There are places that change the way you see the world. Not necessarily because they tell you something you did not know, but because they make it impossible to continue knowing it in quite the same way. As I write these reflections, I am preparing to return home from Montgomery, Alabama, where I have been part of a pilgrimage with friends and colleagues from the Church of England, exploring the history and continuing legacy of racial injustice in the United States. I find myself wanting to gather some of what I have seen and heard, not as a settled account, but as an invitation to keep thinking; and, more importantly, to keep being changed.
It has been an extraordinary and unsettling experience. I find myself returning to a question about the stories we tell ourselves: who curates them, whose voices are heard, what gets remembered, and what is quietly consigned to the margins? A story is never simply a recollection of what happened. It is also an act of curation.
We select, arrange, illuminate and sometimes obscure. We decide which experiences are given prominence, which memories are preserved, and which are allowed to fade into the background. And in doing so, we do more than describe the world. We help to make it.
We create the moral landscape in which we live. We draw its boundaries. We establish its landmarks. We decide whose suffering matters, whose humanity is recognised, and what kind of future is imaginable.
Every society inhabits a story. And every story makes claims upon those who inhabit it. Montgomery makes this painfully clear. Here, the history of American slavery, the domestic slave trade, racial terror and segregation is not abstract.
It is written into the geography of the city. The landscape carries the memory of what happened, but also of what has been hidden, denied or inadequately acknowledged. Our pilgrimage took us to the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, created by the Equal Justice Initiative, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, tracing the steps of other pilgrims of hope who, in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, defied the tyranny of status quo to indelibly change the world. We sat with Rosa Parks, wrestled with a young Dr King as he sat, afraid and lonely in his kitchen.
These are places that ask visitors not simply to learn about history, but to encounter its human consequences and to consider what truth-telling might require of us now. We also had the privilege of meeting Bryan Stevenson, whose work through the Equal Justice Initiative has brought the realities of racial injustice into public view with extraordinary moral clarity. What stayed with me was not simply the scale of the work, but the insistence that our response to injustice begins with how we see, whom we listen to, and whether we are prepared to draw near. I have come to think of this pilgrimage as an encounter with the topography of hope: not a hope that avoids the difficult terrain of history, but one that learns to find a way through it.
The power of proximity
One of the most important insights of our time in Montgomery was the power of proximity. It is possible to know about injustice while remaining at a safe distance from it. We can acquire facts, develop opinions, and even express solidarity without allowing what we encounter to disturb the arrangements of our own lives. Proximity changes that.
It brings us closer to the people whose stories we might otherwise hold at arm’s length. It unsettles the distance between observer and observed. For Christians, this is not simply a useful ethical principle. It is a hallmark of the ministry of Jesus.
In Christ, God does not remain at a safe distance from the human condition. Jesus draws near: to the sick and excluded, to those whose lives have been marked by shame, to the stranger and the grieving. He touches those others avoid, listens to those others silence, and makes room for those whom society has placed beyond its boundaries. The incarnation is, among other things, God’s refusal of distance.
And proximity is not simply about getting nearer to another person’s experience. It is also about recognising that we ourselves are in need of conversion. We often imagine conversion as something that happens to other people: a change in their attitudes, their behaviour, their understanding. But the encounter with another’s story can become the place where our own assumptions are exposed and our own imagination enlarged.
We begin to see what we had not seen; to hear what we had not heard; to recognise how the stories we have inherited may have shaped our sense of what is possible. This is one reason why listening matters so deeply. It is not a passive activity, nor simply an expression of courtesy. To listen well is to allow another person’s experience to become consequential for us.
And it is here that I find myself thinking about an experience from my childhood in Kamina. There were times when, carried on the wind, we would hear a melody. We assumed it was the church choir preparing for Sunday worship. All of us, that is, except our grandfather.
We later discovered that what we had heard was not the sound of a choir rehearsing, but the lament of a family mourning the death of a loved one. The melody had reached us, but we had not understood what we were hearing. We had interpreted it through the music we expected to hear. Our grandfather, it seems, was more attuned to the sounds of grief.
Oscar Romero once said that “some things can only be seen through eyes that have cried.” Might it also be true that some songs can only be heard by ears attuned to suffering? Perhaps this is part of what proximity makes possible. It tunes our hearing differently. It teaches us to recognise that what sounds like dissonance to some may be the only song available to others; that lament is not the absence of hope, but may be one of the ways hope speaks when life has been wounded.
