The Backwater Sermons

By Jay Hulme

Jay Hulme is an award-winning transgender poet, performer, educator and speaker. In late 2019, his fascination with old church buildings turned into a life-changing encounter with the God he had never believed in, and he was baptised in the Anglican church.

In this new poetry collection, Jay details his journey through faith and baptism during an unprecedented world-wide pandemic. As he finds God in the ruined factories and polluted canals of his home city, Jonah is heckled over etymology, angels appear in tube stations, and Jesus sits atop a multi-story car park. Cathedrals are trans, trans people are cathedrals, and amidst it all God reaches out to meet us exactly where we are.

Jay’s poetry explores belief in the modern world and offers a perspective on queer faith that will appeal not only to Christians, but young members of the LGBT+ community who are interested in faith but unsure of where to start.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press Norwich
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781786223951

Jay Hulme

Jay Hulme is an award winning transgender performance poet, speaker and educator. Alongside his writing and regular performances he teaches in schools, consults and speaks at events and conferences on the importance of diversity in the media, and more specifically transgender inclusion and rights.

Book preview

© Jay Hulme 2021

Published in 2021 by Canterbury Press

Editorial office

3rd Floor, Invicta House,

108–114 Golden Lane,

London EC1Y 0TG, UK

www.canterburypress.co.uk

Canterbury Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

HAM.jpg

Hymns Ancient & Modern® is a registered trademark of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd

13A Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich,

Norfolk NR6 5DR, UK

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, Canterbury Press.

The Author has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978-1-78622-393-7

Typeset by Regent Typesetting

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

Contents

Poem Order

Introduction

Poems

Poem Acknowledgements

Thanks

Poem Order

Isaac

Take These Words

On Realising God Exists

‘Now you’re Christian, do you pray and all that?’

England, the Twenty-Fifth of April 2020

Towpath Bodies

Metaphors

Sketches from an English Summer, 2020

A Boy, Fleeing Death

Pete

A Very British Pandemic

The Only Shop Still Open

Anatomy of an Ending

Don’t Die

Not a Poem

Pandemic Prayers

Angels in a Time of Crisis

Stratus

Like Gardening

Video Calling the Dead

For a Short While

In Silence, Everything

All of This is Worship

Plague Baptism

Holy Chaos

What I Couldn’t See

Without Words

Golden Golgotha

Atheist out of Necessity

The Church of Middle England

Abide with us, Lord Jesus,

Holy! Holy! Holy!

St Margaret’s Bus Station

Consider the Sparrows

God is a Capitalist

The Edge of a Past Horizon

And Repeat

We Pause at the Red Diamond

I never killed a man, but it was close

Graveyard Earth

Ratby Nunnery

In the Silence

Seeking Trans Ancestors in Old Provincial Graveyards

Christianity for Heathens

You Eat God?!

Just Talk About the Weather

All Creatures

The Altar Frontal at St Nick’s is a Rainbow Flag

This Body

In Search of St Sebastian

Martyrdom

The Love of God; The Loss of Church

Jay

Like Thomas

Show Me How To Love

Addressing the Backlog

Nine Altars

Cathedralsong

Ruins

Reconciliation

Come Down

Scriptorium

In Memoriam

Graves like Gardens

God in the Garden

Before Creation

Palm Sunday

Up and Out in Gethsemane

Vox Pops from Golgotha

Mary Magdalene and the Gardener

The Carpenter

In Persona Christi

Late Night Theology

The First Sunday

Splitting Fares

Knowing the Unknowable

An Angel in Baker Street Station

Dag Gadol

The Volunteer

Multi-Story

Jesus, upon hearing of the death of John the Baptist

Jesus at the Gay Bar

‘Queer’ is a Calling

Beatitudes for a Queerer Church

Introduction

I often speak of being a ‘Plague Christian’ – I found God in November 2019, having been brought up so Atheist that at 23 I didn’t know what date in December Christmas Day was. And soon after, a global pandemic changed the world.

Despite spending my entire life feeling drawn to churches and cathedrals, I’d spent years in denial, certain that I was too poor, too queer, too dodgy, to even enter them, let alone belong in them. Even