The Remarkable Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin

This year OBV celebrates International Women’s Day, taking the month of March to shine the spotlight on some remarkable women and their achievements. This article focuses on Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin.

An apt word to describe Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin would be humble. Reverend Rose is vicar to her own parish in Hackney, East London; the first black female chaplain to the Queen; and rumoured to be a prominent contender should the church make the long anticipated move to allow female bishops. Yet amidst all these distinctive achievements and the inherently punishing schedule that accompanies it, the accomplishment she holds dearest is that of being a mother.

Though the epitome of the working woman, taking each day as it comes, often having to juggle her time, always looking at her diary last thing at night and first thing in the morning, Reverend Hudson-Wilkin’s determination is that her young girls grow up with a positive understanding of themselves and the awareness of being more than simply a "physical being". She essentially wants to empower them to become proud black women.

She took the first few foundational years of her children's life to stay at home to this end, ensuring that her family did not 'lose her' to the church. Though she is a minister, which some would argue is a calling of the highest calibre - a "vocation, not a job" according to Reverend Hudson-Wilkin, she does not define herself by this, isolating it from the rest of her life, rather it contributes work and home feeding into her life making her better, as both minister and mother.

Growing up in Jamaica, Hudson-Wilkin was never uncomfortable with who she was. She developed with the surety that she could be anything she set her mind to be, always at ease with herself, something many young females, particularly those from BME backgrounds, constantly struggle with. When she migrated to the UK, she brought that mentality with her.

Whenever she would encounter racism it was with the understanding that this was due to ignorance and that the problem was not hers, but the perpetrator's alone. Sadly some encounters stemmed from the church itself and deep-rooted, age-old prejudice, yet despite this she sees no point in being a shrinking violet choosing to "deal with [her] reality" and thoroughly enjoys what she does.

Reverend Hudson-Wilkin took up her calling in the eighties, a time when being both black and a woman the idea of one day officiating the Sunday services of her majesty Queen Elizabeth II herself would have been unimaginable. However this member of the clergy handles the honour with admirable aplomb, explaining that it is not an onerous task, but an honorarium.

She views all of her success within the church, such as meeting President Obama recently as the one of only two black people representing Britain's elite at an event she describes as an "nun dimittis” experience, with the gravest reverence and sense of responsibility. She is not oblivious to the fact that in some instances what a handicap being from a BME background and female can be, individuals often, unfairly, having to be ambassadors for their race, "having to be twice as good as a woman and three or four times as good as anyone else when you are black", but instead of perceiving this as a burden she views it as a honour.

An opportunity to be exemplary and thus be a pioneer for others coming behind her that will be more readily accepted due to her own example, welcomed and not hampered by it. She lives her life in view of profound words of advice written on a poster she received in earlier years, "Do not go where the path leads, go where there is no path and blaze a trail." Never would she have imagined that her life would be what can only be viewed as a collection of impressively innovative and unprecedented laurels adding credence to the notion that if we're willing to work at it, we as young, minority women can achieve whatever we set our minds to.

Her advice to us is to discover ourselves, loves ourselves, enjoy ourselves and to be the best we can be in order to succeed. I think I hear glass ceilings shattering all over the country. That is a trail I'll happily follow in.

Ashlea Williams