The closing lyric of eden ahbez’s haunting ballad Nature Boy, made famous by Nat King Cole, crystallises the lesson at the heart of Jo Clifford’s beautiful, truly beautiful, meditation on life: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn / Is just to love and be loved in return.”

Which is why it is sadly ironic that performances of the play, like trans people, sometimes provoke hostility. From taunts and stares to demonstrations and death threats.

But this is not a reason to hide our light under a cloud of shame, guilt or fear, preaches Jo as the transgender son, daughter and seven colours of the rainbow in between child of God, but an opportunity to raise our candle aloft, however small and flickering the flame, so that we can illuminate the darkness and bring about change.

And if it’s anything like the inner change experienced by audiences who have flocked to see The Gospel since it’s premiere at Glasgay! in 2009 – a calmness rooted in the here and now which focuses the mind on what’s important and fosters care and compassion towards ourselves and one another – then governments the world over should find a way of distilling the text into a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine of the world go down.

Gathered around a long narrow table which spans the width of Traverse 1, and invited to light a candle and share bread and wine, audiences are blessed, truly blessed in all senses of the word, by at first a sermon on the “privilege” and “honour” of being queer and then a series of parables about how we all “blunder about” and “stumble over our mother Earth” in search of peace, meaning and happiness.

Bathed in candlelight and soothed by the rich timber of Jo’s hypnotic voice which resonates from deep and infuses every word with warmth and weight, The Gospel is not so much a play but a profound experience which has the spellbinding effect of keeping the audience in the body of the kirk long after after the final blessing which celebrates life and sex and pleasure and difference and, like the wandering boy in eden ahbez’s haunting song, the “little shy and sad of eye” who are welcome in the Queendom of Heaven.

Peter Callaghan
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