Essay

Creed

Trauma

27 March 2024

8 min read

Pain’s scars and the difficult hope they demand

The tension of pain and hope is hard-wired into the human condition.

Trystan Owain Hughes

Trystan Owain Hughes is a theologian and vicar based in Wales.

A close up of the face of a bruised and bloodied cyclist with a large bandage on his forehead.

When I felt a twinge in my lower back at the age of 30, little did I know that this would lead to chronic pain for over 20 years and counting. Defined as persistent or recurrent pain that is present for more than three months, chronic pain can lead those of us who battle it to struggle to carry out daily activities or to socialise freely. Research shows that up to 15 per cent of the UK’s population live with pain that is moderately or severely disabling. Whether discal, muscular, arthritic, or related to auto-immune or other conditions, medical researchers inform us that we are facing a silent epidemic of chronic pain in our society.

In the past 20 years, pastoral work has opened my eyes to the fact that those of us who face the ignominy and anguish of chronic pain cannot claim a monopoly on suffering. No stranger to significant hardships himself, psychologist and Auschwitz-survivor Viktor Frankl suggests that all suffering should be taken with utmost seriousness, however brief or minor it proves to be. The “size” of suffering, after all, is relative. It is, he claims, like releasing gas into an empty chamber – it doesn’t matter how much gas is released, it will fill the chamber completely. In other words, it does not matter how great or small our sufferings are, they will always hold the potential to darken our hearts completely.

Behind even the brightest smiles and the most cheerful demeanours are the scars of a thousand cuts.

Suffering and struggle have been particularly marked in our society in recent years, with the twin-tribulation of the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis leading to so much grief, illness, depression, loneliness, poverty, and isolation. Some years back, I undertook hydrotherapy at the local hospital. With each patient having endured various injuries, many quite serious, I was struck by the plethora of scars in the pool each week – on backs, shoulders, arms, knees, and ankles. The many years of struggle and pain in that pool was all too visible, but, as I undertook my aquatic exercises, I recall thinking to myself: if we could peer into the souls of those around us, how many more deep-seated scars would we notice? Behind even the brightest smiles and the most cheerful demeanours are the scars of a thousand cuts.

Neither should we fall into the trap of believing suffering merely impacts us as we age. While it is true that there is a correlation between age and bereavement, illness, and disability, the dark hand of suffering is not partisan to age or circumstance. Many children and young people go through all manner of serious trauma and illness, often hidden to those on the outside. Research is showing a sharp rise in chronic pain in young people, for example, while teachers bear testament to the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of so many of their pupils. Moreover, when I was a university chaplain, I saw how deeply young people were affected by incidences and events, even those that, to others, may have seemed trivial. Younger generations are certainly not immune to life’s struggles.

Like that tenacious and resilient tree breaking through the harsh concrete, we witness hope and promise shining out of the pages of his letters.

Christians, of course, have always been aware of the philosophical questions surrounding the existence of suffering. The book of Job in the Old Testament details one of the earliest attempts to consider theodicy, while numerous scholars down the ages have grappled with the “problem of pain” (C.S. Lewis) and the question of “where is God when it hurts?” (Philip Yancey). Their musings are well documented and discussed, but, as a Christian with chronic pain, I have become less interested in the “why?” of suffering and more concerned with the “what now?” In other words, I am increasingly interested in how faith responds when confronted with the crippling and dehumanising personal impact of pain, grief, illness, disability, relationship break-ups, depression, loneliness, poverty, or anxiety.

During a particularly acute flare-up of back pain recently, I took short walks around our immediate locality. We live in a concrete jungle – there are houses, streetlights, cars parked down both sides of the road, and vehicles driving up and down, especially at school drop-off time. In my pain, I was struggling to see any hope in the incarceration of a city. Then I noticed something on our road that I’d walked past on many occasions. It was a small, solitary tree, which is about twice my height. For a brief moment it lifted my heart and I thought to myself how wonderful that someone had planted that tree, just to give some greenery to this urban sprawl. But then I noticed that this beautiful little tree had not been planted at all. Rather, it had broken through the hard, unforgiving concrete, desperate to reach up to the sunlight and take in the oxygen in the air. That small tree is, in many ways, an apt metaphor for the Christian response to personal suffering.

