Justin Welby and the Fiery Cauldron of a Broken Family
Andrew Atherstone writes: Ane of the precious family messages treasured by Lady Jane Williams (the Archbishop of Canterbury's mother) dates from Dec 1973, shortly before her son'southward 18th birthday. It is written by Justin Welby's housemaster at Eton College and is a frank tribute to the "tenacity" and "bravery" displayed past the young homo during his hard teenage years. The housemaster thought information technology especially remarkable how Welby had coped so well with his "family problems", which had become increasingly acute, and the alphabetic character concludes: "Many a boy would take been driven off the rails completely by the problems which Justin has had to face up, and I admire enormously the patience and wisdom he has shown in dealing with them."
The latest Telegraph revelations about the Archbishop's babyhood are a fresh reminder that these "family bug" ran deep. Both his parents – Gavin and Jane Welby – were addicted to alcohol. They had eloped to America in April 1955 to ally in Baltimore, Maryland, with no friends or family to witness the event; two strangers had to exist brought off the street to act as witnesses. It was aught like a Hollywood whirlwind romance, and Jane immediately realized she had "made the most terrible mistake".
By the age of two, Justin was living in a broken home. Past the age of viii, he was sent away to prep school in Sussex and both his parents were securely in the grip of drinkable, incapable of looking subsequently him properly. Jane Welby's life was rescued from the brink, afterward she signed herself into rehab in 1968, and broke the addiction. She is now a happily married, wonderfully gracious, highly esteemed octogenarian. The Archbishop has spoken this week of the crucial importance of the Christian faith, and the gospel of redemption, in turning lives of despair into hope. His mother is a brilliant example of that truth.
Merely Gavin Welby continued the downward trajectory. His behaviour was increasingly erratic. He could exist volatile, irrational, dishonest and prone to shouting. Justin recalls: "You never knew what was going to happen. The experience of living with a parent who had a drink problem is …. very shaping as to 1's views of what human beings are like." Their human relationship was in meltdown. When Gavin died suddenly in March 1977, aged 66, from a suspected centre attack, Justin'south first reaction was "relief" and "liberation", and then guilt for feeling that way. It had just been "all and so painful", he remembers. For 20 years he was unable to bring himself to wait through his father's scrapbooks because information technology was "intolerably painful, and for reasons I probably can't analyse".
Justin Welby, the public Christian leader nosotros see today, has been deeply shaped and moulded by those cluttered experiences of his youth. Preaching recently in Barbados, he proclaimed: "Families are strange things. We may get on well or non get on at all. … But once a family exists, whatever we practise we cannot escape it." From the fiery cauldron of family breakdown has emerged a human of remarkable resilience and determination. Information technology has implanted steel in his spine. He has few fond memories of growing upwards, and speaks of "the loneliness of beingness in a crowded boarding schoolhouse, where you had to be very self-sufficient." But Christian conversion, as a Cambridge undergraduate, has turned that self-sufficiency into God-dependency. Welby's unshakeable confidence is shaped by his personal human relationship with Jesus Christ. Traumatic events, similar the decease of his showtime child in a car accident in the Eighties, take merely strengthened that resolve.
Professor David Ford has known Welby for many years and argues that personal suffering has decisively shaped his character and public engagement. Ford explains: "he can be vulnerable, not self-protective and therefore devastatingly honest. My goodness he tin can be! He just cuts through fluff or flab in a way that tin be rather shocking. He won't put up with pious nonsense." Welby is an unusual public figure, Ford continues, because he has a "freedom from fear". The Archbishop is not concerned by media prototype or whether his PR section tin can control a press story. That has been evident this weekend, in the way he embraced the new revelations.
Given the chaos of his early on family life, surrounded by broken relationships, it is no surprise that reconciliation is one of the Archbishop's key theological priorities – reconciliation betwixt churches, between communities, between divided individuals. His favourite metaphor for the Christian Church is a family, and the Church is ofttimes even more dysfunctional than any natural family. Preaching to Christians in Hong Kong, Welby declared:
At that place'southward an former saying in England, you cull your friends but you're stuck with your family. And believe it or non, y'all and I are family. We are the family of God, and you're stuck with me and I'chiliad stuck with you, not just now, not just in this life, simply for all eternity – so we'd meliorate get used to each other.
That Christian vision of a future in God'south family has helped the Archbishop to navigate the new revelations near the true identity of his biological male parent. His identity is rooted not in Dna or in family unit copse or paternity tests, merely in knowing that he has a heavenly Father who has redeemed him and given him a new life and purpose.
Andrew Atherstone is Latimer research swain at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and writer of Archbishop Welby: Risk-Taker and Reconciler (Darton, Longman and Todd). This article was get-go published in The Sunday Telegraph on Sunday, 10 April 2022 and is reproduced here with permission.
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