Hope is not always a bright melody set against the darkness. Sometimes it is a movement from dissonance to consonance: not by silencing the painful notes, but by allowing them to be heard, held and brought into a larger harmony. We need to learn to hear the song of hope that others are singing. Hope is not always expressed in the language we expect.
It may be carried in testimony, in music, in art, in the persistence of a community, or in the determination of people who have every reason to despair. Sometimes our task is not to supply hope, but to recognise it already alive in others; and to allow it to teach us.
Truth as the ground of hope
At the heart of the Legacy Museum is a commitment to telling the truth: about slavery, racial terror, segregation and mass incarceration, and about the ways in which these histories are connected. The museum challenges the comforting narratives by which societies can remember their achievements while forgetting the suffering on which some of them were built. Truth-telling is not an exercise in keeping wounds open for their own sake. It is a refusal to build the future on denial.
We cannot repair what we are unwilling to acknowledge. Nor can we imagine a different future if we remain captive to stories that conceal the causes of present injustice. There is an important distinction here between truthful remembering and nostalgic recollection. Nostalgia can offer us a reassuring picture of the past, often by smoothing away its contradictions and silencing the suffering that would trouble our sense of ourselves.
It invites us to return, imaginatively, to a world that never quite existed; or that existed only for some. Truthful remembering does something different. It refuses both denial and romanticisation. It allows the past to be encountered in its fullness, including the parts that unsettle us.
If lament, as suggested by Emanuel Katongole as hope as her twin sister, might it also be true that amnesia is nostalgia’s twin sister? Nostalgia can lock us out of a possible redemptive future, because it leaves us longing for a past that cannot, and perhaps should not, be restored. Truthful remembering, by contrast, can make possible a kind of re-membering: the work of bringing what has been divided, disavowed or disfigured back into relationship. Not a reconstruction of the past as though we could simply put the pieces back together, but a regenerative work of recovering our shared humanity.
For Christians, this has a deep resonance with the work of Christ. The resurrection does not erase the wounds of the crucified Jesus; the risen Christ bears them. Yet those wounds are no longer signs of defeat alone. They become part of a new life, a life in which what was broken is not simply restored to its former condition but transformed.
Christian hope does not ask us to forget the wounds. It asks whether, through truth and grace, they might become part of a future that is more truthful, more just and more fully human. At the Legacy Museum, one encounters jars of soil gathered from sites across America where Black people were lynched. Each jar bears witness to a particular place and a particular life, making tangible the truth that racial terror was not an abstraction, but something enacted in communities, on particular ground, against real people.
The jars are part of a larger act of remembrance: a refusal to let these lives, or the violence that ended them, disappear from the nation’s story. Bryan Stevenson tells a story about a woman who volunteered to collect soil from a place where a Black man had been lynched. The woman, though nervous, was determined to go alone. She drove to a remote place in West Alabama, got out of her car, and began to dig.
Then a truck drove past. The white man driving it slowed down, stared at her, and eventually turned around and came back. He stopped, got out and approached her. She was frightened. She considered telling him that she was simply collecting dirt for her garden. But resolved to tell him the truth: she was collecting soil from the site of a lynching, to honour the person who had been murdered there.
And the man asked whether he could help her. And so, the two of them began to dig together, collecting the soil and filling the jar.
I keep returning to this image. The ground that had witnessed terror became the ground of a different encounter. Not because the history had been erased, nor because the act of collecting soil somehow repaired the violence. But because the truth was spoken, and something unexpected became possible.
There is a profound theological insight here. Reconciliation does not begin by asking the wounded to put down their memories. It begins by refusing to let those memories be buried again. Truth is not the enemy of hope. It is its ground.
It is a simple, powerful image. The soil is both material and memory: the ground itself bearing witness to what happened there. And the act of collecting it becomes an act of truth-telling, of refusing erasure. The white man’s decision to join the woman does not undo the past, nor does it make their histories identical. But it suggests that the work of remembering and the work of repair need not be undertaken alone.
Perhaps that is what some theologians have referred to as a contrast community; one where belonging, mutuality, responsibility and solidarity are renegotiated, and life is articulated upon a radically different paradigm. I found myself thinking about the significance of that shared labour.
The work begins with the truth of what happened, and with the willingness to stand on the ground where it happened. It asks something of us beyond sympathy: a readiness to be implicated, to listen, and to take responsibility for the stories we tell and the structures we sustain.
