1. Who is Worthy of Grief?
On the evening of Monday 22 May 2017, I was doing what I often do on Monday evenings after a long day of meetings, ministry and conversation: I was sitting in front of my laptop scrolling through my Twitter timeline. It was just another Monday evening, full of the usual mix of carping, argument, comedy cats and cynical humour. Then something started to happen. Tweets began to emerge from people in Manchester city centre that indicated something very serious was happening. There was talk of loud noises, possibly even explosions, near the MEN, aka the Manchester Arena. As ever, with such immediate Twitter reportage, information was, initially, mixed and confusing. Something had happened, for sure. It might be a bomb, but it might equally be an accident. Quite quickly, images and short videos began to emerge, some from people who had been attending the Ariana Grande concert at the Arena, some from people in the nearby parts of the city centre. Images of the emergency services arriving in the Victoria Station area of town began to appear. Something dreadful had happened.
At 10.31 BST, a suicide bomber detonated an improvised explosive device in the foyer area of Manchester Arena. It contained nuts and bolts, which acted like shrapnel, flying in every direction. That evening over 14,000 people had attended the Ariana Grande concert at the venue. Many of them were children, for Grande was famous not only as a singer but as a childrenâs entertainer on the Nickelodeon show Victorious. As the concert hall emptied, the foyer area was full of happy gig-goers and their parents. In the aftermath of the suicide bomberâs act, nearly two dozen people were killed and scores were injured, many with physical and psychic wounds that might never fully heal.
The 2017 Manchester Arena bombing presents an intense focus for the varieties of grief. There are many other sites of trauma, of course, and I shall attempt to explore some of them. However, the Arena bombing, certainly for someone like me who lives in the city, remains exceptionally poignant. There are layers and horizons of grief within it that warrant cautious attention and I want to offer my reflections on it with care and tenderness. I do not want to mock or diminish anyoneâs sense of grief, including those who, it might seem to the casual observer, were on the margins of trauma. While the primary grievers were surely those who directly lost loved ones, there was a potent sense in which the grief generated by the Arena bombing was public, widely felt and interpersonal.
For, in this social media age, grief is partially constructed and structured in multi-platformed and transnational ways. For days, the centre of Manchester found its locus in the laying of flowers in St Annâs Square. Public, interpersonal grieving was negotiated through a sea of fragrance and colour. Layers upon layers of flowers acted as metonyms for layers of emotion, some simple, some no doubt sophisticated, all felt sincerely. For over a week after the bombing, the square felt like the hub of the worldâs media, full of cameras and satellite trucks gathered at the edges of the main square. This media was hungry for content. For that week, it was a risk to walk through the square while wearing a dog collar, for priests were seen as public figures with an angle to offer on grief and hope. I knew priest friends who, when they had to go into town, simply took their dog collars out.
Manchester city centre provides a focus for over 2 million people. Since its renaissance in the late 1990s, it has grown to provide a cornucopia of delights. It can â especially during rush hour â feel a busy and congested place. However, in the week following the bombing there was something else. It was almost possible to taste the emotion in the diesel of the buses that choke Oxford Road and John Dalton Street and Deansgate. The streets were swollen with bodies and grief and love. St Annâs Square â that august, almost severe square named after the late Stuart church at its south end â moved and flowed endlessly with hundreds, thousands of people who wanted to signal their respect, their shock, their grief. Most had no direct connection to the bodies they grieved over. Attention was fixed on the tokens of grief ever growing in the heart of the square. Though I know many drew comfort from going into the church, attention was drawn away from it towards the central bouquets of grief. Indeed, I recall attending an Archdeaconâs Visitation at St Annâs that week (when the Cathedral was closed) and being stunned by the bright lights of the TV cameras intensively facing away from the church. St Annâs felt at the margins not only of the worldâs attention but of its own square.
When we talk about grief or grieving we enter space and time framed in terms of hardship, suffering and bodily affliction. To grieve can mean to make angry or enrage. It has horizons of lament. In Old French, it has implications of injustice, and misfortune and calamity. It also gestures towards burden and oppression. In its Latin root, to grieve means make heavy or weighty; to have weight. So, when we begin to ask, âWho is worthy of grief?â we might also be asking, âWho has weight?â, or âWho is weighty in our culture, our communities, our bodies and lives?â And, in a hint of how liturgy and poetics begin to emerge, who is worthy of memorialization and language and song? Who can be re-membered in discourses of pain and anger and injustice and oppression, as well as joy and hope?
