

The end of the world we and our fellow humans know about.

There are signs all around us right now, signs that our current way of living is unsustainable and intolerable and wicked and has to change.

Right now, the red weather warning that covers most of England is saying that the weather is so hot that it is a danger to human life.

The heat will kill people.

People all over the south of England are suffering atrociously because their houses are not designed for the heat, nor their schools, nor their hospitals, nor their care homes, nor their public buildings.

Public transport can’t function.

I don’t know how many more warnings we need before we, as a people, collectively come together and say to our rulers,

“Stop. Change. Do something about this.”

As well as take responsibility for what is happening in our own lives.

it’s so hard to face up to what is happening, and it makes us despairing and afraid.

Which is why we close our eyes and bury our heads in the sand and hope it all goes away.

But it won’t.

And maybe, just maybe, these stories can also offer us a way through our deep fears….

I couldn’t actually join the march itself.

Couldn’t walk that far..

But what I do every year is I go to my church, which is on the route of the march,

and a group of us always stand and sit on the steps at the entrance with our Pride banners.

And we cheer the marchers as they go past,

and they cheer us,

because it is fabulous to see a church that is doing its duty to humanity

and affirming our right to exist.

And I felt very proud to be part of it with my trans-affirming church banner.

And in fact, the whole march was very trans-affirming,

and I think it was like a huge outpouring of love and support for our very beleaguered community.

It was fabulous to be part of and lovely to see the groups of young trans men proudly going topless and proudly showing off the scars of their top surgery.

And very moving to hear the stories of, young and old trans women coming out for the first time.

And also deeply touching and beautiful to see how many trans parents were out.

Parents affirming their love and their support for their trans children.

And it makes such a difference.

One of the nastiest things that’s happening in our country and in America just now is that young people are being denied puberty blockers

when all the research shows that these are incredibly helpful.

They ease a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, and help young people discover themselves.

And the only reason to deny them is just prejudice and cruelty and nastiness.

Of course, these things were not available to me when I was an adolescent.

I just had to pretend to be normal, and it never did me any good.

It just caused years and years of unnecessary suffering.

And it’s worth repeating over and over again that there is no harm in being trans.

The harm comes from prejudice and from hatred.

I’m very blessed to have been born trans.

It has enriched me immeasurably,

both as an artist and as a human being.”

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I do wonder if Jesus really said this .

I wonder if it reflects his concerns, or the concerns of the Storyteller who wanted to frighten and overawe his religious opponents.

But then as I write this I see there’s a Red Weather Warning for parts of England later this week.

It will be dangerously hot for humans and cause deaths.

In England! In June!

And it will damage our infrastructure in all kinds of ways.

Because we are completely ill-equipped for this kind of weather.

Even though we have been repeatedly warned; and it is our actions that have caused it.

It will contribute to the end of the social structures that we have known and that have held us in an uneasy, unjust, exploitative kind of peace throughout our lifetimes.

We need to accept this, if we can, and at the very least do all we can to lessen the suffering involved.

And they will surely come to a bad end…

We don’t have to look far to see those who are falsely representing who Jesus is.

We’re seeing them kicking down the doors of Black people,

burning women and children out of their houses in the name of Christianity,

and they certainly will come to a very bad end.

Nor do we have to look far to see the wars and the desperate, cruel suffering of these present times.

But it is worth remembering

and worth trying to believe

that these are the pangs of childbirth,

of the birth of a new and better age.

But it’s not just about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

I think of the cities where I’ve been that are clearly threatened with destruction.

Places like Dhaka, São Paulo, Manila.

Amazing places full of good people and good creative energy.

All threatened by the climate emergency in one form or another.

And of course it’s not just happening in these distant countries either.

A report has come out today that estimates almost two million houses in the south and east of England will be affected by subsidence caused by global heating.

And when I look around my beautiful house, I know that its future existence is threatened by sea level rising.

While it’s not helpful to simply focus on imminent and inescapable destruction…

It’s important we look at this with open eyes

And think about how we can each contribute to creating climate justice and a more sustainable world.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/11/millions-homes-london-essex-and-kent-sinking-climate-crisis-subsidence

The sacred city of Islam, Judaism and Christianity: the accumulated wisdom of these three great religions has absolutely failed to make it a village of peace.

Instead it is the epicentre of a vicious, cruel, and intractable conflict.

Like all our cities, we would wish it to be a place of safety, justice and peace.

instead, all our cities are places of cruelty, injustice, and fear.

And every one of them will one day be destroyed…

And that’s not just paranoia.

A recent Amnesty report reveals that in the last five years, the British press has published an average of nine articles a day on trans issues.

And yet the voices of trans people themselves have been mostly silenced.

They write about us but do not allow us to speak.

And maybe one reason for this is that we are prophets of a new age,

of a new way of understanding what it is to be a man

and what it is to be a woman.

And the present overwhelmingly toxic ideas about manhood,

about what it is to be a man,

are responsible not just for the terrifying growth of attacks on girls and women

but also, I suspect, lie behind the values that are destroying our planet.

there are some very rich and very powerful men out there who have a strong interest in suppressing the truth about their acts of violence against women and girls;

And who are also profiting hugely out of the world’s destruction.

All our voices matter

The voices of all of us trying to create a different world.

All prophetic voices are needed now more than ever.

We would have resisted. We would not have condoned in the crimes.

But would we?

What crimes are we condoning just now?

And how can we prevent ourselves?

Promising that they will never forget the sacrifices of the men who were murdered in past wars,

but who then go on to wage war and murder more young men and women, and children too, in their turn…

And so in some ways, it’s quite suitable. It’s a very pretty little teapot that she used to enjoy drinking tea out of.

Which is now filled wit human remains.

And yet, of course, in another way, it’s completely wrong because it’s not full of dried bones and corruption, as Jesus says,

But full of very precious relic, Susie’s ashes, that one day, I think, will mingle with mine.

And maybe it’s because of the associations that I couldn’t stop my hand from shaking a little bit.

But maybe it’s appropriate in a strange kind of way because these scroll keepers and separated ones that made Jesus so angry were, at the end of the day, also human beings and perhaps loved and respected ones, too…

And I think of some of the New Age teachers that I followed for a while when I was younger, who always failed to live up to what they preached.

That was generally because they were blokes, and they could not resist having sex with their attractive women students.

My dad used to say, “Practice what you preach.”

And so I think of him, too. I think of him with love.

I was taught they were directed against the scribes and Pharisees - Jewish religious leaders-

Which makes them very safe for the established church.

But apply them to church organisations….

And the attacks are devastating!

Sorrow and trouble on the churches with their wordy, empty prayers…

Sorrow and trouble on the churches with their missionaries…

It’s amazing what happens with this, the First Nations Version, when these condemnations are directed not against the Scribes and Pharisees (as they traditionally are) but against Churches in general….

I’m sure he would have denounced almost all our Christian churches also…

Which is why I’m making such efforts to be conciliatory and find common ground between us.

This is the text of my letter:

Tracy Gilbert, M.P.,

House of Commons,

Westminster.

30 May 2026

Dear Tracy Gilbert,

I have a feeling that we’re on different sides of the trans rights debate, but I know that, like me, you are deeply concerned for the safety of girls and women.

And I’m writing to you because I am profoundly troubled by the implications and effects of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s new code of practice, which , as you know, has just been published by the minister for women and equalities and which will become law unless members of Parliament like yourself step in to intervene.

Now, I accept that this guidance may not be intended to increase suspicion against trans women like myself.

But unfortunately this is what is happening, and I do not understand how it will make the lives of my daughters or my granddaughter any safer.

My fear is that the opposite is going to occur and is, in fact,already happening.

Women whose appearance does not conform to conventional standards of femininity, are beginning to find themselves under suspicion of being trans, and are therefore attracting hostility, ridicule, and sometimes severe violence.

Even more importantly, this code of practice has wide-reaching implications, for the hospitality industry, for our pubs, our hotels, restaurants, for hospitals, healthcare, for our sports and leisure centres, for our schools, for all our workplaces,

In fact it affects every aspect of our communal life.

And it surely cannot be right for the government to make this law without any debate.

This is profoundly important for our national life, and needs to be thought about in the context of the appalling rise in acts of violence against women and girls. something the National Police Chiefs’ Council has called a national emergency.

What can we do to stop this happening?

Surely this is what we need to be thinking about, and this is the debate we need to be having.

I hope I can count on you to try to make this happen.

Yours sincerely,

Jo Clifford

I tried to talk myself out of it, as I had a strong feeling it would attract hatred in my direction.

But I realised it needed to be said.

So it’s been quite a watchful day monitoring the comments in my Instagram and Facebook feeds.

Sure enough, there have been some hateful comments - all of which I’ve deleted - but remarkably few.

The vast majority of comments have been positive and lovely.

So I suspect that all this transphobia is not popular or widely accepted.

People are more enlightened than their representatives…

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I was invited to be part of a school play.

And I remember the joy of that first day of rehearsals,

of how suddenly and unexpectedly I felt at home on that stage.

Suddenly, I wasn’t shy anymore.

Suddenly, there was a place for me in the world.

Looking back, it’s very clear I discovered my vocation that day:

My vocation as a stage actress and performer.

But sadly, there was no future for a young trans actress in a boys’ boarding school in England in 1965.

I soon realised it was very dangerous for me to continue, that if people came to see how much I loved playing girls’ parts, my life would be made hell on earth.

There was nothing for me to do but repress who I was.

And I lost my vocation almost as soon as I found it.

