'The Three Sophias' at Lancaster Priory

Lancaster Guardian

Facing the Past and 'The Three Sophias' at Lancaster Priory; interview with Rev Leah Vasey-Saunders

Transcript

00:00 Hi I'm the Reverend Leah Vasey Saunders and I'm the Vicar of Lancaster.

00:03 Leah, can you just tell us a little bit about what's happening today at the Priory?

00:07 So today we are launching an installation, an intervention in the Priory Church at the end of

00:16 what has been 18 months of working on a project across the city responding to our shared history

00:24 around transatlantic slavery. And that's of course the Facing the Past project?

00:28 Yeah. And can you just talk a little bit about the journey that's brought us to

00:34 these wonderful sculptures that are now in the Lancaster Priory as of today?

00:40 So one of the wonderful things about this project has been commissioning Priory-specific research

00:46 from academic Melinda Elder. And one of the wonderful things about that piece of research

00:52 is that half of it is yes, about dealing with the white Lancastrians who were engaged actively in

00:59 the slave trade, either through owning plantations or ships or various other means. But the other

01:05 half of her research has been about uncovering and bringing into the light many black Lancastrians,

01:11 people who were here for all sorts of different reasons and a significant number in the registers

01:17 of the Priory Church. We were trying to think about how do we respond to that discovery?

01:22 And we decided that we wanted to do something which would bring black presence in physical form

01:29 into our space. And that's partly because we were so moved by the stories that we have learned about,

01:35 but also because we want to think about how do we enable black presence in the space of our church

01:42 in the future. So in that research there's a story of one girl called Sophia Filene who was

01:49 baptised in February 1799, the only child in the registers of that history and 11 years old and we

01:58 know nothing else about her, nothing at all. And we were really drawn to that story particularly

02:05 because the Priory has a long-standing relationship with Educade, which is a charity in West Africa

02:13 working with school children. So working with Educade we then developed some teachings,

02:19 some sessions to deliver to children over Zoom and to teach them about the history of transatlantic

02:26 slavery from our perspective and to ask them what they knew and to share with them the stories of

02:31 some of the children that we know about. There are other children we know about outside of our

02:36 registers. And then ask them specifically what they thought about Sophia, how they responded

02:43 to her story, how they empathised with her and they imagined her to be beautiful and strong

02:49 and to have agency and to have experienced joy in her lifetime. They then had a movement workshop

02:57 with a practitioner in the UK over Zoom, dancing and moving, expressing their hobbies and their

03:03 talents and their gifts. And then lots of photographs were taken. Those photographs

03:08 were developed into 3D images which have then been taken on further and developed into the

03:15 sculptures that are in the church today. And from your perspective what do these sculptures say to

03:21 you as an individual who's obviously the vicar of Lancaster but also somebody living in Lancaster

03:27 today? I mean I find them really moving and when the first one came in for a trial a few weeks ago

03:35 I did find myself struggling to not shed a tear because there is something about the presence of

03:43 children in church, of young children and then when we're thinking about children with a global

03:48 majority heritage it's just so important to me that we have a future which is not the same as

03:55 the past where we are a really diverse church, where we are a church that welcomes everyone.

04:01 We were baptising black Lancastrians in the 18th and 19th century and yet our churches are not

04:09 very diverse today and that tells me we've still got something to learn. So when I see these models

04:15 I'm yearning for and praying for a time when our church will be more diverse and where the

04:21 children of God will be more representative of the character of God in that kind of multi,

04:28 it's kind of a multi-vocal way. At the moment I think we miss so much when we don't engage with

04:34 diversity and I'm really looking forward to seeing how the congregation responds to these and seeing

04:40 how it makes them feel about our church and where our church has been, where we are now and where we

04:46 might be going to in the future as God calls us to lean into this history and to make a different

04:52 future. I was going to ask you about the future so you've clearly yourself been on a journey

04:57 this last 18 months and through the Facing the Past project, would you encourage people to do

05:06 the same if they haven't already done so and what lies ahead? So I mean I think in Lancashire as in

05:13 various other parts of the country that are near to ports that have been ports where slavery

05:18 was a part of the trade in those ports, Lancashire has a great history and there will be many other

05:24 churches I think across the Diocese of Blackburn but also in the Diocese of Liverpool and possibly

05:31 even further south where there is a history where when people start to look at who these wonderful

05:38 people are that are named on the walls, when they look at who they are and what they did,

05:41 they will discover people who have legacy and complicity in slavery. I would say don't be afraid

05:49 of learning the truth, it is what it is, it isn't anything to be defensive about or ashamed of

05:57 and I think that because we have done that we can both own it but also we can say we are committed

06:04 to being a different church in the future. The future for Lancaster Priory in terms of what we

06:11 do next, we're looking to think more about this theme of disruption and about you know how we

06:18 disrupt what might be the norm for our experience of church partly because I think when we look at

06:26 Jesus that's what Jesus does, he doesn't look at what the status quo is, he looks for the marginalised,

06:31 he looks for those on the fringes of things and he calls them into community to help to transform it.

06:38 I think that's what we're looking to do as we move forward and hopefully that will involve

06:43 some sort of permanent memorialisation of the black lives that we have discovered in our history.

06:49 That's great, thank you very much indeed.

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