East of Eden: Tower Hamlets

They call her Sister Act,

Father Ted on an off-day.

Once a workman yelled,

“You dressin’ up, love?”

She laughed, tapped her collar,

in salute.

“You’ve got to have balls

to be a priest,” they said.

She smiled, offered a blessing.

They shrugged, called her ‘Mother’.

It stuck.

Mother Mary,

Mother to her flock,

maternal with no airs,

sharing love, sharing bread,

offering wisdom,

where others offer pity.

Mother Mary,

with her Magnificat,

a song of holy rage.

Now Mary the Priest

raged with holy anger

at the injustice she saw

in her own city.

When will the mighty

be stripped from their thrones,

and Blind Peggy,

who she meets at the foodbank,

be lifted up,

not on a throne,

though that would be nice,

but perhaps a new mattress

that isn’t filled with bugs?

But this priest, she is also Mary.

Just Mary,

the name her mum gave her,

without knowing she’d end up

bearing God in tower-block stairwells.

Mary of Nazareth,

Mary of Poplar.

She wears the name

with reverence,

because names carry weight.

Mary, the one who said Yes.

Mary, the God-bearer.

She seeks to carry Christ

into flats where hope rusts,

to those the church forgot to see.

Theotokos in trainers,

lighting candles

in crumbling corridors.

She knows the hands,

how they twitch and trade,

the currency of foil and flame.

She worries about riots,

how the city’s bones

creak under weight

of unvoiced rage.

Tommy’s got a following,

gospel of grievance,

broadcast from pub benches

and Telegram threads.

Mary prays for him too,

also prays that the summer

won’t be hot,

because the heat

brings out the bricks.

On Thursdays,

she visits Luke,

once a banker, now afloat,

canal barge philosopher,

with hands that remember

signing million-pound deals,

now turning pages of Amos.

They talk of floodwaters,

how Noah might have been onto something,

when society builds towers

but forgets to listen.

“Maybe the ark was just a barge,”

Luke says,

“anchored in the debris of empire.”

Mary smiles,

hearing the parable

beneath the sarcasm.

East of Eden,

she carries oil for anointing,

bread for breaking,

words for those

the world misnames.

She knows addiction

by its first name,

poverty in its most intimate form,

not statistics, but stories

told in the glow of streetlamps,

while foxes preach to bins.

The poor, you see, have names,

the name you say

when you hug their children,

names written on death certificates

twenty years too soon.

In morning prayers,

she names them all,

Peggy, Luke, Tommy,

the asylum seeker,

the wounded,

the lost,

the addicted,

the lonely,

the lashing out,

the ones hanging on

by thread or tether.

Her kingdom come

is not far off,

it’s in the lift

that never works,

in the teenager selling gear

because Mum’s got no leccy.

Mother Mary is tired,

but she keeps vigil,

a priest in Babylon,

holding up a crucified hope

in a city that keeps forgetting

what resurrection looks like.

Mother Mary,

Mother,

Mary,

Mother Mary,

she wears them all

like a well-worn stole,

bearer of God

in these concrete pastures.

She tends her flock

with hands that break bread

and a heart that marches

to the beat of

magnificat.

Her vocation is simple,

to carry Christ

here, East of Eden,

where the others forgot to look.

Rev’d Jon Swales, 2025