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Editorial:
Trust enough? From
the director: Icons of Culture and Political Identity: A Decade
of Opportunity Comment:
Shaking hands with soldiers At
the end of the day: Trust Remember
1916 Shattered
pieces - a journey in recovering trust Interview
with Rev John Dunlop & Danny Morrison: Truth & Trust Faith
matters lyo
nta kindi dufite uretse UKWIZERA A
Reader's Response to Lion&Lamb #40 Bible
Study: Trust Review:
Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries
of Belonging and Belief Review:
1916: Lest We Forget Difficult
Conversations |
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I RECENTLY VISITED a small, nationalist museum of ‘the Troubles’ which contained a variety of exhibits, including bin-lids which had been banged by women to warn their men of approaching soldiers, and wooden handicraft on Celtic themes, made by IRA prisoners during internment in The Maze. In the course of bidding goodbye to the man who showed me around the exhibits, I shook his hand. This may not seem like a particularly significant gesture but in the light of a particular moment during my visit to the museum, it most certainly was. At one stage my host pointed to a black and white photograph of republican prisoners in a ‘cage’ in The Maze during the 1970s. He pointed to his own face in the photo alongside the more famous features of Bobby Sands. He then pointed out another face in the picture and alluded to the fact that that particular IRA man had died in a premature bomb explosion, shortly after his release from jail. My heart missed a beat as I remembered the very incident to which he was referring – a republican bomb-blast, in which one of my students had been blown up, as well as the man who had been carrying the device. During the ten minutes that elapsed between seeing this photograph and completing my visit to the museum, I feverishly pondered the dilemma that I found myself in. Here I was, as a guest who had received excellent hospitality on the premises where the museum was housed. I was also someone who believed strongly in the importance of reconciliation in the society of which I was a citizen. Moreover I knew enough of the realities of global politics to recognise that I was, as a voter and tax-paying British citizen, complicit in the international arms trade and the maintenance of a British nuclear arsenal. I too was therefore involved, albeit at a distance, in the manufacture, use and threat of violence. Yet there seemed to be something wrong about shaking hands with my ex-prisoner acquaintance. My disquiet was all about the people I knew who had been harmed by the IRA. Personally I had never suffered at their hands but I knew many people who had. There was a neighbouring family from my boyhood who had lost their father in the horrors of the Oxford Street bomb on Bloody Friday in 1972. There was the son of a friend of my father’s who had been shot down for wearing an RUC uniform, in a sleepy County Down town in the 1980s. There was a close friend of my aunt’s who had been killed in his shop doorway, as a member of the UDR. Would shaking hands with the exprisoner who was my guide be an act of betrayal of their trust - a selfindulgent piece of ‘reconciliation’ that I had no right to offer, as someone who had not really suffered? It is in the midst of such difficult circumstances that we are called as Christians to be what St Paul referred to as ‘ambassadors for Christ’, helping in the process in which God ‘reconciles the world to himself’. Shouldn’t we, as believers, shake hands with the ex-soldiers of our little war, no matter how difficult it proves to be and no matter how open it leaves us to criticism by those who were most damaged by that war and who still cannot bring themselves to forgive those who did them grievous harm? |
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