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Editorial
Alwyn Thomson
Comment:
Politics: serving God and doing good!
Ethel White
From
the Director: Cultivating the common ground
David W Porter
ECONI
Statement: Confidence in God
October 2002
Postbag: Letters to the Editor
Why
vote?
Alison Laird
Communities
of hope
Lord Alderdice
Transformation 2003: Killing for God?
View
from the south
Patrick Mitchel
Church
& state
Esmond
Birnie MLA
Taking
the plunge
John Kyle
Faith
in politics
Interview: Rt Hon Paul Murphy MP
Your
kingdom come
Heather Morrow
ECONI
Statement: Forum for Peace & Reconciliation
January 2003
Bible
study series: Faith in the future
David
W Porter
Through
a glass, darkly
Changing Women, Changing Worlds Conference
Review:
A night in November by Marie Jones
Noel
McCune
Book
Reviews
Alwyn Thomson
For
God and His Glory Alone:
Study 3: Reconciliation
For
God and His Glory Alone:
Study 4: Peace
COMMUNITIES OF
HOPE
I suppose no-one has captured the mind of the liberal Northern Protestant better for me than the poet John Hewitt. In ‘Parallels Never Meet’ he writes,
“Events in my native province now
twist my heart, threatening
any future I had planned.
To find focus for my taut feelings
I thrust them all back into a remote setting
dressing the circumstances
in the properties of antiquity…”
But try as he might to cover or convert it the poet finds by the end of his poem that,
“...the heartbreak remains,
the malice and the hate are palpable
the flames authentic,
the wounds weep real blood
and the future is not to be foretold.”
This tragic picture of broken community first came home to me in a very personal way at school when I became aware of how it impinged on my relationship with a Roman Catholic friend. At this time, of course, sectarian strife was breaking out on the streets of our towns and cities and its wider impact on Christian witness was borne in on me by missionaries who would often visit the presbyterian manse which was our home. They would point out the dreadfully adverse witness such news had on their work, emanating as it did from their homeland which was, and regarded itself as, a largely Christian country. If centuries of Christian witness in Ireland had produced such brokenness it was very difficult to persuade people in other parts of the world that the Gospel represented for them the best hope to resolve the problems of their individual and communal lives.
These experiences led me to explore the whole question of what made up a community, and most especially what made a community Christian. One of the most significant experiences for me in this regard emerged out of working with other Christian young people from throughout the British Isles during the mid-1970s to establish an event which came to be called Dayspring. We met together for a few days each month or so around Britain, but especially in the little cathedral city of St David’s in Wales to try to find out what was necessary to develop a sense of Christian community. In August 1977 this group was then expanded for a week to involve about 700 young people in a tent city around the old cathedral.
It became clear to me that Community came not just from the current shared life of a number of people, but also from their shared experience (which had developed like the history of a family), the shared purpose (in this case working towards the event), the shared language which emerged not only in discussion but more importantly in the liturgy of the twice daily worship, and increasingly a shared faith and culture as well as beliefs which, while differing, were discussed.
As I observed these phenomena over the next few years in various religious and professional groups I realized that even where all these things are shared, people fall out as individuals and groups. I was also struck by the regular appearance of a phenomenon which is referred to in the Old Testament as the ‘scapegoat’. When there is a problem in a group or community the problem is often set upon or borne by someone (the ‘scapegoat’) who is driven out. In psychological terms there is a splitting into ‘Us and Them’ and this becomes synonymous with ‘Good and Evil’. Community is then determined less by all the shared positive aspects I have mentioned than by the split between ‘Us’, who are inevitably regarded as being a repository of ‘Good’, and the ‘Others’ who contain the ‘Evil’. This splitting can, as we know well in our community, involve people literally being driven out of their homes to create a more apparently homogenous community. In fact such a ‘community’ is not then based on a broad positive commonality, but on a mechanism which creates false commonality, driving down the normal human values and differences in the service of the splitting mechanism, and an attitude not of hope, but of persecutory paranoia.
In the Bible and in early times ‘Evil’ was not only put into animals (literally a goat) but also into wicked spirits, other tribes, and ‘black sheep’ within the local community. As people began to travel more widely for the purposes of trade, exploration and conquest the same mechanism was used and involved more control by the Empire (or State) or the Church, both of which retained the authority and capacity to determine who was acceptable, and who had to be ‘driven out’. Eventually the human desire for liberty of belief and action blew the lid off this control through the Renaissance and the Reformation but this did not solve the problem of Community because the Reformed Churches tended to retain the old scapegoat mechanism, determining what was Community on the same basis of driving out the ‘Evil’ and defining Community on the basis of ‘Us’ over and against ‘the Other’. This led in the post-reformation Churches to increasing splitting into smaller and smaller groups based on belief, which were not always very gentle with each other.