There is a temptation to imagine that hope is what we turn to when the truth becomes too difficult. Montgomery suggested something quite different. Hope becomes possible when we are prepared to face the truth. It is not the opposite of truth, but one of its fruits.
Rattlesnakes don’t commit suicide
There were two particular expressions from our pilgrimage that I have carried away with me. The first was a line from one of the films at the Legacy Museum: “Rattlesnakes don’t commit suicide.” It is a wonderfully unsettling image. Rattlesnakes do not voluntarily bring about their own destruction. And those who benefit from systems of oppression are unlikely to relinquish, of their own accord, the power and privilege those systems afford them.
There is something important here about the nature of the struggle for justice. We can sometimes imagine that, if only we could explain the injustice clearly enough, or appeal to people’s better instincts, those who benefit from the status quo would willingly surrender their advantages. But history suggests otherwise.
Power rarely gives itself up simply because it has been shown to be unjust. Privilege rarely dissolves through moral persuasion alone. And systems of domination are remarkably adept at reproducing themselves, even when their most explicit expressions have been challenged.
This is not an argument for despair, nor an invitation to demonise individuals. It is an invitation to realism about the nature of the work before us. Justice requires more than goodwill. It requires courage, organisation, persistence and a willingness to confront the structures through which power protects itself.
Perhaps it also explains why proximity matters so much. We need to hear the experiences of those who bear the consequences of injustice, rather than rely on the assurances of those who benefit from its continuation.
The second reflection came through the work of a Ghanaian artist whose contribution to the museum offers a powerful meditation on ancestry and memory. The artist is Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, whose Nkyinkyim installation is part of a wider body of work honouring enslaved African ancestors. The title evokes the twists and turns of life’s journey.
His sculptures give individual human presence to people too often reduced to numbers or categories, restoring faces and forms to those whose lives were violently interrupted by the transatlantic slave trade. The work’s journey from Ghana, including its installation at Cape Coast Castle, to Montgomery is itself a powerful act of remembrance across the Atlantic.
I retain a thought associated with this work in paraphrase: We do not become ancestors simply because we die; we become ancestors through the quality of our living. I find this a profound challenge.
Across many African cultures, though in diverse and distinctive ways, ancestors are not understood simply as people who have died and belong to the past. They may be remembered as continuing members of a community, whose lives and wisdom remain consequential for those who come after them.
Practices of remembrance can sustain a sense of belonging across generations, reminding the living that they have received a world they did not make and that their own lives are bound up with those who preceded them. This is not to suggest that there is one African understanding of ancestry. Traditions differ, and the relationship between the living and the dead is understood in different ways.
But in many contexts, ancestry carries a strong sense of continuity and responsibility: we are shaped by those who came before us, and our actions will shape the lives and possibilities of those who follow. The artist’s reflection turns that understanding towards the present. What kind of ancestors are we becoming? What will our lives leave behind?
What stories will those who come after us inherit from us? What possibilities will our choices have opened, or closed, for people whose lives we will never know? To become an ancestor, in this sense, is not simply to leave a biological legacy. It is to live in such a way that something life-giving becomes possible for others.
It is a demanding understanding of vocation. It asks us to measure our lives not simply by what we have achieved, accumulated or secured for ourselves, but by what we have made possible for others. And it connects, for me, with something at the heart of Christian discipleship: that our lives are not ours alone.
We are members of one another. We are shaped by those who came before us, accountable to those who share the present with us, and responsible for the world we are helping to bequeath.
The grammar of hope
There is a grammar of hope here, and it is always articulated in the plural. So much of our public language encourages us to think in the singular: my success, my security, my future, my freedom. But the stories we encountered in Montgomery resist that narrowing of the human imagination. They remind us that no life is lived in isolation, and that the wounds of one part of a community cannot be treated as though they have no bearing on the rest.
For Christians, this is deeply resonant with the language of being en Christo, in Christ (Ephesians). It is not simply a description of individual spiritual experience. It speaks of a new way of belonging, in which our lives are drawn into relationship with one another through the life of Christ. The Christian hope is not escape from the world or the private possession of a few.
It is a hope that takes shape in a shared life: in the work of reconciliation, in the practice of solidarity, and in the material sharing of what we have. That has implications for the Church. We cannot speak credibly of reconciliation while remaining indifferent to the ways in which power and privilege shape our common life. Nor can we assume that good intentions are enough.