And I think of how often this happens to young children in this cruel world,

how often children are denied the opportunity to pursue whatever it is they are uniquely gifted to do,

whether because, like me, they’re the wrong gender or the wrong sexuality,

or because they’re poor,

or because their country’s in a state of war,

or because they are girls and they live in a society that represses the full and free expression of women.

I was very lucky.

After 20 years, I found my voice as a playwright, and after another 20 years, I rediscovered myself as a performer.

And right now, I’m getting ready to travel down to England to take part in the recording of a couple of audio plays that I have parts in.

I am lucky, and I think maybe I am part of a wider story that the world is trying to tell.

A new story of being human,

A new poem that is being created,

A new song of humanity that is struggling to be sung.

I posted that on Tuesday, while I was waiting for the taxi to take me to the station to travel down to Leicester, where I was due to record 3 parts in “Our Story” - a beautiful series of five short audio plays being produced by Fifth Word Theatre Company.

Our Story

Now I’m back, after such a lovely day recording in the Curve Theatre with the director Jo Tyabji.

In “Respect Your Elders” by Mika Onyx Johnson I played an old yew tree.

And in my “Dan Dare Meets the Bodhisattva”, I played Dan Dare and Sophie Jones.

I so rarely get the chance to work like this; and I did wonder if I’d be able to find the three voices that were needed.

But I did, and it was such a profound joy.

It confirms what I was saying in this reel, about acting being, deep down, my true vocation.

And how incredibly lucky I am to have found a way to use it to fuel my work as a playwright; and then - miraculously - find it again towards the end of my life.

I must tell how that happened some time soon; and I’ll talk about the plays in more detail when they come to be released.

Meantime, deep thanks to the new subscribers who have just arrived. You are so welcome.

It’s lovely to have you here; even lovelier if you pay. It really helps the work.

Share with people you know who might be interested

And, as always, do let me know what you’re thinking…

And men were men, and women were women.

End of story.

And I was always tormented by the fact that I knew somehow,

deep down inside me, I knew that I was not the boy and not the man I was supposed to be.

And I did everything I could to suppress this knowledge because I was so ashamed and so frightened of it.

And I grew up.doing my best to be a man,

but at the same time trying to honour and respect and not be ashamed of the woman inside me.

But because I wanted to be a good husband to my dear wife and a good dad to my dear children,

I kept on living as a man until my kids were grown up and my wife was dead,

and then I couldn’t stand it anymore.

So I formally began the process of what our society calls “transitioning from man to woman”

(Though in fact I had begun the process many, many years before, maybe when I was 4 years old)

And over the years since then, I’ve come to realise that my young self was right.

That the feeling I wasn’t a man was completely justified and absolutely correct.

And, of course, biology confirms that sex is far more complicated than we’ve been led to believe.

And sociology teaches us that gender is far more complicated,

And there are many, many societies in the world that understand gender completely differently from the way we do,

And their understandings may actually be wiser and more humane than our own.

And it makes me very sad to see first the American government and now my government here in Britain trying to turn the clock back to boys being boys and girls being girls, and end of story.

And the new ruling from the Equality and Human Rights Commission in my country won’t help anybody.

It won’t help make women any safer.

It will just cause nothing but confusion and conflict and profound suffering and distress.

And it will fall, because the truth is on our side.

And in the end, the truth will prevail.

When I posted this video on social media about 6 days ago, I was afraid it might attract a lot of hatred.

I was wrong. The post has been, and continues to be widely shared.

18,400 people have seen it; 935 people have liked it, and of the 94 comments only a very few have been hostile.

Which proves, I think, that people are far less hostile towards trans people than we tend to imagine.

The great thing about keeping these videos at under 3 minutes is that they seem to reach a wider audience; the frustrating thing is that it demands an over-simplification of complex issues.

But to do justice to this issue would take many hefty volumes…

I’m posting it here because I am trying to keep a record of my videos; and because I think there is value to posting positive comment to counter the hatred and rage that the algorithms seem to favour.

If you agree, please consider sharing this to help spread the word

And consider subscribing, if you haven’t already.

I hugely appreciate those who have recently subscribed, and especially those who have chosen to become paying subscribers.

You are enormously helping the work.

And also, of course, I always like your thoughts and comments.

“On these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets.”

And I think it’s true that if we became able to learn to love life and the spirit of life, whatever we call her, love her with all our heart and all our mind and all our strength, that would enable us to love ourselves as part of that life.

And if we learn to love ourselves, we become able to learn to love our fellow human beings, too.

When I first started to openly live as a woman, I used to get a lot of abuse in the street.

People would laugh at me or say rude things about me, or sometimes threaten me with violence.

It happened more or less every time I left my front door, and what set me free of fear and distress and resentment was the understanding that these people were not hating me.

There was something in me that reminded them of a part of themselves they had been taught to fear and hate and despise.

And that’s where the abuse was coming from.

That it was their problem, not mine.

That maybe I could learn to forgive myself and then forgive them, too.

And it’s true right now in the context of all the abuse that we trans people are suffering.

It’s not actually about us.

I’ve been posting a lot of videos on social media which have been getting tens of thousands and sometimes 100,000 views and many, many hundreds of comments.

And what surprises me is how few of them have been rude.

Very few of them have been ignorant and abusive, which makes me think that people in general are way ahead of governments and way more humane.

And of course, the people who are supposedly powerful people in government hate themselves because deep down they must know they are supporting and defending a system that is not only unjust and abusive but also no longer fit for purpose.

Because we all need to strengthen our love of life,

our love of ourselves,

our love for each other,

and work together to create a better world.

“Love the Lord Your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind…”

I’ve never found a particularly helpful thing to say.

How can we love the Lord Our God?

It’s all far too abstract for me.

Loving life makes far more sense.

And if I think of God as the life giving force of the universe….

Then it all makes perfect sense.

Trans Preacher

This is a tiny bit of our conversation…

And a bit more

And I don’t seem able to share the whole thing.

But Joelle, I’m sure, will show me how…

It’s a great day, I think, for Scottish democracy.

And I know you have so much to give us in public life.

A particular welcome to Dr. Q Manivannan, and I hope I’m saying your name correctly, because you represent me.

You are my member of the Scottish Parliament, and it’s really, really wonderful.

And it grieves me profoundly that you both, and you, Dr. Q, in particular, have been the targets of so much hatred.

And so I wanted to remind you of something that is said in my play, “The Gospel According to Jesus: Queen of Heaven,” where Jesus says:

“Bless you if they persecute you for being who you are,

because it means you are bringing about change.

And bless those who persecute you, too,

for hatred is the only thing they have,

and it doesn’t amount to much.

And they will lose it in the end,

for no matter what they say or what they do,

They cannot stop the change that is coming.

And one day, we will all be free.”

But there they were, endearing and beautiful, and they left me lost for words…

It is nothing more than a trap to catch the authorities with…

And they fall right into it.

Something I like about this translation (The First Nations Version) is that it removes the anti-semitic element of the story.

Why expose his son to such danger?

Which of the two sons did what his father wanted?

The failure of some religious leaders..

There’s a certain satisfaction watching them being caught out instead….

Let’s pray we never become one of them….

That was the conventional wisdom when I was a child

And seems to have been the conventional wisdom when Jesus was alive.

And yet again he turns convention upside down…

He denounced the desecration of a holy place….

And then?

And then he transformed it into a place of joy and celebration.

In those days triumphs tended to be incredibly stage managed affairs.

Where a military leader who had won a victory, and killed a large number of people

Put on a show of force to assert his power and dominance

Often by displaying the army and the leader he had overcome humiliated and in chains.

All designed to create shock and awe and subservience.

But this joyous event was something else entirely.

Something that simply and beautifully displayed the power of love.

Its message was lost at the time and has been ignored ever since.

Most notably by the church whose mission, apparently, was to spread Christianity…

Also the donkey he rode on was a mother with her child.

Impossible to imagine a more radical subversion of the way rulers were supposed to behave…

“Whenever you need something, focus on it.

Focus on it clearly in your mind and then walk out into the world with open eyes…

And, in a way you will never understand,

What you need will come to you.”

But like just about everything else in our society, that model doesn’t work anymore.

This story proposes to turn our world upside down and conceive of leadership as service.

It reminds us that it’s not generally the people at the top that really matter, but the people at the bottom who count.

It reminds us that we have to think of human society in a radically different way….

Not from top down. But bottom up….

We imagine that’s the only way to be.

But it’s not working now.

It never has…

And if we can accept it,

And not resist or fight against it,

Then strangely it, too, can become a gift.

I realise I’m the same.

But I think the message from it all is that to be fully human means being fully prepared to die and not to be afraid of death.

To accept that sometimes our own death is necessary.

And that to me feels like an impossibly difficult ask.

It upset me so much yesterday that I forgot to post it.

But it’s an important context for today’s story:

It’s easy to mock or blame the Zebedee brothers’ mum, and I wish we knew her name.

Because she obviously loved her sons and wanted the best for them.

As mums and dads always do. I know I do.

But Jesus goes on to remind her, and remind us, that this is absolutely not where he’s at….

I’ve a hunch they’re the same thing..

But they’re not.

They were crafted to give comfort and purpose to a tiny, demoralised, traumatised group of people who were suffering because of the complete failure of Jesus’s mission and his horrible death.

And then also by the destruction of the temple and the determined, ruthless attempt by the Romans to wipe out Jewish people and culture.

