Jim Cotter's journey with leukemia has taken him heavenwards now (I was sad to read of his death in the Church Times obituaries this week). But what a great legacy he has left us, of wonderfully crafted liturgies and some of the deepest and most honest spiritual writing of our times - as he put it,
'I think I have been exploring, as a pilgrim soul, what it might mean to unfold afresh my spiritual and religious inheritance, and it has been both a personal and a public concern to try and connect that tradition with the experiences of being gay, undergoing two years of serious depression, and, more recently, living with leukaemia. In their time each of these has been a stigma, information that few people would wish to reveal when applying for a job.'
I was surprised and overjoyed to encounter Jim at Aberdaron in 2008, whose vicar he had been for just two weeks, and to share morning prayer with him, the two of us in that windblown church on the edge of the Lleyn Peninsular, haunted by the near presence of a previous poet-incumbent R. S. Thomas. Jim's latter days were spent facing the challenge of engaging Aberdaron church's 10,000 annual visitors with the spirituality of the place, and 'providing nudges' to tourists and pilgrims alike (see my interview with him in the Church Times Travel Supplement, January 2011 [pdf]). He'd been exploring that gentle sort of hospitality for some time before, at Llandecwyn, and I'll always be grateful to him for his pioneering the Small Pilgrim Places network, which continues and - who knows - maybe one of our small churches might become one? It'd be a fitting tribute to a man who variously described himself as a 'Wordsmith', 'Godstriver' Hospitaller, and for whom I give thanks today.
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