In the aftermath of the Manchester bombing various narratives took hold. One of those narratives â a very impressive one â was the âwe shall not be divided by violence; we are united; we shall model peaceâ. Religious and political leaders, including my bishop in Manchester, provided a united front. There were moving moments when religious leaders came to the sites of grief and joined their silence to that of others. As Iâve indicated on numerous occasions, including directly to the Bishop of Manchester himself, I think David Walker was exceptional under intense pressure. He demonstrated the kind of nuanced carefulness and bold grace that the Church of England has, at times, failed to model. He understood that, though he was a significant community leader in Manchester, he was one among many. In one sense, as a diocesan bishop of the Established Church he had every right to stand in public places and demonstrate spiritual leadership. However, what was especially impressive was how he intuitively understood that the old days when the C of E spoke first as of right are gone. He entered the space of grief with the gentleness of a guest invited on to holy ground.
Another axis of attention concerned the sheer impact of the destruction. The juxtaposition between the work of violence and the fact that people were out for a night of fun only heightened the effects of the bombing. People had gone out for a good time, to listen to a winsome childrenâs entertainer. The roll call of death was appalling. In one sense, the contrast between the vile act of terror and the context should make no difference. And yet, of course, it does. Sometimes the gap between the violence and the wider context is partially constitutive of the horror.1 Either way, in a modern liberal democracy the death of 22 people in one incident is a lot. Although, of course, thatâs where a line is revealed. That night, 23 people died. One happened to be the bomber Salman Abedi.
On 29 May 2017, the local newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, wrote, âIt is important to remember the innocent victims and not the terrorist who murdered them.â Let us be clear, Abedi perpetrated an act of terror. I understand why one would want to say that he is not worthy of grief or remembrance. I understand why words would be withheld from the perpetrator of violence. Abediâs denial of the good â his actionâs privatio boni or absence of good â makes him unworthy of word, of sermon, of song, of poem. His work of violence arguably denies him the worth, weight or value of liturgy or memory.
But it is noteworthy to think, from a Christian perspective, what it means for a body to be erased from the record. To be placed beyond the line of value. To have been so othered that a human is not even listed among the dead. It is a pungent, startling indication of the limits and lines that can be drawn through grief â through weight and value, and therefore of language. There are things that become unsayable, or at least profoundly risky about, for example, the extent to which Abedi himself was a victim of ideological exploitation or perceived injustices around identity and the Westâs violence. Perhaps I go too far and make a category mistake in this particular case, but even if I am wrong about Abedi, it is striking how cultural affinity, skin colour, notions of nationality matter in the theatre of grief.
And hereâs the fascinating thing. It is at least tempting to suggest that one of the ways communities and persons locate their sense of oneness, and disavowal of violence, and the path from grief to action (which of course includes revenge and fighting back as well as more pragmatic compromises and acts of love) is by processes of othering. There are invisible or barely tangible lines of value that when pressure comes can harden or become defined. I was struck by the complexity of reaction in my parish after the attack. I had conversations with people who were scared for their Muslim neighbours because Abedi might be seen as representative of all Muslims; and I met and spoke with people who did want to lash out at what they saw was a problem with Muslims or Arab men. Abedi was for them a metonym for Muslim savagery.
This example may raise more questions than answers and still seem to hover above our concerns in the Church perhaps. But I wonder if we are to be agents of grace we cannot become hardened to the limits of grief, because they signal something about our (and the diverse wider communitiesâ) senses of justice, suffering, oppression and value. The limits of grief indicate where lines of community and memory are delineated. In The Ethics of Memory, the philosopher Avishai Margalit explores â in part through an analysis of the ethical afterlife of the Shoah â âthe healing power of knowing the truth in the case of communal memoriesâ.2 He notes, however, how âmemory breathes revenge as often as it breathes reconciliationâ.3 In so far as ethics is the province of community,4 memory â who or what is remembered and considered valuable â intersects powerfully with grief. Grief is not and should not be reducible to an emotion or emotions âexperiencedâ by individuals, but is a horizon of community. Margalit speaks of âthick relationsâ. These are anchored in a (perceived) shared past or âmoored in a shared memoryâ.5 On this picture, âmemory is the cement that holds thick relations togetherâ.6
In Precarious Life, the philosopher Judith Butler asks, âIs there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavouring to seek a resolution for grief through violence?â7 She presents us with a challenge: to consider whether, in staying with the sense of loss, we are left feeling only passive and powerless, or whether we become alert âto a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one anotherâ.8 Butler is not considering individual grief here â though, of course, individuals experience it â but grief as a mode of communal vulnerability. Writing in the shadow of 9/11 and the USA and Britainâs decision to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, Butler wants to invite us to reflect on how grief â as vulnerability and openness to others who wound us and whom we may wound â may transform our human relations. As she summarizes:
Could the experience of a dislocation of First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally? To foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other h...