So questions like the one Peter is asking in this bit of the story—what will become of us?—are really important because these people were living and working in great poverty.

They were risking their livelihood and their personal safety to believe in what they thought Jesus had said.

They needed to be told that, because they were poor, the rich were on the wrong path, but they were on the right path.

Because they were humiliated constantly by their colonial oppressors, they needed to be told that one day they would get their revenge.

And because they were suffering so much in their daily lives, they needed to be told that their present sufferings would lead to future happiness in their life after death.

Some of these things are really, really helpful and useful for us to hear, us in our very different circumstances, but some are not.

Some have been and still are being used to justify injustice, cruelty and suffering.

So let’s try to be aware. Let’s try to be open, and let’s remember that we are all free to take what comfort and what meaning we can.

Because right now, evangelical Christians in America are using Jesus’s words to justify the most atrocious acts of warfare and cruelty.

One of the reasons why I so doggedly persist in this project is to try to resist them, to try to understand what, in the midst of all this, really, really matters.

And how we can manage to lead good lives in the face of a cruel and apparently meaningless world.

And this sentence offers up the possibility of revolutionary change….

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But maybe if we can learn to focus on other dimensions….

Or is it all too painful to think about… and we walk away, head bent, ashamed?

But I keep going back to what happened to me in 1989.

That was the yearI travelled Long Beach in California with my Lucy’s Play.

And then I went first to Egypt and then to Bangladesh with my Great Expectations.

So in the course of one year, I went from the richest country in the world to the poorest.

And I understood at that time that this is one world, that the obscene wealth in the one part of the world was absolutely a product of the obscene poverty in, the other,.and that the old divisions between nation states no longer serve us.

That we need to develop a global consciousness because we all live in the one world.

And when I was in Egypt, I turned on the television news and I saw them knocking down the Berlin Wall.

I somehow knew back then that the Berlin wall held up capitalism as well as communism

And that capitalism, like communism, would eventually collapse.

And that’s what is happening now.

As the manifestly corrupt and incapable man who rules America

Involves all of us in a global war.

A war being fought by old men holding on to power.

because they are afraid their crimes will catch up with them.

It is terrifying.

But their time is coming to an end. And history tells us that whenever an old order collapses, it is accompanied by atrocious bloodshed and suffering.

But if we can see past our terror and our despair:

we can see new ways of understanding our world are being bornnew ways of thinking and being

new ways of understanding what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a human being,

The signs are there: the signs that we are also living through the birth pangs of a new age.

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I felt compelled to post this yesterday on social media.

The advantage of making ‘reels’ is that they very easily reach a large audience.

The disadvantage is that they have to be under three minutes long and so it’s necessary to compress some very complicated thoughts into small space…

The plan is to use this place to give these thoughts more room to breathe in….

The young tribal leader asked.

You know them already, Creator sets free answered.

Do not take away the life of another.

Do not be unfaithful in your relationships.

Do not take what is not yours.

Be honest in all you say and do

and never cheat a fellow human being.

Give honour and respect to your mother and father

and love your fellow human beings

as much as you love yourself.”

“That’s why I always used to tell people:

become like a little child if you want to enter the queendom of heaven.

Because you know how it is:

As we grow up and become adult

The world gets to us and mucks us up.

And we blunder about…”

And then I remembered how when I was a child I really did want to be invisible.

I suppose I was so deeply ashamed of myself I really did not want to be seen…

And when I thought about what I really want this day, I made this video.

I printed out my list of plays, brought out the posters I have in my living room, and all the published work I have that I could find….

(not much, because I keep giving it away…)

… and improvised this little film.

I said:

Jesus said, “There are eunuchs born so from their mother’s womb. There are eunuchs who are made so by human agency, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves so for the sake of the queendom of heaven.”

And that’s me. That’s me.

I’m in that category:

The eunuchs who have made themselves so for the sake of the queendom of heaven.

Because that’s the step I had to take in order to become myself :

what this world calls a trans woman.

And I don’t want to be visible today. I want my work to be visible.

That’s what I want to be seen.

This work that I’ve given my life to creating.

When I was fourteen, I discovered my vocation as a theatre artist.

Not as a writer, but as a performer.

I was unable to pursue that.

In 1964, there was no future for a young trans actress in an English public school.

The transphobia that was so dominant in that time silenced me, and it took me twenty years to find my voice as a playwright.

And I’m proud of all that I accomplished.

It took me fifty years from that time to discover myself as a performer.

In my late sixties… I’m proud of that too.

Because it was not till I was in my fifties that I was able able to openly live my life as the person I am.

And that struggle, I think, needs to be celebrated somehow.

But for today...

For today, I just want to live my life in dignity and peace.

Like all my trans sisters and brothers.

We all have that right.

But in the meantime, I’m sending all of us blessings and peace.

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Think poetically….

Damage other people and damage ourselves.

And we must take care of what we see

And what we show.

There is enough suffering in the world already, without us adding to it.

It’s important we understand: because we are seeing these deep understandings of manhood being embodied in the leadership of the USA.

Especially in Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump in their disastrous conduct of the Iran War.

I can see such strong links between this and the abuse I suffered in the English public school system.

I was very lucky to be what we now call trans from the very beginning of my life in this system.

It caused me immense suffering: but it saved my life.

There is so much more to be said about this…

…and I will continue to try to say it.

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It was a commission from the Traverse theatre, in Edinburgh, to wite a play about Lorca.

The main character was trans, a thinly disguised version of myself, and the Traverse turned it down.

I was devastated and ashamed, and now cannot find the script.

But I did turn it into a radio play, “Ain’t It Grand To Be Bloomin’ Well Dead”, which BBC Radio 4 broadacst in 1999; after turning it into a monologue I performed in a conference in the Playhouse in Newcastle in 1998.

And I quoted this story in both works, because I was angry at the abuse I suffered and the shame that was heaped on me,

and I reproduce it now because I’m proud of what I did:

4. VIRGIN They say my son once took a boy into his arms.A little boy the disciples wanted to send away Because they thought he would disturb him. And my son said

5. JESUS No. Let him stay. Be like him. Be like a little child.

6. VIRGIN Hear that Federico? He said be like a little child.Not like that monstrous hanging tortured thing

1. VIRGIN That monstrosity the priests put in all the churchesNo. He didn’t say that. He said: be like a child...

2. JESUS But if anyone destroys the faith of a little one Perverts the faith of a child who believes in me It would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neckAnd be thrown into the depths of the sea

3. LESLIE Oh Federico. How many millstones would it takeTo hang round the necks of everyoneWho’s ever misled a little childAnd told them they have to be ashamed?

4. JESUS Not enough millstones, Federico.Not in the whole wide world.not in the depths of hell.Not enough millstones. Not enough sea!

don’t think that helped me much.

Now that I’m older, and now that I do this exercise of reading through the stories of his life verse by verse, I begin to see that actually he was was just like the rest of us.

He got troubled. He got discouraged. He got furious.

And this is one of these moments.

It helps me somehow to know that he is one of us …

And that he struggles too.

(Matthew 17:19-20)

And then the next minute he’s coming out with this outrageous claim:

Just believe a tiny bit and you can move a mountain…

I’ve read it as if he really meant it.

But maybe that’s wrong.

Maybe it’s a kind of joke.

Maybe it’s a kind of half joking, half serious paradox to blow our minds and expand our consciousness…

I love him for it anyway.

But we don’t want our friends to reveal it to anyone else…

Something very beautiful about these stories is that Jesus goes through the same process with his friends.

Don’t tell the world who I really am, he says, not yet.

The world is not ready.

Perhaps the world is never ready.

Perhaps our job, here and now, is to prepare it.

And prepare ourselves…

And that we shut ourselves off from.

Some of the power of these amazing stories comes from the fact that Jesus knew of these dimensions and was at home in all of them.

As we can be also…

And we also have a right to be heard…

I can’t help thinking that there’s a connection between the large scale cruelty and madness of America’s war in the Middle East and the small scale cruelty and madness of America’s war on trans people.

Both are about defending a horribly toxic vision of manhood.

And I’m fascinated by the artistic and activist possibilities of these reels…

They have to be limited to under 3 minutes; I have to film them in a single take; on a cheap iPhone 13 mini; and mostly in candle light.

They’re quite tricky to script, which is why it’s nice to be able to expand them in a text post.

But they reach a surprising number of people. This one, which I posted last night, has been seen by 1.5K people, on Facebook, 1.8K on Instagram, and the numbers keep growing.

This is small by social media standards, but it’s big to me, and in its own tiny way important I think.

Do share if you agree

And do all the other things too…

Thank you for reading.

But also about the latent possibilities within each one of us.

Possibilities that we can realise even if only in small ways

And that have the potential to change the world.

“Robert John” just wasn’t right any more. In fact it never really was…

And I didn’t come to this conclusion through the normal ways of thinking; it was something that came to me gradually and inescapably from a place deeply beyond my conscious mind.

And how strange that I never notoiced till today that the same thing happenened to St.Peter.

The one, they say, who holds the keys to heaven….

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We, too, have a responsibility to become as fully human as we can be…

Good question.

He has to ask it again:

(Matthew 16:13-15)

And we must ask it too:

what does it mean for us to be a true human being?

(in this world where there are so many false ones….)

And then it all makes sense.

Because it was never about real yeast at all….

And it’s such an important reminder to everyone who wants to take the Bible literally.

It doesn’t work like that.

It’s a poem.

It’s a dream….

So I want, I want somehow to pay tribute to her, because she was such an amazing person.

