Sunday 13 September 2025
On Saturday morning I went for a run, from Waterloo to Southwark to Blackfriars station and back to the IMAX, past tens of thousands of people waiting for the Tommy Robinson march. The t-shirts, banners and placards ranged from the at-least-slightly-nuanced-if-historically-challenged ‘Original Briton’ with an English flag underneath, to the less ambiguous ‘Get Them Out’. Every time a non-white person appeared on the street, the aggression was palpable. (I’m acknowledging my privilege here, too; if I wasn’t white I would’ve run elsewhere.)
There’s a well-known Martin Luther King quote, that “the arc of the moral universe may be long, but it bends towards justice.” On Saturday evening I was planning for Sunday morning’s church service, and to be honest it didn’t feel like that. Those of you who have been to Oasis Church Waterloo will know that we don’t shy away from topics like this – if our faith is still relevant today, it has help us navigate things like this, so we started the service by talking about it.
I talked about what I’d seen the previous day; how I walked past a Black teenager near my house and considered telling him to go back to his house, because I didn’t think the street I’ve lived on for 11 years was safe for him. How I then crossed the road and heard one of the marchers shout racist abuse at a tourist group, some of whom were wearing hijabs. How our schoolkids had been told by their teachers to stay home on Saturday. How I’d moved to London almost 17 years ago, and that Saturday was the most profoundly depressing day I’ve had here.
But although the day felt heavy, and lots of us – particularly our Black community – were tired, we needed to respond; and the way to respond to hate, fear, and exclusion is through love and inclusion; by wrapping our arms around those who were being threatened. So we sang songs about love, we prayed about inclusion, we talked about providing our kids a counter-narrative to what they saw on the streets around us, and I asked someone to read a poem that talks about all of this.
We’ll keep working at all this. But if you’ve felt that tiredness and impotence over the last couple of days, this poem is for you too:
Prayer for the Morning, by The Rev. Dr. Audette Fulbright Fulson
Did you rise this morning,
broken and hungover
with weariness and pain
and rage tattered from waving too long in a brutal wind?
Get up, child.
Pull your bones upright
gather your skin and muscle into a patch of sun.
Draw breath deep into your lungs;
you will need it
for another day calls to you.
I know you ache.
I know you wish the work were done
and you
with everyone you have ever loved
were on a distant shore
safe, and unafraid.
But remember this,
tired as you are:
you are not alone.
Here
and here
and here also
there are others weeping
and rising
and gathering their courage.
You belong to them
and they to you
and together,
we will breakthrough
and bend the arc of justice
all the way down
into our lives.