Reconciliation in Our Souls
Erin’s story
In June 1976, having just turned 15 years old, I traveled by air for the first time with a group of 18 other Pullen youth and six adult leaders. Our destination was Coventry Cathedral in England and the John F. Kennedy residential center (“Kennedy House”), the cathedral’s dormitory-style youth hostel. The hostel’s construction had been funded in part by the government of West Germany as a post-World War II gesture of friendship, acknowledging Germany’s firebombing of the city and the 14th-century cathedral in 1940.
Pullen’s long-time choir director, who loved to travel, had visited the cathedral in the early 1970s and believed this was a place Pullen needed to know. Not long afterward, in 1974, a group of youth and leaders—including my older sister—went to Coventry and “camped out” on the floor of a nearby Baptist church as well as taking part in activities at the cathedral.
View of the ruins, the porch of the new cathedral, and the city from the old spire
For both sets of pilgrims, our hosts’ hospitality stood out. My group stayed at Kennedy House for nearly 3 weeks. We shared the space and conversed with other youth visiting from France, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland, as well as with student volunteers who were participating in the ministry of the cathedral as guides and young leaders.
We attended worship in the cathedral, became friends with the Kennedy House staff, met current and retired clergy, volunteered our services in various ways, and joined social activities (on July 4, 1976, the community honored us with a picnic and a canal boat ride). We learned about how after its near-total destruction by fire, the cathedral had taken to heart its ministry of helping perceived enemies find a path to peace and reconciliation.
Unbeknownst to me, that same summer, Robert Childers—current President of the Community of the Cross of Nails (CCN) in the USA and Caribbean—was offering hospitality to the cathedral’s international visitors as a student guide. In 2012, we also simultaneously rediscovered our deep connections to Coventry when we returned for a CCN international gathering that also honored the 50th anniversary of the new cathedral’s consecration. Eventually, it dawned on me that student-guide Robert had been “that tall, thin redhead in a cassock.”
CCN board members and friends in Coventry, November 2012, with the new and old cathedrals in the background. L to R: Erin Newton, Marilyn Peterson, Rev. Walter Brownridge, Episcopal Bishop of Cuba Griselda Delgado del Carpio, Rev. Mark Pendleton, Rev. Robert Childers, Father John McGuire (director of Kennedy House in 1976), Rev. Anne Stevenson
Robert’s story
I went to Coventry during my sophomore year of college, from 1975 to 1976. I’m from Alabama, and the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama, and I had three good friends who had worked as guides at Coventry Cathedral the three previous summers. We had all known each other through our Diocesan Camp in Alabama and had been at Sewanee: University of South together. One of those friends told me, “This is something I think you would like”—not for any deep reason, but for a chance to travel. I had never traveled in my life. I had never really left the South. And like Erin—and as I’ve told many people—I had never been on a plane before in my life. I interviewed with a seminarian at Sewanee who knew cathedral Provost H. C. N. (“Bill”) Williams, and she and my bishop recommended me.
And so, without knowing anything else about Coventry Cathedral, or even where Coventry was, I accepted because of a chance to work in England for the summer. I went for 2 months but stayed for 9 before coming back to the United States. That was the sum of my involvement until 2012, when Mark Pendleton, who was then the CCN–North America board president, convinced me to go to the 2012 gathering and then to serve on the board. I did go back, reconnected with Coventry, and began to really understand, 36 years later, why I had been so moved before.
Looking toward the ruins from the new cathedral, through the glass screen
Nighttime worship in the nave of Coventry Cathedral
My experience in Coventry taught me what it means to live in community; it was an incarnational learning of reconciliation that I didn’t have the sophistication to express in words, then. I learned that I could be stretched and I could have relationships with people with whom, in my mind, I had nothing in common other than our shared humanity. And it gave me that framework which I have realized became rooted in my soul, even though I didn’t know it for the longest time. I do what I do, as an Episcopal priest, in part because of what I gained as a 20-year-old in 1975 and 1976 in Coventry.
Our story together
In February 2018, both of us were privileged to take a pilgrimage to Cuba with other CCN friends from the US, UK, Germany, and South Africa. Our group reengaged with long-separated but faithful CCN partners in Santiago, Guantánamo, and Havana, and we participated in the service for the installation of a cross of nails at Primera Iglesia Bautista in Matanzas. The measure of welcome and hospitality that we experienced in Matanzas and elsewhere in this lovely and tenacious country went far beyond anything we could have imagined or felt we deserved.
Both of us were exposed early to the reconciliation ministries so pivotal to Coventry Cathedral’s mission. We remain strongly pulled to this international network of individuals and organizations and its three universal, guiding principles. Strikingly, they also echo our Advent theme of hospitality: healing the wounds of history, learning to live with difference and celebrate diversity, and building a culture of peace.
Photo taken in February 2018 at Iglesia Santa María, Santiago de Cuba, which received its cross of nails in 1993. L to R: Coventry’s former Canon for Reconciliation Sarah Hills, Father Ulises Agüero Prendes, and Rev. Mark Pendleton
Service of installation of cross of nails at Primera Iglesia Bautista, Matanzas, Cuba, February 17, 2018: Pastor Orestes Roca presents the cross to the congregation