She enriched my life and the life of everyone who was lucky enough to come into contact with her in so many ways.

Something we had in common, me and Susie, was that in our childhood, we both had to hide ourselves away.

I’d had to hide the fact that I was trans,

And because her mum and dad both belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, a very repressive religious sect, she had to hide away the fact that she was a free spirit.

And maybe one way of telling the story of our thirty-three years of loving each other is that it was a process of trying to discover and live out our freedom together.

We shared childcare, which was one of the best things we did, and we did our best to bring our two daughters up to be free spirits, too.

And they certainly are. I’m so proud of them, and if she were alive, I know Susie would be so proud of them, too.

She touched the lives of so many people through her journalism, her books, and her activism.

It was tragic that she was killed by cancer at the very height of her powers.

But what she gave us still lives on.

She was someone who loved life and and didn’t want it to end.

Not so much because she wanted to go on living, but more because she wanted to go on loving.

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Perhaps it’ll come clear tomorrow…

We are in the depths right now

trying to find our way through uncharted waters…

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“Thank goodness Jesus does the right thing!”

and another:

“It’s a pivotal moment…”

And it is. Opening a closed door:

and opening it to the whole of humanity.

In 1950s Britain, it was just part of the air we breathed.

So the offence that Jesus commits here,

The hurtfulness of his rejection,

Was all minimised.

In scripture classes we were taught Jesus was a perfect human being, and so incapable of prejudice.

In the all male, all white schools I was forced to attend, his remark was probably completely justified.

And the woman’s response was regarded as daring and disrespectful.

If we replied like that to our teachers or our parents,

our “elders ‘and betters”

With such disrespect, it would be called “cheek”, and we would be punished for it.

But she had every right to be angry.

Revisiting this encounter all those years later makes me appreciate her response all the more…

…because in my shame I thought myself to be worth less than a dog and never dared speak back.

Honoured one, she begged him, help me.

The children’s food should not be given to the dogs, he told her.”

“The children’s food should not be given to the dogs” he told this woman in great distress coming to him to ask for help for her sick daughter.

MAGA would be proud of him.

The cruelty here is astonishing.

So it’s easy to relate to what Jesus’ friends and followers are saying.

But when Jesus says the same thing…

When he says his healing power, his compassion, is reserved for the people of Israel,

And not for outsiders,

it’s truly shocking.

And with deep compassion.

But now, suddenly, he hesitates….

It is from the heart that come things such as the taking of lives, unfaithful marriages, uncontrolled sexual desires, stealing, lying and speaking against the Great Spirit.

It is things such as these that make you impure, not failing to wash your hands when you eat.”

There’s a strong warning here to our culture that feeds of spreading hurt, hatred, and lies.

Spreading them through the words that are spoken; and the posts that are typed.

But as we are seeing now, evil spread through the internet comes back to haunt its creators…

Angry voices trying to hang on to the past.

Our job is to break free of them and set about building the future…

And then the storm passes, and everyone goes back to their normal selves, happy to admire Jesus because it’s easier to do that than develop their own spiritual capacities.

And then they get back to land, and everyone wants a piece of him.

And nothing fundamentally changes…

To the state of mind where of course you can’t walk on water

And you sink if you try.

And so perhaps what keeps us all in “normal life” is actually deep fear.

A fear so deep and so habitual that we no longer notice that it’s there.

Not a fear of being powerless,

But a fear of being powerful.

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…for astonishing things to happen.

And we teach children to be afraid of these things too.

But what if we could truly open our eyes in wonder….

But what if we could see past the fear?

I think whatever dimension He was tuned into to make that extraordinary thing happen is somewhere we can tune into as well.

Traditionally, we call this space the spiritual dimension, but I don’t think that definition helps us much. I

’d call it queer space and time because it is queer, and because it defies logic,

and because sometimes when we evade our self-censorship and enter that space,

Amazing things start happening….

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…followed by acts of compassion.

(Matthew 14:6-14 in the First Nations Version)

(We could be in Mar-a-Lago)

Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that at the heart of the deliberations is an old man who is seriously sick in both body and mind.

A man who is, very lioterally, constantly talking utter nonsense.

But who, in public at least, they keep treating like a sane and sensible human being.

And whose sycophants and defenders keep praising with increasingly monstrous, shameless and grotesque falsehoods.

But one day the truth will come out. It must….

So I’ve put two thoughts together…

And what today’s confirms is that no individual, however strong, can really ever work in isolation.

We are social creatures and we cannot survive alone…

And did they?

Bad hearted people, and our own bad hearted actions, have immediate consequences.

They cause suffering to the victims… but also to the perpetrators.

We see this very clearly in the US:

Trump and his allies are the ones grinding their teeth.

Because, among other things, they know deep in their hearts that they are being defeated.

That man who shot an innocent woman in the face after she smiled at him is in hell already…

…Are very mistaken.

The harvest at the end of the world is happening here and now.

Change is coming….

Planting good seeds in the world in order to change it for the better…

But asking him to explain the stories, if that’s really what they did, shows that they completely missed the point.

Because I think the point of these stories is to think about them, mull them over in your mind, enjoy the strangeness and paradoxical nature of them.

And that then, just like a Japanese koan, that effort will lead to an enlightenment,

to an expansion of consciousness.

But the dear loves didn’t get that…

just as we don’t so often.

Despair and a sense of helplessness.

A sense of massive destructive events happening all over the world,

and us tiny people stuck in the margins,

unable to prevent all the damage and the suffering.

Of course there’s a certain truth to that,

but I guess what I’m trying to reach for here

is some kind of crumb of hope and of comfort.

Sending you all my love.

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But it has the power to change everything…

And which ones do not.

Perhaps more likey, an enemy from within…

And maybe it’s also an image of my mind.

And the weeds were planted by my parents with their (well meaning but damaging) upbringing…

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The ones who hear and understand God’s word and try to put it into practice.

And we feel a bit guilty at the thought that we' might be the ones who allow themselves to be led astray by worldly cares.

But what if the stroy isn’t about us at all?

What if it’s about the foolish seed planter, wating precious seed because they don’t look where they’re puttiong it?

What then….?

And always following thir own agenda….

So my hunch is that these were words put in Jesus’ mouth.

And that the story almost certainly means something different…

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We need to open our eyes.

I have been a bit overwhelmed by all the things I wanted to say about the preceding verses: and unable to find a form in which to say them.

I should really have just trusted in the power of the verses on their own…

Otherwise, all the distractions in the world will choke your idea before it even has any chance of life.

That’s true of finished work as well.

There is so much content being generated in every form of media that almost anything we say or create is in danger of being swamped and obliterated by a plethora of information.

Somehow we have to hold fast to the idea that the right people will see what they need to see….

I know they are taking these words of mine into their bodies, and I don’t want these words to do them harm.

And I don’t want the words I write to harm my audiences, either. And so I always worry…

And one of the reasons why I enjoy performing Queen Jesus is that saying these words makes audiences feel good, and they make me feel good too.

Stories matter to human beings. They always have.

So many malicious stories are being spread about these days.

And the only way I know to counter them are to try to spread stories of truthfulness, compassion, and love…

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But we are esponsible for the content of our stories.

We must make sure they are truthful and compassionate and will not cause harm…

And thanks to everyone who’s sent in plausible and wise explanations…

I think in the end I was content just to sit in silence, let it sit in my imagination…

And peacefully watch the loveliest sunrise…

Maybe because it had triggered some distress, which was unlocked after a friend shared a memoryof being called the Queen of Sheba as a put down by his dad.

I used to get put down a lot when I was a child and at the time I never knew what to say.

It was only afterwards that I could invent the most elaborate scenarios where I was biting and bitter and brilliant and utterly humiliated my opponent.

Perhaps that's one reason I became a playwright…

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But it’s a beautiful image…

They say the same things over and over again for years and years.

I think it’s because trauma is essentially repetitive. It just goes round and round in circles.

But transition, by contrast, is a process of healing and so is endlessly creative.

And how we are all involved in it, all involved in the process of change, of creating a different society.

The one we are forced to live in, of course, tries to silence us and tries to put out our hope and extinguish our courage.

But Queen Jesus reminds us:

“ No matter how much darkness there is in the world or how much darkness there is in our lives

We all have a light inside us, deep, deep in the very heart of us.

And our job is to bring it out and let it shine….”

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So Jonah is Wings Of Dove and Nineveh Village of Changed Minds.

I want to be a citizen of that place. And so I try to create it.

But sadly in the meantime we are stuck in the UK:

Arrogant, isolated, deluded village holding onto false notions of its past and unwilling to change its mind about anything at all.

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It made me wonder what Queen Jesus would say?

And how ironic that the main haters I (jo) encounter these days are not religious people but feminists…

Just to add I’m experimenting with form here… trying to see what “A New Gospel….” might look and sound like.

So feel free to share your thoughts…

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And they unmistakably tell us our way of life is not sustainable..

We ignore them.

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The words that come out from your hearts will decide for or against you when you stand before the Great Spirit.”

These harsh words reflect the harsh mood I’m in these days.

I’m so disgusted by the wilful, callous stupidity of the words that are so constantly used against trans people like me;

Words leading to such profound suffering and to our growing exclusion from public life.

Unlike this Gospel storyteller, I don’t believe in a final judgment happening sometime in the future;

And the Great Spirit is not high up in the sky, but actually deep within the hearts of each one of us.

Including the haters.

Now and in the future they are feeling and will feel the consequences of their words.

Their words can only increase their suffering.