We need the humility to listen, the courage to tell the truth about our own histories, and the willingness to be changed by the encounter. The pilgrimage also reminded me that the Church does not own the song of hope. We may recognise its melody in the gospel, but we must be ready to hear it sung by others; in communities whose courage and persistence have sustained them through generations of struggle. To listen is to discover that hope may already be at work beyond the boundaries we have drawn.
The artisans of a future
Not all the stories I will carry home from Montgomery are stories of suffering. Some are stories of flourishing, of agency, and of futures being made. I was particularly struck by attending a college football game between Tuskegee and Morehouse. To see thousands of young Black men and women gathered in celebration, confidence and shared identity was to encounter another kind of topography: a landscape in which people were not defined by the terror inflicted on their ancestors but were making lives of possibility and purpose.
The contrast was not lost on me. Here were young people flourishing in a place where terror had once been unleashed upon generations before them. Their presence did not erase that history. It made visible something that history could never finally extinguish: the capacity of people to imagine, claim and shape a future.
I had a conversation with a group of young women from Tuskegee University. They spoke proudly about their hopes for the future. There was no sense of waiting for someone else to make that future possible for them. They spoke with the confidence of people who knew themselves to be agents in its making.
I found that deeply moving. These young people have inherited a history, but they are not simply its passive recipients. They are using their agency to become artisans of the future we hope and anticipate: a future brighter than the one the violence of the past sought to foreclose. They have become, in a sense, the griots who invite us into the curation of a new story of hope.
The griot, in many West African traditions, is a keeper and teller of stories, a custodian of memory who carries the past into the present. But the stories we tell are never only about what has been. They shape what can be imagined. These young women were not asking us to forget the past; they were inviting us to see what might yet grow from it.
Another encounter brought this home in a different way. Our Uber driver, Nichole, spoke with evident pride about her nieces, who had resettled in the Deep South from California. She told us of the opportunities they were pursuing, and of the economic blessings they were bringing with them, fruits of the hard work of their parents. There was joy in the way she spoke of them: a family story of movement, labour and possibility.
But Nichole also spoke with concern about the continuing architectonics of racism and the ways these still shape the lives of so many Black people in Montgomery and across Alabama. Her account held together pride and pain, hope and realism. The flourishing of her nieces did not make the structures of injustice disappear. Nor did the persistence of those structures cancel the significance of what her family had achieved.
I was reminded that hope is not a choice between celebrating progress and naming what remains wrong. It requires both. It needs the truthful memory that refuses to minimise injustice, and the attentive imagination that can recognise life and possibility where others might see only the shadow of the past. Our pilgrimage could not encompass the whole story.
Montgomery itself invites us to remember the Montgomery bus boycott and the courage of those who organised and sustained it; beyond the city lie Selma and the wider history of the civil rights movement. These are not simply chapters in an American story. They are part of a continuing struggle over whose humanity is recognised, whose freedom is protected, and what kind of society we are willing to build. The places we visited have opened up questions that reach far beyond the boundaries of our itinerary.
Becoming a people of hope
As I prepare to return home, I do so with no easy answers, and certainly no sense that a few days of pilgrimage could resolve the questions it has raised. The history we encountered is too deep, and its consequences too present, for that. But I return with a renewed conviction that hope is not a mood, nor a comforting alternative to difficult truths. It is a practice: a way of seeing, listening and acting.
It requires us to draw near to those whose stories have been pushed to the margins, to tell the truth about the ground on which we stand, and to refuse the idea that the arrangements of the present are inevitable. The image of the ancestors has stayed with me. We are not only inheritors of history; we are also its authors. The lives we lead will become part of the inheritance of others.
The question is what kind of inheritance we are making. Perhaps this is one way of understanding the Church’s vocation in an age of fracture and historical amnesia: to become a community that helps people remember truthfully, to stand alongside those whose lives and stories have been diminished, and to practise a hope that is generous enough to make room for others.
I leave Montgomery (with the promise to return) wanting not simply to speak about hope, but to become an artisan of it. More than that, I want to join a community of hope: people willing to draw near, to listen with ears attuned to suffering, to tell the truth without surrendering to despair, and to make room for the flourishing of others.
Together, we might curate a story that does not conceal the wounds of the past but bears witness to the regenerative work of God; a story that embodies something of the fullness of God’s love. The topography of hope is not a landscape without scars. It is a landscape in which the scars are no longer hidden, and in which the truth can become the ground from which something different grows. And perhaps the pilgrimage’s deepest invitation is this: that we might become, in the quality of our living, ancestors of hope.