From the book of Acts and his letters in the New Testament, it is clear that St Paul had walked the gruelling path of pain and struggle. He faced prejudice, persecution, and prison, not to mention his battle with a personal affliction, which he called a “thorn in my flesh”. Scholars posit this may have been an illness or a disability, such as blindness. Yet Paul does not allow his letters to become dark, depressing diatribes of fear and hopelessness. Like that tenacious and resilient tree breaking through the harsh concrete, we witness hope and promise shining out of the pages of his letters. Here was a man who knew suffering, but, through his vivid encounter of the person of Jesus, he had also grasped the profound meaning of hope. When we attend a funeral or a wedding, we will quite often hear uplifting passages of hope and joy written by him. Discussions around the tension in Paul’s epistles between “flesh” and “spirit” are well worn, but, when I read his letters, especially in light of the life and death of Jesus, it is the tension between “suffering” and “hope” that is most conspicuous.

“I have seen the light – it flickers on and off like a badly-wired lamp”.

Andrew Motion

This tension, of course, is not just prevalent in the Christian scriptures. It is hard-wired into the human condition. Just take the years of the pandemic, when people were either isolated, lonely, stressed, and anxious themselves or were journeying alongside others facing illness, grief, worry, and fear. During that period, I was a parish priest and would regularly visit people, standing socially distanced on their doorsteps. Yet, despite suffering seemingly being omnipresent during the pandemic, people did not generally regale me with their miseries. Rather, they wanted to inform me of moments of uplifting hope that had broken through their difficulties – the beauty of nature on their daily walks, the tireless care of the NHS workers, and the joy of meeting with friends and family, on zoom or outside in the garden. They seemed naturally aware that hope and suffering are inextricably linked. This fact is at the heart of our Christian experience – its recognition is one of those things that define Christians as Christian. After all, the very symbol that has come to represent the Christian faith – the cross – is both an emblem of torture and suffering and a symbol of liberation and hope.

Not that opening our eyes to moments of hope, love, and wonder is easy when we are going through difficult times. In the dark moments when my own chronic pain seems overwhelming and utterly debilitating, I am inspired by the words of the former poet laureate Andrew Motion: “I have seen the light – it flickers on and off like a badly-wired lamp”. There will be times when Christians will see God’s light clearly and its beauty and glory will dazzle daily. But there will also be times of doubt, grief, depression, anxiety, and physical pain. During those moments, we can learn to be sustained by the occasional spark of hope that will come to us, even in the very ordinariness and humdrum of our daily lives.

And so, in travelling through life’s dark moments, Christians recognise two powerful realities. One of these has long been championed by preachers and spiritual teachers – it is the presence of a kingdom to come in a heavenly future where there will be no more tears and no more suffering. The other one, though, can speak powerfully into the present predicament – it is the presence of a kingdom all around us now, breaking through the harshness and bleakness of life, like that small tree bursting through hostile concrete. Theologians refer to these two realities as “inaugurated eschatology” and they can also help us to recognise profound moments when transcendent hope breaks into our lives. Opening our eyes to compassion, beauty, wonder, and awe can help us transcend our suffering, which so often seems all pervasive, and can lead us into a strange new world of God’s providence.

In the soil that the broken concrete had revealed were little green, sprouting shoots. Hope had begotten hope.

So, Christians hold onto the hope of the “not yet”, confident in the hope of life after death. But, as the old Christian Aid advert put it, we also believe in life before death. However dark and long our journey seems, hope is birthed when we take time and space to notice strange and uplifting moments of beauty, grace, and guidance breaking through our daily lives now. In these, Christians find, in the words of theologian Karl Barth, “indications, intimations and parables” of the coming reign of God.