And the cruelty they are turning against us they are also turning against themselves.

But there are consequences to spreading hatred, and they are the first to feel them.

Because their hatred of others comes from their hatred of themselves…

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Who claim to be feminists but are instead sharing their agenda with the most malevolent misogynists on the planet.

“Hatred is the only thing they have

And it doesn’t amount to much.

And they will lose it in the end

Because no matter what they say or what they do

They cannot stop the change that is happening

And one day we will all be free”

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I’m not sure I understand what this sentence means.

Perhaps what is truly unforgiveable is a crime against the very fundamentals of life…

But forgiven or not, no-one can escape the consequences of their action…

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From the city of Ur, in the unimaginably distant past, in the very first civilisation of which we have knowledge.

Which makes it all the more remarkable how thoroughly we have been erased from the record….

More information here:

https://www.academuseducation.co.uk/post/ancient-mesopotamian-transgender-and-non-binary-identities

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They added it, perhaps, out of their long history of resisting the annihilation of their peoples and culture.

It resonated with me, I guess, because I feel my identity is under attack at this time.

And cruel and wounding things are often said to me.

These words often come from women who are also unde attack.

Our hurts are collidng, and it is hard for us to hear each other.

Because a state of warfare hurts everyone.

Forgiveness at least offers the possibility of a way forward…

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It’s true here in the UK where we are involved in a war.

A war that’s not fought by guns or bombs, at least not yet, but a war of ideas.

A war between those who wish to maintain the old order of things and those of us who are trying to create the new.

The war matters because if the old order prevails then climate change will be irreversible and catastrophic, and has the potential to destroy all our lives.

And so we fight.

Ranged against us are the forces of hatred and greed.

They have massive financial resources, and often it often feels as if they cannot be defeated.

And as the reading says, we fight to gather our resources.

Our resources of imagination and solidarity and love.

There is no way of knowing the outcome:

But we have the truth on our side.

They have only falsehoods and lies.

Our duty is to do what we can…..

I woke at about 3, and soon after 4 realised I would not sleep again.

I made a mistake: I turned on my phone.

So many voices on the internet:

Enraged voices. Grieving voices. Obsessed voices.

People saying things that had no connection with reality…

But which pushed other people’s buttons,

And made them say angry things and enraged things and obsessive things…

I turned off my phone at once.

But too late, I thought, I’ll never sleep I thought….

And next thing I was having an immensely stressful dream.

A child crying, “I don’t want to go home”

And me helpless to comfort her.

And then I got up, and went to my chair,

To sit with my coffess and my bible reading,

And couldn’t make any sense of today’s reading at all.

It was Matthew 12:25-8. Let me know if it makes sense to you.

And then I thought: what i really need is a little quiet.

So here it is….

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Late capitalism depends on us being in competition and rivalry with each oter; governments, too.

They use our bitter disagreements - over sex and gender, for instance - to distract us from their failings.

We so urgently need to listen and respect each other and see what we have in common, so we can bring about the deep change the world so desperately needs…

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And so hatred comes more easily than love.

Jesus had to deal with so many of these people; and in the end they killed him.

We have to deal with them too, especially now when social media amplifies the voices of hatred.

I can’t really claim to know how to. Perhaps the next readings will help…

A question: if I had shared something that made you furiously angry, would it feel easier to press the ‘share’ button?

And we all need to find help wherever we can to clear our minds; and speak out our truth….

Possessed by the spirit of late capitalism. unable to truly see the world around us, deprived of the ability to speak about it…

And so these stories help?

Do they help us see clearly

…And help us speak of what we see?

Not one built on top down hierarchies

Not one based on the brutal politics of the school playground

But one built on co-operation, human solidarity, and mutual respect.

(Matthew 12:18-21)

I think the power is in all of us, and especially in those parts of us we have been taught to reject and to despise….

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They’re a group of young queer people who devised the show to answer the questions

“Who are the queer elders in our lives? How do they influence us? What can we learn from them?”

I spoke to them a bit about my life early on in their devising process and it was such a joy to spend time with them.

And “Bedrock”, the beautiful performance they created, spoke to their hurts and their vulnerability but also their love for each other and the pride they feel for being who they are.

And what they did was just the loveliest act of healing.

Healing for us, the fortunate ones in their audience; healing for themselves; and also, in a way I can’t even begin to explain or understand,

Healing for the whole world.

Bedrock

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The question they ask Jesus in this story is framed as a hostile question… but it occurred to me as I was reading this

What if it’s a genuine question?

What if they, too, are troubled by the demands of their rules and regulations and are asking Jesus for guidance?

And then I thought, I should be reading this completely differently,

And that’s what the pause is about

But I was just about to leave for early communion and didn’t have time to record it again..

And so here it is.

If I was dramatising this scene, I’d definitely make it a real question.

Because that’s far more interesting…

And maybe that’s an approach I’ll take in the future.

Many more deaths went unrecorded.

Many suicides caused by transphobia went unrecorded.

Many more young people’s lives were and are and will be ruined here and throughout the world by cruel bullies & culture warriors & prejudiced legislators inspired by the Cass report.

Many cis women will suffer because they feel they must repress parts of themselves they’ve been taught to consider ‘masculine’ in order to become ‘proper women’

And many cis men will suffer because they feel they mus repress parts of themselves they’ve been taught to consider ‘feminine’ in order to become ‘proper men’.

And so we work.

We work to create a world in which every human can flourish and live out their beautiful authentic selves.

And if you care about these things, please share this post

And subscribe too…

So this story was very real to me, and I hated the Pharisees because of it.

Which is why, now, it’s important to take a different message from it…

What I absolutely did not foresee then, back in 2009, was that I would find myself performing Queen Jesus in cathedrals…

And that the new generation of haters would call themselves gender critical feminists.

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It’s why I like the First Nations translation “Separated Ones”. It makes me think of the Plymouth Brethren, the sect to which my in laws belonged.

They did in many ways hold themselves apart from the rest of the world - because we, unlike them, were not saved and so certain to go to hell…

And their religion was very strongly one of rules and prohibitions.

They embodied a tendency we all have to project our self dislike onto other people.

It’s the only way I can make sense of this passage…

for a while now I’ve been wondering how to extend the reach of “The Gospel According To Jesus Queen Of Heaven” because it seems to me that her message is one that needs sharing.

I’ve made a couple of books out of the playtext, but they’ve never really been quite right, somehow, and I’ve never managed to find an agent or a publisher who wanted to handle them.

So I tried to abandon the project, but it’s kept bothering me and never quite left me alone.

And then yesterday it occurred to me that of course Queen Jesus could speak her version of my daily bible readings, and that might point to a way forward.

So I’m posting these as a bit of an experiment to see where they take me.

So please make an effort to comment if you want to, as your thoughts will help me.

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one was to tell the story of Jesus’ life,

and the other to overcome their opponents.

So antagonism and hatred are built into the foundations of the Gospels, and perhaps that partly accounts for the appalling cruelty and bloodshed in the history of the Christian church.

And the challenge for us, hopefully far distant from these conflicts, is to see what meaning these old stories can have for us.

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“Come to me, you who’ve been oppressed for being who you are,

you who’ve been made to hate and despise yourselves.

Come to me, for I will accept and love you with my whole heart.”.

from “The New Gospel According to Jesus Queen Of Heaven”

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But now I think it’s saying that God the Mother is inside all of us; and we are all Her children and She can only become manifest in the world through us…

And that’s what Jesus was modelling for us.

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I think they may have been attributed to him by the Gospel storyteller in their exasperation at the very little headway their tiny organisation was making against their opponents…

Whoever said it, it’s not an effective way to change people’s hearts….

And it’s been misused countless times by all those un-Christian Christian sects who use the threat of hell to keep their followers in line.

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And we know exactly where is the right path…

And we consistently ignore it.

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And every day our leaders ignore them.

And we let them….

So this passage is not about some distant cities in a far off time.

It is addressed to us.

Us here and now….

Because she is in the heart of us, deep deep below the level of conscious awareness

Knowing everything about us

And doing her best to guide us.

If we would only allow her to…

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Best to avoid them if you can…

And prophets are people who speak out against the wrongs and injustices of the present time:

And share a vision of a better time that could come.

In that sense, we are part of that lineage too…

It’s been distressing this week, as it is almost every week, to see “Christians” supporting all manner of means of reactionary cruelty.

When what the dear love actually said was completely different…

It’s the main reason why I keep posting these little readings… and the other reason being that I so appreciate these quiet moments of reflection.

Every time I publish one of these posts, Substack reminds me that I am losing subscribers.

And so I really appreciate those of you who post ‘likes’ and sometimes beautiful comments.

If, like me, you feel this work really matters then please feel free to share these posts and subscribe to the newsletter. It mostly doesn’t cost a thing…

Love and thanks to all of you, and I hope you have a lovely weekend.

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But if we act and speak while on the Creator’s Good Road, what we say and do matters more…

But they still live among us:

those who denounce injustices

those who foretell the ecological disasters coming our way if we don’t change our ways

those who envision a different way of being in the world.

We must join them.

That’s how change happens…

And those of us who live in the wilderness often feel like this:

Like a fragile reed, at the mercy of the wind,

Helpless and vulnerable.

But maybe we have a strength we’re not aware of…

But I’ve a feeling it makes more sense to see him as a name for a part of ourselves - ever loving, ever hopeful, ever committed to a better world…

And so these stories may also be part of a kind of inner spiritual autobiography.

