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Introduction:
Identity
Derek Poole
Comment:
What's in a Name?
Janet Morris
From
the Director
David Porter
End
Game of the End Times
David Porter
We
Will Not Have Home Rule
Alywn Thomson
The
Lost Field
Tony Davidson
Divine
Assumption
Alan Wilson
Walking
the Tight Rope
William Storrar
Certificate
in Biblical Peacebuilding
Lynda Gould
Liberal
Evangelical Post-Unionism and ECONI
Esmond Birnie
O
God Our Help in Ages Past
Christopher Catherwood
Transformation
Lynda Gould
FROM
THE DIRECTOR
The helicopter has become one of the potent symbols of conflict in today’s
world. I can remember being told that its rise was predicted in scripture
by references to giant flying insects with a vicious sting. This gave
them an apocalyptic significance, an image enhanced by scenes in Vietnam
War movies, most famously in ‘Apocalypse Now’.
It has certainly been a central image of the conflict in Northern Ireland, the constant presence of a hovering eye in the sky with the monotonous hum of its whirring blades. For those of us brought up in the relative calm of East Belfast ‘The helicopter’s up!’ became a byword indicating there was trouble somewhere on the other side of the city.
On occasions we too had our hovering presence, and I remember the street being swept by a searchlight several times in the early seventies. But most of our choppers were on their way somewhere else, to be a watchful presence, monitoring tense situations and deterring the threat of terrorists.
Helicopters have stood guard over some of the most horrific incidents, recording events, guiding the response. Without them the security forces were unable to move in many areas and they became their major means of transport, moving people and stores and deploying patrols.
In their own way they have also become a key image of our peace. I remember watching a flight of three helicopters circle the Stormont estate in the last moments of the negotiations for the Belfast Agreement. Their final descent was a more accurate indication that the process had reached a conclusion than the predictions on television.
Over the last two years, as the process has staggered through each impasse, we have been treated to helicopter diplomacy. British and Irish leaders, landing on the lawn at Stormont to rescue the peace, eventually became a symbol of frustration rather than hope. But this time, as the crisis in the process deepens, no rescue helicopter is coming.
There is of course another image of the helicopter in our world, the image of rescue. Get into difficulty on a mountain and helicopters are sent to your aid. Yet I write this in a week in which first three and then five helicopters were all that were available to rescue some 10,000 people stranded in trees as a result of the floods in Mozambique.
Have you ever noticed the number of helicopters sitting on the ground at RAF Aldergrove? What unlimited resources would be deployed in the event of our peace collapsing? To protect us from what? Simply put - ourselves.
The gospel confronts us all about self-centred absorption with our crisis and ourselves. We cannot ignore the global context in which we struggle with our peace process. Not that the issues we face are unimportant. But the equivalent of the population of Northern Ireland have just lost their homes in floods at the other end of the world, and they have only five helicopters!
What do we think God’s perspective is on this? On God’s scale of justice where do we as resource rich Europeans self-righteously defending the justice of our cause in Northern Ireland sit on the Mozambique issue? Do we in fact share responsibility through bad stewardship of God’s creation?
Natural disasters on such a scale confront us with our common humanity. That humanity is frail and fractured, for the tribes of Africa are no more at peace with themselves than the tribes of Ireland. But it begs the question as to what the real crisis is for our society in a global context that increasingly threatens us all. Does it really matter if a piece of road is in a unionist or nationalist area? Is this a Protestant or Catholic tree?
David Porter - ECONI's Director
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