Look at the smile.
Not at the woman in black. Not at the medal.
At the smile beside her.
Imagine how mirror-smooth you'd have to be to take that photograph. To stand there in your own house, in front of the photographer, and smile like that. As if everything is completely normal. "Yes yes, everything's just fine here."
Can she even see you from in there, Sarah?
Can she breathe freely?
And you smile.
....
Sarah Mullally - that's her on the left, Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest cleric in the English church - stands on an idea.
That Man is made in God's Image.
It's one of the very few ideas the entire Western world balances on.
That idea has been working for two thousand years. Slowly. Relentlessly. Towards freedom and equality for EVERYONE - regardless of gender, birth, skin colour and class. It worked against her own church too, every time the church forgot it. It forced the institution to its knees, again and again, until the door stood open wide enough that a woman today carries the cross in Lambeth Palace.
That's the struggle she stands on. All the way up.
And from up there she smiles - beside the other picture. The one she herself has been freed from.
Two pictures of Man in the same room.
The one - Created. Seen. Willed.
The other - Covered.
We could shout it at Tehran.
No one dares whisper it at Lambeth Palace.
WOMEN. LIFE. FREEDOM.
❤️🔥🪽
That the highest cleric in the institution embraces it and stands there smiling beside it, as if it's the most natural thing in the world - in what should be among the holiest halls of Western civilisation...
It is COMPLETELY incomprehensible.
And a MOCKERY of the Western woman's struggle - and all of us men who have supported and stood before it.
It's like walking into the Great Mosque in Mecca in a g-string and bare breasts - and the grand imam stands beside you and smiles for the photographer.
It would never happen. Not in a thousand years.
And everyone knows why.