And we have a responsability for the effect we have on the people we encounter…

But perhaps the healing that is being talked about is also a gradual process of healing from the hurts we suffer in our lives…

He doesn’t say:

“ Yes I’m the Messiah I’m the one who’s going to sort everything out for you and make everything okay.

And so worship me….”

And he doesn’t say:

“No I’m not don’t be ridiculous.”

He says:

“Look at your own experience for yourselves”

- the Buddha says the same thing -

“Don’t look for the Messiah outside yourself look within….”

And that is very liberating.

The One we’ve been expecting and waiting for?

The One who will lead us to liberation?

When things are as bad as they are now, we all want a charismatic leader to appear who will solve our problems.

It’s a natural enough wish; but the danger is it leads us to people like Farage and Trump.

Poor John was a political prisoner in jail; and probably hoping for a revolution that would set him free.

And so maybe in his distress he was asking the wrong question…

As for us, we can’t afford to passively wait: we must do what we can to bring about the change that is so desperately needed…

Wandering about haphazaedly from village to village.

And then coming to a catastrophic end.

how on earth did these profoundly counter-cultural ideas ever survive?

I guess because the world needed to hear them…

And those of us with our absurd counter cultural idea which we try to get across to our world - which seems so determined to ignore them - should take comfort from this.

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You can watch it here:

Led by Donkeys

What’s troubling about it is to reflect on how richly capitalism rewards those who lie and spread hatred.

Why should this repulsive individual be so richly rewarded?

The answer is that capitalism itself is founded on hatred and lies.

Which is why it is crumbling away before our very eyes.

Because lies cannot, in the end, withstand the power of truth.

But they seem to have so much power just now. And it’s discouraging…

And we need constantly to remind ourselves that every act of kindness, however small, counts for something…

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Those wretched creatures who think of nothing but how to increase their own wealth and power, and also how to hold onto their lives.

Thinking of men like Trump, or Putin, or Netanyahu, men thinking only of themselves.

It’s easy to see how they are lost souls.

It is not that they will go to hell; they are in hell already.

What’s worse is that they are doing what they can to make this earth a hell in which we all are forced to join them too.

The least we can do is commit ourselves with all our hearts not to be like them.

Not to let self interest govern our lives.

But instead embark on the journey to discover what the good road is for us…

And then follow it.

Maybe it works as a challenge: what is it we really value most in our lives?

We needs words for “here” and yet “not here” at the same time…

“Not a whit, we defy augury; there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,’tis not to come; if ut be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

Be so afraid of the society we have to live in.

I think of these words in the context of the “No Kings” demonstrations taking place right now across America.

There’s an evil regime that will fall and whose crimes will be exposed for everyone to see…

“Bless you if they hate you for being who you are

Because it means yo are bringing about change…”

As a trans woman, as writer and performer of “Jesus Queen Of Heaven”…

And recently just as a trans woman again.

It’s taken me a while to understand that it’s not me these people are hating.

Not me as me, if that makes sense

But me as a representation of some part of themselves.

And so they hurt themselves much more than they hurt me….

And so that’s what I do. I keep going.

I’m sure you’re the same….

Our different values were incompatible.

It was the same between my partner Susie and her parents.

The generations were at war with each other as we tried to create a different way to live.

I don’t feel the same conflict between me and my daughters: we pretty much seem to share the same values.

The culture wars that affect every single one of us, and in every single corner of our lives, seem to be between those who are holding on to the old ways…

…And those of us who are trying to create the new.

That is what this newsletter is about. The forces are reaction are getting very strong at the moment, and we need to come together to resist them.

So feel free to share this with anyone you know who might be interested.

And I’d encourage them to subscribe.

I was born in 1950: so my life encompasses the most incredible and profound change.

I’ll be mapping this change over the next weeks and months, as I try to remember my childhood.

My childhood in an unimaginably different world…

So please:

And do feel free to share your thoughts with me…

But it doesn’t necessarily seem to come from me…

“They may try to put out your light. They may hate you for allowing it to shine.”

Whenever I read the words of gender-critical feminists or MAGA evangelists or far-right influencers, I’m always struck by how much their words are filled with hatred.

They have very little positive to say.

Most of what they say is about insulting or abusing people like us, their opponents.

And it’s because, I guess, those who are defending the old patriarchal ways have nothing positive to give the world in the end.

All they have is their fear and their hatred of the new….

“Be as crafty as snakes…”

“…And as gentle as doves.”

Which is pretty much how I try to be myself.

all round America, Australia, Manila, the North Of England, London, Liverpool, Belfast -

Everywhere kind, honourable people have hosted me and enabled me to spread the Gospel of Queen Jesus…

All love and honour and blessing to all of them.

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Because no-one, to my knowledge, has come anywhere near fulfilling them.

Which is ironic, because I’ve been ill, and they’ll all been about Jesus healing the sick.

A young girl whose illness has killed her. A woman who suffers from endless bleeding. Two men who cannot see; a man who cannot hear.

They come to him for help: and they get better.

Jesus takes no credit for this. He makes no claims to be their healer.

Instead he empowers them: you did it, he tells them.

You did it because you trusted me and believed in me.

And I’ve been telling these stories to my friends, verse by verse, in the middle of my illness, utterly unable to believe any of it.

Because I was completely unable to ask him to make me well.

And here he is, looking out at how lost we all are, filled with compassion,

As if overwhelmed by the bottomless abyss of human need.

The needs that confront all of us as we contemplate the world right now,

And look into the depths of our hearts

And wonder what can we do

What can we do to alleviate all this suffering.

He took this image as the inspiration of many of his poems…

Poems in which he described his own soul as female. As a bride mourning the disappearance of Jesus her bridegroom…

I secretly felt my soul to be female, too… and to find a poet - and a poet who was a saint! - feeling the same way as I did moved me so profoundly.

And helped me to take the first steps to see myself as OK…

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Ironically enough it was because I was preoccupied with applying for Pension Age Disability Payment.

The form is very comprehensive and asks all kinds of intrusive questions about the intimate areas of your life that you might need help with.

I found it deeply distressing to fill out.

I'm not as disabled as the man in the story but walking is becoming harder and harder.

And also unlike the people in the story I've no faith that anyone can heal me.

But what if I did?

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I can't imagine it would've been really very celebratory.

When I was a child, I was taught that this story was about Jesus' power as a miracle worker.

I can't help thinking now that this is a story that gives a warning, a warning that even with the best of intentions, power can cause damage.

And I really do think that Jesus is allowed to get things wrong sometimes….

I can’t say I really blame them…

But sending evil spirits into the bodies of pigs and the pigs just being drowned? Seems a bit thoughtless, to put it mildly.

Sometimes I wonder if we misunderstand Jesus because we kind of assume that he knew exactly who he was and what he was doing from the very beginning.

But perhaps he didn't….

I think if I was writing a play about him, I'd make his character to be someone who was aware of having great gifts—gifts of healing, gifts of seeing the world in a different way, and communicating with people—but really unsure of what to do with them.

And this whole story has a slightly strange air of improvisation about it. A kind of, "Oh, let's try this and see what happens," feel.

And maybe Jesus just got it wrong.

The gospel storytellers wouldn't be able to say that, but perhaps we can.

And somehow it strengthens me to think of Jesus as a human being just like myself, struggling to find his way in the world….

As we all are.

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The church would like us to understand it literally because they're in the business of upholding an organisation where power flows down from the top.

And so they’re very eager to promote the idea that Jesus was her a supernaturally powerful miracle maker.

I think this is the opposite of the kind of society Jesus had in mind….

Also to read the story metaphorically empowers us.

I don't think we will ever be able to still storms at sea but we can learn to control the storms that break out in our hearts and minds.

And given all the hatred and fear that there is in the present day world this is something we very definitely and very urgently need to learn…

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I imagine hejus breathed….

My heart was beating unnaturally fast, the slightest movement would leave me feeling out of breath, I felt a deep fear in the pit of my stomach and in the weakness of my knees.

At the time, I hated these symptoms and wanted them to go away…

But later came to understand that because they made me seek help, they saved my life.

And later I came to understand that they were generated by a deep, all encompassing Intelligence inside me, far beneath my conscious awareness, that was responding to all the information it had of every aspect of me and doing what it could to preserve my life…

We all have that intelligence inside us; and maybe it gives us an inkling of what we call God…

We’ve a lot to learn from them…

There’s no time to waste…

(All translations from The First Nations Version, Matthew chapter 8)

https://firstnationsversion.com/book/first-nations-version/

I guess we all have our ‘bad spirits’ - thse parts of ourselves that we dislike or are afraid of and try to banish to our subconscious.

From which they emerge to bite us…

Maybe Jesus was able to somehow acknowledge all those parts of himself; and that freed him up to acknowledge them in others…

Which is not the same as him fulfilling the prophecy in Isaiah, as the story teller claims.

Always a big problem for Jesus: to be misunderstood by his own followers….

I wish there were more scenes like this…

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And what if I were capable of such belief….

Or what we truly believed we had the power to make the world a better place?

And also something so completely wrong.

Sad that the established church so strongly embraced this idea of a hierarchy of spiritual command…

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..and a member of that oppressed population who’s been taught to fear and hate the occupying force.

And yet Jesus doesn’t hesitate to help the man he’s supposed to hate; and the soldier doesn’t hesitate to trust the man he’s supposed to despise.

Maybe this is the real miracle…

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He heals people because he feels compassion for them, and simply can’t stop himself.

The important thing for him is what he has to say…

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“I could never do that”.

