The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has written the forward for a new edition of the poetry of WH Auden. The former Archbishop of South Africa, Desmond Tutu, wrote the preface for Bishop Gene Robinson’s In the Eye of the Storm soon to be printed in the UK by Canterbury Press.
About Auden, Williams writes,
The early poetry is full of what was to him the uniquely “authoritative” landscape of Pennine limestone, isolated communities, cold skies and deep-rooted, revengeful violence. This serves not as a backcloth for regional mythmaking, but as a set of framing metaphors for the social and political tragedy of the era. And, perhaps more importantly, for the sense of doubleness and loneliness, being suspicious and creating suspicion, that was bound up at this point in his life with Auden’s homosexuality. The convoluted political context, with its rhetoric of covert operations, espionage and treachery, is inextricably connected with a muted but intensely felt sexual politics – of a very different kind from what we associate with the phrase in more recent decades. The poetic voice is often that of someone working as a kind of double agent or negotiating difficult border country.
Apartheid, crassly racist, sought to penalise people for something about which they could do nothing – their ethnicity, their skin colour. Most of the world agreed that was unacceptable, that it was unjust.
I joined the many who campaigned against an injustice that the Church tolerated in its ranks when women were not allowed to be ordained. They were being penalised for something about which they could do nothing, their gender. Mercifully that is no longer the case in our Province of the Anglican Communion and how enriched we have been by this move.
I could not stand by whilst people were being penalised again for something about which they could do nothing – their sexual orientation. I am humbled and honoured to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who seek to end this egregious wrong inflicted on God’s children.
Earlier this week it was learned that Gene Robinson would not be receiving a “full invitation” to Lambeth from the Archbishop of Canterbury. See The Lead’s coverage here, and Gene Robinson’s response to the news here.