In the last hundred years or so, with increasing travel and communication the shared ‘life’ idea is increasingly inadequate. People do not live together in the same place. They move around a great deal. They do not have a common history or language. In Lambeth, the area where I live when I am in London, there are said to be some 160 languages in use. Christian communities have begun to grow up across geographical, social and linguistic boundaries based on common beliefs and experiences, including worship (Taize and Corrymeela are two examples I know fairly well). This has much to commend it but it leads to us living in a world full of people that we don’t truly regard as part of our community. After the utter catastrophe of the two World Wars, fought out across the world by nations many of whose citizens would have defined themselves as Christian (and even have shared the same religious denominations), we have tried to prevent a further breakdown into violence by developing international law on the basis of Human Rights – something we all share, not because of our background or beliefs, but simply because we are human beings. However after fifty years the problem of the lack of trust, which provoked this movement, has been shown to have worsened rather than improved, as has been eloquently demonstrated by Northern Ireland woman, Onora, Baroness O’Neill in her excellent 2002 Reith Lectures. As a basis for hope for the future development of the world community Human Rights and Accountability alone are a dead end.
The problem is that we cannot move away from the world of others (since the ‘Fall’) with all its mixture of good and evil. We may try to run away from it as much as we wish, but in the end we have to return to the psychological and profoundly religious truth that the problem in others is also partly located in ourselves. Our friends in the United States are having enormous difficulties understanding why much of the rest of the world does not like them. Of course some of this hatred is based on envy, but to locate the whole problem outside by positing an ‘Axis of Evil’ as the current president is doing is to fall back into the old, and increasingly unsuccessful, scapegoat mechanism. It is not surprising that a US President should do this since the United States (like South Africa and Northern Ireland) was made up of people who had been driven out of other places by themselves being scapegoated. When they came to their new place they carried with them the experience of exclusion and, as often happens unfortunately, they then abused others in the way that they had been abused themselves. There is no future, and no real hope, in trying to re-create the old split into ‘Good and Evil’ and ‘Us and Them’, for we carry some of both in all of us, as the doctrine of Original Sin makes clear. John Hewitt writing in memory of W R Rodgers (who left Northern Ireland to spend his later years in the USA) puts it this way in ‘The Iron Circle’,
“Here, often, a man provoked has said his say,
stung by opinion or unjust event,
and found his angry words, to his dismay,
prop up his adversary’s argument,
for bitterness is not allowed to die,
is fanned and fuelled in this crazy land:
the brandished gun demands a gun’s reply;
hate answers hate, our crest the Bloody Hand.My friend, who followed coursing on this ground,
and sought its lore and logic everywhere,
suggested once the Hare must need the Hound
as surely as the Hound must need the Hare.
In my mood now I fear that he was right:
the chase continues, with no end in sight.”
Are we then condemned to hopeless dividedness and its consequent violence, or is there any possibility of Communities of Hope?
I have already mentioned that some Christian communities of hope try to address this issue of exclusion. Taize uses different languages and brings together people of differing social racial backgrounds. Our own Corrymeela has tried to explore the split between Protestants and Catholics. The first step, and it is a major one, is to begin to respect our differences, and to accept that the other may possibly have some understandings which we see only dimly, if at all. But what is it that distinguishes a Christian Community? Is it who we keep out? In St John’s Gospel, Chapter 13 and verse 35 the apostle says,
“By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.”
He does not say that we are community because we speak the same language, or even believe the same things, much less that we are the same colour. He uses the word ‘love’, in other words he talks about relationships. I I have become convinced that this is the very essence of the problem. How do we build relationships characterised, at the very least, by mutual respect? This is what the Trinity is about – the Mystery of Relationship. At this very time our world is on the brink of war, and more than anything else it is a war brought about by the absence of respectful relationships between the adherents of the three great Abrahamic Faiths. The Abrahamic Family is now a trinity of despair, rather than a Community of Hope. Do we have any sense of the vital necessity of building relationships between Christians, Jews and Muslims, for our own community and in the wider world? It is said that without a vision the people die. A vision of communities of hope may in the end be a matter of survival for our world. Where does that vision lie? I end with some lines out of a poem from the 1970s’ tradition from which the Dayspring event grew. It comes from a book of questioning called ‘Interrobang’, and is called ‘We’re Enemies, God’.
“What’s wrong with me God?...
If I stop and think
about the things I do
I get mad at myself
for being selfish
and stupid and thoughtless.
But tomorrow
I’ll probably go out
and do the same things again
without realizing what I do…
Maybe there’s some
deep internal bleeding
that is making me so frantic…
Maybe God is the trouble after all,
and he won’t stop the pain
till I give in to him.
For he keeps giving me hell inside
till I surrender all my pride…
If only there were someone
who could stand between us
with a hand on my shoulder
and a hand on yours
to mediate our differences.
Or is that the role
that Jesus Christ, the Jew,
has been waiting down the centuries
to play for me
and you?”
From a lecture delivered
by Lord Alderdice of Knock,
Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly, at the invitation of Evangelical
Alliance Northern Ireland at Malone House in September 2002.
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