My Book – by Roger Haydon Mitchell

I have written The Day of the Labyrinth out of a heart for children and young people, a desire to explore and promote love as an alternative way of being, and the belief that historical fantasy is a natural genre for expressing this. These motives have, in turn, been inspired by my childhood friendships with adults who took children seriously and who were themselves motivated by the idea of a world built on radical love and kindness. Some were captivating storytellers, and they showed me that narrative has the power to expose and reconstruct the world.

A heart for children and young people

When I was a youngster, I read all the fiction I could get hold of and was always building and experimenting with alternative worlds inside my head with the help of railway sets, board games, and other toys and models. Now, with the added advantage of virtual reality, I believe that despite the assertions of some so-called experts, many children and young people can engage easily with concepts and big existential questions such as those raised by this book. It is written as an attempt, in part, to see the world through their eyes.

I am convinced that adults can only deeply understand and reflect on life if they do so with and alongside children and young people. The book demonstrates this process and is designed so that while thinking children and adults can read and engage with it on their own, they can also read and enjoy it together. As a child and then as a teacher and a parent, I experienced the magic of being read to and reading to others, and this book is positioned for that. The juxtaposition of its characters, the deliberate way that it encompasses the passage of lifetimes, and the provision of a glossary to enable the use of terms and language of another era are intended to inspire and help maximize engagement.

One of the tragedies of our factory-like education system is that it frequently fails to honour young people and give them the opportunity to mature creatively or contribute to the learning process alongside their teachers and their syllabus. I am convinced that children and young people need access to the deep issues of life and the universe and that an egalitarian relationship with adults who value and treat them as equals while recognizing their vulnerability and immaturity helps them achieve that. This book aims to provide an example of young women and men who had close and mutual relationships with influential adults that challenged accepted norms and brought about significant social and political change. As such, it is a potential tool for this to continue to happen.

A desire to explore and promote love as an alternative way of being

I grew up in a relatively conservative and legalistic expression of Christianity where it became quickly obvious to me that there were those radically loving people who saw me and loved me for who I was and those who were about their own religious agenda and either ignored or believed me. The quality of life that surrounded the former and its potential to reconfigure the rest of society both inside and outside our religious community became an early driver for my life as a community worker, researcher, political theologian, and activist, and now issues in this novel.

The story traces and questions the interplay between the two expressions of Christianity in the days when the Roman Empire was embracing it as its official religion. I have worked hard to avoid a polemical antipathy to the empire but instead to interpose the alternative way of love at a pivotal moment for the outworking of Christianity in the West. The narrative exposes and investigates key points and questions around the difference between the radical message of Jesus as testified by the four gospels and the partnership of church and empire that impregnated much of established Christianity from the fourth century onwards.

Author Bio: Roger Haydon Mitchell has been a friend and consultant to the faith community, and also to the third, business and public sectors in the UK and Europe for more than forty years. He currently co-directs a small charity that advises such agencies on negotiating social change [www.2mt.org.uk]. Much of the focus of his work has been reconciliation between gender, generation and nation, and the role of the church as a reconciling community.

For the last ten years Roger has been an honorary research fellow at Lancaster University, firstly in the Politics, Philosophy and Religion Department and then in the Sociology Department’s Centre for Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities. He has helped facilitate the Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission since its inception in 2017 and is the lead editor of The Kenarchy Journal [https://www.kenarchy.org], an online academic journal in partnership with the Institute for Religion, Peace and Justice [https://www.irpj.org].

Roger is a member of the Society for the Study of Theology, the Conflict Research Society, the Anabaptist Theology Forum, Pentecostals and Charismatics for Peace and Justice, the Society for Pentecostal Studies and Christians on the Left.