By Jo Clifford (From Seeds October – November 2026)

This is the time,’ says Queen Jesus. ‘This is the place. This is where we meet each other.’

And we did, in Iona Abbey.

Under the tower holding up the sky, the tower with its roots deep in the earth. On that island where, once again, I felt overwhelmingly aware of the intense, incredible beauty of God’s Earth. And yet also eerily aware of another realm. Somewhere beyond it. In the dimension we call spiritual.

It feels like a very special privilege to perform The Gospel According to Jesus: Queen of Heaven in so sacred a place.

And it was a bit disconcerting to find that my main focus was not on communicating some deep spiritual insight, but on trying to make sure that I didn’t fall over.

But then maybe that’s a lesson of this extraordinary place, that to reach up to heaven, we also need to be grounded on earth. And maybe dear St Columba had the same problem in his old age: the disconcerting discovery that he was becoming unsteady on his feet…

What moves me about the saint’s story was that he was someone living in an age of violence and injustice, someone travelling, someone searching, someone trying to create a safe space where humans could begin to set things right.

Which I suppose is something I also do when I perform. And the last time I performed in Iona, I found myself invited to perform in churches around the US in 2024. The first place we were invited to, me and Queen Jesus, was First Churches, Northampton, Massachusetts. This was the site of ‘the Great Awakening’ of the 1700s and 1800s.

The Awakening was a powerful spiritual movement built around the work of charismatic preachers; later, Northampton and its church were to become an important stopping point in the Underground Railroad that provided a safe route for enslaved people to escape from the slave states of the American South.

My performance there raised funds for a charity that was providing assistance to trans people and their families trying to escape their persecution in the transphobic South. Pastor Sarah of the church said that it really mattered to her that Queen Jesus and I were welcomed in her church because for her this was part of a new great awakening. When churches free themselves from old prejudices and work together towards justice and peace.

Very much what the Iona community is still committed to and what we, too, are committed to in AUC…

I think it must have been a similar impulse that inspired the clergy of Gothenburg Cathedral to invite Queen Jesus to their cathedral church right after her appearance at the Gothenburg Theatre Festival.

One of the stories in the script is of the prodigal daughter:

‘There was once a man who had two sons, and the younger came to know she was his daughter and didn’t know what to do. And in the end, she went to her father and said, “Father, forgive me, for I can no longer be called your son.” And the father threw her out of his house…’

When I was in Brazil with Renata Carvalho, the Brazilian Queen Jesus, I was so moved to discover that the prodigal daughter story was partly her story, too. Because she was thrown out by her father when she was still very young, thrown out the house for being effeminate.

And in Gothenburg, I was again deeply moved to meet Alice, whose parents were old-school Pentecostalist Christians and who threw her out, too. And how after a time of deep fear and sadness, she found her way to the Queen Jesus company in Gothenburg and is now playing music for the production and leading the choir that so beautifully sings the blessing at the end.

Above is a photo of her preparing on the steps of the cathedral.

Absolutely and totally in her right place.

Absolutely and totally at home.

And I think of how I was forced to exile myself from my own home because there was no place there or me. And how widely I’ve travelled around until now I find myself in a new and remarkable, safe spiritual home.

Perhaps this is everyone’s story.

All of us prodigal daughters and prodigal sons, all of us trying to find our way home.