And almost certainly we can’t…

But we all have it within us each moment of each day to do something.

We can each do some little thing to heal the pain that all our fellow human beings are carrying.

“We all have a light inside us”, says Queen Jesus, “And our job is to bring it out and let it shine…”

And one day, when the storms return, they will be gone…

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There is another way..

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It's a weird thing to be performing a new show with a dodgy hip. And I wasn't quite sure how it was going to work.

In fact, I wasn't at all sure how the show was going to work at all but that is another story.

What this meant was that the kind of trust this reading is talking about, a sense that things will somehow turn out right, was something I needed to be reminded of…

And they did.

We were both trying to make it as writers, were usually in debt, and chronically short of ready cash.

When confronted with a crisis, we would look at each other and say

Let's consider the lilies.

What we meant was that somehow the money we needed would turn up.

And it always did…

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Perhaps if we could address it to the as yet unknown Self within us it would be a very good guide as to how we should live…

and almost always changes things for the better.

But I tell you, treat your enemies with love and respect, and send up good prayers for the ones who make trouble for you and bring you pain.”

(Matthew 5:43-4)

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And it is assumed that we are all ‘hims’ in competition with each other.

What this assumes is the opposite:

that we are all connected to each other,

that we are all neighbours,

and if we hurt our neighbour we are only hurting ourselves….

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If someone strikes the right side of your face, turn to him the other side also.”

(Matthew 5:38)

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So he said to the men “you have heard the saying, ‘you must not have sexual relations with another man's wife.’ but I tell you this, any man who looks at a woman and wants his way with her has already done so in his heart.

This is not how the great spirit wants us to see our sisters if you're right eye sees in this way – gouge it out and throw it away!

If you're right hand does harm to her – cut it off and throw it away! It is better to lose a part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into the valley of smouldering fire.”

(Matthew 5:27-30)

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And we all know which of our leaders and influencers belong to the region of smouldering fire.

Not as a future threat.. But a present reality.

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But this society built on individuals striving against each other for political power or commercial gain is not how it has to be.

There is another dimension to human life and it helps to honour it…

(Matthew 5:20)

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By prophets of every age and gender.

The problem is, when we’re not perverting what they said

To mean the exact opposite of what they intended,

We simply forget. We put it out of our minds.

Until some poor innocent soul has to stand up and tell us

And get arrested for their pains…

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It was Gaza that was getting to me.

The evil that is being committed to the Palestinian people there is so similar to the evils suffered by Jewish people in World War Two…

At that time, the rest of the world stood by and let it happen; and at this time, we are all also standing by and letting it happen again…

And there are days when I simply cannot bear it.

Like the women in the story, I have seen the cruelty of the world and cannot prevent it.

But I have also seen that there is another way; and that I have a duty to try to proclaim it.

And quite unexpectedly I remember a scene in my LUCY’S PLAY (1986).

Lucy has just met Mary the Mother of God. She is full of fear of a coming war and deep suffering that is to come.

Suffering she feels helpless to prevent:

“LUCY

I want to stop it.

But nothing I do makes any difference,

And nothing I do makes any sense.

MARY

Don't despair my love. You are Lucy, light on the mountain.

If you have light, do you hide it under a bucket? Do you cover it up with a stone?

No. You put it high on a hillside,

Where everyone can see it. You can't help it.

And you can't put it out. It's in the nature of light.

It was Him who taught me that. Don't forget.

And don't lose hope. Peace will come.

The good you do is never lost.

Remember, Lucy. Never forget.

LUCY

I won't. I promise.

MARY HAS GONE.

LUCY

The mother of God. I have seen the Mother of God. I must tell the others.”

….and reading through those lines, I discover I say the same thing in THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JESUS QUEEN OF HEAVEN.

Which I am performing this coming Saturday at 7pm in Rosslyn Hill Chapel, 3 Pilgrim’s Place, London NW3 1NG.

Tickets & info for Queen Jesus in London

Come if you can. And share with anyone you know who might be interested…

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A presence that’s consistently sidelined and overlooked.

(and until mainstream Christian churches get their acts together and finally admit women to equal positions of authority, they will continue to become an irrelevance)

At this point in the story, they’ve come to the tomb to give Jesus’ body the kind of tender loving care he was denied in the cruelty of his dying.

And I think that when they get to this point, it’s their love and courage and devotion that has rolled away the stone.

Because love, courage and devotion have a power we consistently overlook…

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Something to do with the complications of travelling; and something to do with the horrible brutality of Jesus’ death.

And I can’t see it as being culturally very healthy, the way orthodox Christianity keeps focussing on these atrocious scenes of trauma…

Anyway. Tenderness has re-entered the story, and I’m staying with beautiful friends in Livepool who tell me they enjoy these little readings.

So I thought I’d share this one… filmed in their beautiful garden.

And today I move on….

Do let me know if these little readings are meaningful to you. Or if they’re not…

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And you might even want to share them. I’ve a funny feeling it’s important for queer voices to be reading the bible…

We met in a group and shared dreams with each other; and she used to say:

“Everyone you meet in the dream is an aspect of you”.

And so we are the young man in yesterday’s reading, running away in naked terror into the darkness.

And we are Peter, frightened and trying to be brave, terrified and trying to appear nonchalant, as he warms himself by the fire.

And if we can focus on these figures, they can teach us something about ourselves….

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Winifred Rushforth was a truly remarkable woman. You can find out about her here:

Winifred Rushforth

If you go looking for answers on Google, you’ll find a whole load of different explanations that tell you more about the writer than they do about the text…

And me…. I keep picturing him in my mind. I keep imagining myself in his place.

And perhaps one day I’ll be able to give words to what I find.

And you? What do you think? Tell me…

Feel free to ask a friend…

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And the violence changed nothing. It could not silence who Jesus was; and it could not prevent his arrest.

There’s a message here for all of us…

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I can see it all – the darkness of the garden, the fear in the disciples, the sudden invasion of folks with torches, clubs and knives.

And then the kiss is such a powerful and gut wrenching moment – when Judas betrays Jesus with an act of love.

But at the same time, it doesn't make much sense as a literal account of events.

There is no need for Judas to identify Jesus. Everyone knew what he looked like because he had been teaching openly and very publicly in the temple for days and days.

Which makes me think that this is a moment when the story is not about the literal truth of what happened: but it has entered the realm of myth and poetry and legend.

Perhaps it has never left it.

That doesn't mean it's any the less true. On the country: it means that its truth is more profound.

And I know if I was writing the scene, I would very much want to know what was going on at the moment of that kiss.

What was Judas thinking? Was he really full of hatred?

Perhaps this was really an act of love. Perhaps he was making the ultimate sacrifice to help the man he loved to fulfil his destiny.

I don't know. Like so much else in this story, it is full of mystery….

Yes, do tell me your thoughts!

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Even when that means letting down those we love.

Al we can do in the end is try to learn to forgive ourselves.

And try again….

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It was horrible: my heart beating uncontrollably fast, the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, the weakness in my legs and knees, the all encompassing sense of terror.

If I've been able to pray at that time, I'm sure I would have prayed just the way Jesus does in the story: pray for the suffering to end.

I don't think I'd have been able to go on to say as he does: maybe the suffering is necessary. Maybe what I want is beside the point.

Maybe I have to accept my suffering.

It was only later, much much later, that I was able to accept my suffering at that time as necessary, and even be able to feel thankful for it.

Because it was that suffering that caused me to seek help. And it was that help that saved my life.

Otherwise, I guess I've just kept on going in my destructive way of life until it killed me.

I was remembering all this on my way to the tram stop this morning.

In the beautiful light of the new day…

When I had also just read the usual disastrous daily headline about human cruelty and human stupidity about their consequences in our tormented world.

This morning it was about the melting of glaciers due to global heating; and how this is endangering the food supply of billions.

And, of course, these findings, reported by the United Nations, are being ignored by governments all over the world.

Just as Western governments are so inexplicably ignoring the unimaginable cruelty the Israeli armed forces are inflicting on the people of Gaza.

Just as our contemptible UK government, which really should know better, is preparing to inflict poverty and suffering on the most vulnerable and those least able to defend themselves against it.

And it's no use praying for the glaciers to stop melting; or even for our politicians to start behaving as half decent human beings…

Just as it would've been of no use for me to pray for my sufferings to end.

Somehow I had to just accept what was happening, and try to do what I could to get myself better.

And later, when I was talking to my surgeon, and he told me that at a certain point he would give me an injection to stop my heart beating, I found myself feeling incredibly moved that after millennia and millennia in which we humans had been learning more and more effective and cruel ways to kill each other and to stop each other's hearts from beating out of hatred, here was someone assembling a group of highly skilled people to stop my heart beating in order to make me better.

I didn’t know how to make myself better then; and I don't know how to make the world better now.

All I know, then and now, is that it's important not to give up hope.

It's important to ally and align myself with the forces and energies that are working to heal the world.

Even in seemingly the tiniest ways…

Because each kind and compassionate act does have an effect on this interconnected world….

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A deep deep sorrow at the cruelty and the stupidity of the world.

I know I don’t need to tell you why….

And I was going to add: “and deep sorrow at my inability to change it”.

But that’s not true. Because we are all so inter-connected, every attempt I make to reach out to you counts for something.

So that at least we know we are not alone; and that somehow we also know, deep dep down, that human beings are better than this.

And perhaps it also helps to know that one of the best and wisest teachers the world has ever known felt this too…

I have not been able to publish posts like this for a while. My laptop broke while I was away, and it was all too complicated to find a way to share them.