After 20 years of daily struggle, I have made peace with the fact that I am likely to battle chronic pain for the rest of my life. However, I have also come to recognise that hope is not all about smiles, sunshine, and flowers. Hope is often difficult and demanding. It is about delicately holding the joy and challenge of life in a wonderful balance. For the Christian, it’s about both recognising God’s kingdom in the beauty, awe, and wonder of his created world and glimpsing it in our very earthly, wearisome, and draining lives.

But there was also something else about that small, resilient tree that was breaking through the hard and unforgiving concrete. On another walk, a few weeks later, I noticed foliage growing around the base of the tree. In the soil that the broken concrete had revealed were little green, sprouting shoots. Hope had begotten hope. And it is certainly true that the more we open our lives to recognising hope, however brief it may be in our struggles, the more it can inspire us to bring moments of light and comfort to others. And thus we live out, in the words of Karl Barth, so many “little hopes”, and, by doing so, we scatter seeds of new life and resurrection as we go, trusting that God will water them and bring his “hope, faith, and love” to fruition in the world around us.

Explainer

Belief

Community

Creed

Politics

10 June 2025

7 min read

The peripheries of belief: how faith shaped the north’s identity

Northern spirituality’s rebellious capacity to adapt is still in play today

Tom Rippon

Tom Rippon is Assistant Editor at Roots for Churches, an ecumenical charity.

Durham Cathedral and town.

David Connor on Unsplash.

2025 has so far been the year of the north. At its start, we were treated to the plasticine escapades of Wallace and Gromit, whose unabashed northern-ness was enough to faze American TV executives. Then in April, the story turned to northern industrial decline when Scunthorpe steelworks hit the headlines, prompting last-minute state intervention. In May, the local elections saw the astonishing rise of Reform across areas previously dominated by Labour. Taken together, these three moments encapsulate the range of associations often evoked by life on the periphery of England: regional pride, good-natured humour, close communities, economic precarity and hard graft.

The north is a landscape of contraries and co-existence, where sweeping fells and dark skies meet red-brick chimneys and rolling waves of terraced houses. As David Barnett puts it, it is “a place made up of individuals, bound by an ethereal quality that is at once a myth and, conversely, as real as grit and graft.’

Hard to pin down, yet real once seen, the same could also be said for the faith that has filled the region with a multitude of expressions to this day.

Of course, when we talk about ‘the north’, we mean everything and everyone from the conurbations of Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the Lake District and Northumberland, where centuries of border warfare have left a plethora of castles and fortified houses (‘pele towers’). Two landscapes dominated by buildings which have long lost their original purposes. Perhaps the principal shared characteristic of these communities is a sense of distance from mainstream political and cultural life (just try catching a train that isn’t heading to London). But with distance comes an independence of identity and a proud sense of cultural distinctiveness. If anything, the only thing that can be definitively said about northern identity is that it is the quality of being ‘not southern’.

Northern Christianity has not escaped this wavering relationship with the south. In 664 AD, the Northumbrian Church gathered at Whitby for a meeting presided over by King Oswy of Northumbria and the Abbess Hilda of Whitby. It was quite literally a pivotal moment for the early Church and the north more widely. The matter at hand was whether Northumbrian Christianity, then centred on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, should remain orientated towards Celtic Christianity, which had as its principal focal point the abbey of Iona, or whether to turn towards Rome and its growing mission in the south, headquartered in Canterbury. North or south? Canterbury or Iona?

In the end, the group opted for closer links with the Roman Church. Yet the Christian faith in the north remained distinctive, blending the older influences of St Columba and St Aidan with the new ones coming up from the south. Lindisfarne Priory remained a centre for Christian life in the north and its prestige led it to accumulate the wealth that eventually precipitated its own destruction by Viking raids in 793 AD. In spite of this, the northern saints drew reverent pilgrims for centuries to come, as the grandeur and scale of Durham Cathedral, the burial place of St Cuthbert, testifies to this day.

Behind the independent northern spirit lies a long history of political, economic and spiritual divergence from the south. Northern spirituality is characterised by a sustained distinctive flowering of the Christian faith that intertwines itself with the social identity of the peoples and places of the north. The region’s response to the religious reforms of Henry VIII was the Pilgrimage of Grace, which protested both his break from the Roman Catholic Church and socio-economic policies implemented by the king and his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.

By the seventeenth century, faith in the north had taken on a distinctly reformist hue as non-conformism – that is, churches and sects not aligned with the Church of England, the Church of the state and the establishment – flourished in the region. The beginnings of the Quaker movement can be traced to an open-air sermon given by the reformer George Fox in 1652 on Firbank Fell, near Sedburgh in modern Cumbria - the crag he spoke from is still known as Fox’s pulpit - while other reformist movements, including Methodism, Congregationalism and Presbyterians, also drew increasing crowds with their passionate preaching in fields, moors and disparate farming communities.

The very landscape of northern England, often challenging and remote, drew its inhabitants away from both socio-political centres and the established Church, nurturing forms of belief in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which were as independent as those of seventh- and eighth-century Northumbria. Much of religious life in the region was organised around a large parish church that served numerous small communities spread across a large area. Living at such distances, no wonder people felt a disconnect from the parish church and the national Church it represented. Non-conformist chapels and meeting houses quickly spread across the landscape, particularly in remote villages outside of the control of major landowners and Church authorities. As David Petts argues, the building of chapels expressed the collective economic and organisational independence of rural labourers and miners, and united dispersed communities through collective endeavour.

The region has proved itself capable of delivering considerable shocks to the London political establishment.

Once the chapel was built, they would prove valuable training grounds for rethinking the political organisation of the poor; the significance of non-conformism thus lay not only in its spiritual divergence from the establishment, but also in its fostering of alternative political systems. Methodism in particular was to provide an ideological and practical template for mass movements such as Chartism, which campaigned for social reform and an expansion of democratic suffrage in the mid-nineteenth century. Chartist campaigners called themselves ‘missionaries’ and crisscrossed the country preaching ‘the gospel of Chartism’ and forming Chartist congregations. Their political vision found a receptive audience in the working population of the industrialised north, who were raised on the non-conformist emphasis on Christ as the carpenter’s son and a poor man, one who worked for his living as they did. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the non-conformist social Gospel produced notable reformers such as the journalist W. T. Stead, born in rural Northumberland as the son of a Congregationalist minister, and the Quaker confectioner Joseph Rowntree of York.

Amidst the darkness, grime and crushing conditions of nineteenth-century mills and mines, the Christian message of mutual aid and fellowship, first articulated by the early Church, again found expression. In Manchester, the Methodist Central Hall served a dual purpose, providing a space for worship on Sundays and a community space during the week, when it offered libraries, food, clothing, shelter, childcare and even entertainment to the people of the city.

Social reform and the Christian faith buttressed one another across the region and together resisted the fractures, pressures and degradations that industrialisation exerted on the communities they served. The social values of these interdependent movements left a lasting impact on the modern political landscape of the region, until recently known as Labour’s ‘Red Wall’. As any political correspondent will tell you, northern politics can no longer be taken for granted and the region has proved itself capable of delivering considerable shocks to the London political establishment. Walking through these communities, left behind by deindustrialisation, globalisation and our periodic post-crisis recoveries, the air seems pervaded by a sense of unravelling as the old bonds and certainties slowly slip-away. The Church is not immune to these processes and the north follows the overall national trend of declining church attendance. The empty chapels testify as much to the seismic shifts taking place in the region as the empty warehouses and factories.

But if the history of Christianity in the north tells us anything, then it is that northern spirituality has never stood still. It has an ingenious capacity to adapt, to regenerate itself to meet the challenges faced by each generation. The challenges are varied and specific to each community, but the Church is there. In Burnley, the fight of the early disciples against urban poverty is echoed in the work of the Church on the Street, whilst on Holy Island itself, the Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin is a driving force behind the Holy Island 2050 project, which aims to assure the sustainability of the Island community in the face of depopulation and rural precarity.

If the dominant atmosphere in the north is one of feeling left behind, then the Christian call to reach out to those around us is needed more than ever. More than one thousand years separate St Aidan from us, but the Christian faith can still help the us to navigate the challenges and precarities of a changing world.

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