These days I feel I need to keep reminding myself that this world’s turmoil and suffering is not all there is, and that there is another dimension that also gives meaning to my life.

Which is what these little readings are all about, and which I have been sharing with a whatsApp group.

But I have a feeling now that it may be useful to share them to a wider audience.

Do feel free to let me know what you think…

And subscribe if you want to receive them regularly.

Some of you have been kind enough to become paid subscribers, and I am deeply grateful to you.

I work hard on these posts, I know mostly because I must, but also it helps to receive financial recompense.

I keep meaning to reward you by giving you exclusive posts… but when the moment comes I always feel it important to share what I write with everybody.

So bear with me. Perhaps I will find a better way to sort this out soon….

And thank you all for reading this. It helps me; and I hope it also helps you a little.

Feel as if there is nothing we can usefully give

But everything counts

Everything matters

And we do have agency in this world…

Because they both so hypocritically and repulsively distort his teachings….

Yet the dear man made it so very clear that the two most important thingswere loving God and loving our fellow human beings.

Loving them as we love ourselves…

When people were regularly shouting abuse at me, I came to understand that I represented something they hated and feared in themselves.

And it was themselves they were really shouting at…

They often fill me with the deepest rage.

Yet also I can’t stop myself wishing them happiness…

That is an act of some power.

Few things can be more subversive of the present order of things - when the US government is trying to wipe us off the face of the earth.

The knack is to be quick witted enough to see beyond their malice and find a new way forward they never thought of…

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Or just grabbing its wealth for ourselves?

And how do we treat those who warn us of the dangers of our path?

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Evil has taken power in our world, too. Perhaps we can learn from what he did…

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Because you know how it is:

As we get older and become adult, the world gets to us and mucks us about.

And we blunder about…”

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The next time I get in touch with you will be in the new year, when I shall be in another continent on the other side of the world.

I will let you know why I’m there when the time comes; and will keep you up to date with how my journey is going.

I hope you have a very happy New year; and that 2025 is hapy and creative and hopeful for all of us.

I so appreciate your presence and support. Thank you with all my heart.

Love,

Jo

And wonderful the way she stands up to him… and is rewarded for it.,

(Mark 7:24-30 xx

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It’s not altogether true any more - what we eat can pollute us - and the food industry is very happy to make obscene profit from poisoning us.

Just as there are people on social media who are incredibly happy to increase their power and their profit through polluting our minds.

But we can control what we say and what we do: and we can, and desperately need to, control what we say and do.

So we do not add to the poisons destroying our beautiful world….

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Jesus may be talking about dietary laws that hold no meaning for us now; but the poison spread by social media is with us all the time.

And it really, really matters not to add to it…

(Mark 7:14-16)

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(Mark 7:8-13)

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More helpful to see them as an image of part of us: the part that lives in the past, and turns off our critical faculties, and does things because that’s how they’ve always been done…

(Mark 7:1-4)

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Mostly we just feel crap because it seems like we can’t make the person better..

But a smile, a kind word, a hug… all give a little healing.

We’re all hurt, we all need it, and we can all give it, too….

(Mark 6:53-6)

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“Everyone in the dream is you”.

And more and more I think these stories have the same vivid immediacy and deep truth as dreams.

And we do walk on the water every day we don’t sink under depression or anxiety or despair or get carried away by rage…

And the bit of us that just works and doggedly works away, rowing against wind and tide, just cannot believe there is another way of being in the world

And is freaked out by even a glimpse of our true powers and capabilities

And has no idea of who we truly are.

(Mark 6:47-52)

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And we all need both….

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it doesn’t last long - I’ll quickly drift off, maybe into sleep and generally a lovely dream or maybe I’ll start writing in my head something I’m working on, or have an imaginary conversation with someone I’m concerned about…

And then I’ll pull myself, with a bit of a jerk sometimes…

Back to the still small point I’m trying to focus on.

This place which may be inside me, or maybe outside me, doesn’t matter, this…

…place both of this world and yet somehow outside it

This place that may correspond to what we talk about what we use the word “spiritual”.

And I wonder, as I read this utterly baffling story, that may be Jesus had greater access to it than we do… and that maybe this is a place that is not governed by the laws of scarcity that prevail down here….

Or maybe I should just stop taking this literally and accept it as a beautiful metaphor for the transforming power of love.

Or maybe it’s not an either/or

But an and/and.

(Mark 6:35-42)

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(Mark 6:31-34)

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Trying to understand evil, trying to understand the best way to resist it and overcome it, is a painful business that tends to leave me helpless and exhausted.

This reading reminds me that kindness and devotion do count for something…

(Mark 6:29-31)

A father holds a birthday party for his male associates and serves up his teenage daughter as a dancer to entertain them.

And then, because he can’t afford to lose face in front of them, has a good man killed.

And a young girl gets given a severed head

I wonder if we’ve learnt anything since the days of Herod beyond the ability to spread evil more widely around the world.

I’m thinking of Assad and his family in their grotesque palace with their obscene collection of luxury cars.

That they accumulated at the expense of most of the population living in desperate hunger…

And the countless thousands of prisoners tortured and killed to keep them in power.

We’re complicit in all this. We knew what was happening.

But we chose to ignore it because it suited world governments to use the suffering of the Syrian people as pawns in their proxy warfare.

And I look around my little flat, hardly palatial by Western standards, but a palace compared to the living conditions endured by countless billions elsewhere in the world whose labour keeps us in comfort.

And I wonder how best to resist. How best to remedy the fundamental injustice that poisons all our lives…

(Mark 6:21-28)

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Goodness knows, he may be right.

It’s common to imagine that people like this are monsters who are incapable of human feeling.

I’m not sure that helps us much. I’d rather imagine them to be human like the rest of us: capable of great evil but also, even if only in tiny ways, capable of kindness.

Maybe that’s just my vanity as a writer: I want to imagine that it’s possible to imagine what it would be like to be any human being, however evil they may be.

Which is why I’m very touched by this story of Herod having conversations with John in prison.

There’s definitely a play there: I’d love to imagine what they said to one another..

(Mark 6:16-20)

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And like Herod they’ve all committed crimes to gain and maintain themselves in power.

It often seems as if they will always evade justice; but tis story reminds us they cannot avoid the justice of their own hearts.

Their own crims willvisit them: and will haunt them.

The King in my Ines de Castro says:

“KING

I keep having dreams. People keep knocking on the door. & I have to open it. I say, it isn't right, I'm the king. I shouldn't have to do this. I'm the king! But they take no notice. They just keep filing in. Hundreds of them. Hundreds. People with their wounds. All festering. Horrible. Horrible. It was a fair fight, I tell them. Entirely fair. Nothing personal. Just go away. Go away! But there's more of them. More. & more. & more

She never comes. Not Ines. Never. She knows better. It had to happen. I've no regrets. None. None at all.

I'm walking down a passage. It's very long. There are so many doors. I'm trying to open them but I've thrown away the keys. I'm naked & afraid. There's a man further up coming after me. I'm looking for some armour. I try all the doors. But I can't get in. I can't get in. I'm naked. Then I look down. My armour has become my skin.”

I wonder what dreams visited Assad in the years before he fled for his life.

And what dreams and fears will visit him now in his insecure sanctuary in Moscow.

Whatever they are, he can’t escape.

And nor can his colleagues in crime escape them.His colleagues in Tel Aviv. And Moscow. And Washington…

(Mark 6:14-16)

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And explore them as metaphors instead.

To “Think poetically” as Queen Jesus tells her audiences.

And I’m somewhat astonished to see the similarities between the way I present Queen Jesus in churches these days to the the instructions Jesus gives his followers.

It’s equally simple: just me, a prayer bell, and the words, and the Queen Jesus white dress.

That’s what took me round America and the north of England; and that will take me round Australia next year.

All I ask for is my travel expenses and a place to stay. I’ve never had to shake the dust of anywhere off my feet, because I’ve received nothing but kindness.

I’m not asking for payment in Australia because my visa doesn’t allow me to: and maybe that’s how it should be from now on.

What’s for sure is that as a society we’re on a deeply mistaken path; and we all need to find different ways of doing things to guide us to a new one….

(Mark 6:7-13)

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I’m not sure that was a very helpful thing.

Something I am treasuring from this slow journey through Mark’s gospel is the picture that emerges of a remarkable human being with extraordinary gifts - gifts he didn’t really understand and know what to do with.

And someone who wanted to be accepted and loved and valued just like the rest of us.

There’s something very beautiful and moving about all this.

And helpful, too. Because we are groping our way forwards too…

(Mark 6:1-6)

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(Mark 5:41-3)

He just goes ahead regardless and does his own beautiful thing….

(Mark 5:35-40)

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I was suffering; but it was so hard to talk about it. I felt I had to hide it because for people to know would expose me to shame.

And if people knew, I was sure they would hate me.

I suppose that’s why I love this story; and one reason why, when I re-read it all those years ago I was inspired to write “The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen Of Heaven’.

Because I understood that the transphobic jesus of the traditional church was not true.

(Mark 5: 29-34)

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Maybe if we could truly believe in a truly good person it could change the world for the better…

(Mark 5:25-9)

I remember in the early nineties opening myself up to it to write a play - LIGHT IN THE VILLAGE - and becoming seriously ill with pneumonia.

But the Jesus of these stories just seems to give himself, all the time…

And then, in the end, he really was totally destroyed.

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