The Church Of Ireland
Press Release

Just as the Second World War came to a close, there was a famous spat between Éamonn De Valera and Winston Churchill on the matter of Ireland’s attitude to Nazi Germany. Probably along with everybody else in the country, the Irish Times had strong views on the matter and, in an editorial, recommended that now was the time to end the bad feeling – “The future”, it suggested, “demands an act of oblivion concerning the past”..

It is enticing advice but deeply, deeply flawed.  An act of oblivion concerning the past is never the basis on which to build peace. It is however the starting point from which we have hunted for peace for this country in these past couple of years. But the story cannot begin on Good Friday 1998, nor at any other convenient moment in human history. The story is the whole story or we are basking in delusion.

• The whole story involves churches that have perverted power over communities and individuals alike in order to exercise a demonic control.
• The whole story is of those who have maintained political power by perpetuating myths of death that have indeed brought death.
• The whole story contains people who have lived in fear for decades and who still live in fear, south and north,  on housing estates and in inner city ghettos.

We therefore cannot pretend that the story can have a convenient beginning that forgets the past and blurs the present. Nor can we pretend that we are not all part of the same story.

The Nigerian writer Ben Okri suggests that we all have to see ourselves as ‘within the story’ of what we as people may be, not as outside that story.  In A Way of Being Free he writes that a people without stories would be a perfected people, or a forgetful people, or an insane people. We are certainly not a perfected people. The last thing we Irish are, deep down, is a forgetful people. Are we to be an insane people, and think that we can move forward by indulging in a counterfeit act of oblivion concerning the past?

Perhaps one of the reasons why South Africa seems to be moving forward, albeit slowly and painfully, from the horrors of its past is that it has recognised the past, the whole story. South Africa has been mature enough to be honest about what apartheid did to people, white as well as black. No-one and nothing has been beyond the scope of a Commission which was about Truth as well as Reconciliation. Truth is in fact a pre-requisite to Reconciliation. Peace cannot be built on carefully crafted ambiguities that are open to as many different meanings, as different people may wish to draw from them. The political language of the past months has been rather like Humpty-Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland who announced, “When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less”.  The limitations of Humpty-Dumpty speak as a mode of political dialogue is a lesson we are learning the hard way, as time moves on leaving us isolated from the future. We must surely seek to acquire the honesty and the maturity to do as the South Africans have done and, south as much as north, face our own immediate past with genuine and ruthless objectivity and integrity.

Only when we face the unpalatable truths of what we have done and what we have been can forgiveness and reconciliation begin. That is at the heart of the Gospel message of redemption, and the Christian Gospel is from start to finish about redemption. The original and the real Good Friday is indeed only about the hope of redemption. But that authentic redemption - for communities and for countries as for individuals - can be found nowhere except in repentance and honesty, and certainly it is not present in ambiguity or in posturing. The past is to be redeemed, but the way of redemption is not collective amnesia. I have a particular love for the poetry of Christina Rossetti, but even I have to admit that she gets it wrong - in relation to communities if not to individuals - in those famous lines,

Better by far you should forget and smile,

Than that you should remember and be sad.

Senator George Mitchell, a hero of modern Ireland if ever there was one, has said sadly that there had not been real trust in the negotiations of the past months. No there hadn’t been trust, but has that to be the end of the story? Do we have to have a unified vision of what the end of the road will be like, and do we have to trust each other to have the same total vision, before we even begin the journey? In his autobiography, Unfinished Journey, the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin gives us a remarkable parallel from the world of music. He writes of the temptation to see the ideal of what the music should sound like, and the practice required to attain that ideal, as distinct. He says that they are not. The activity of practising – of doing – will itself expand the vision. Sometimes, he writes, he would find his fingers suggesting ideas that listening and study had not prompted. This is true, Menuhin goes on to suggest, of human endeavour also. There are ideas that are stretched by practice. And so, he concludes, “vision hauls practice upwards, and in rising, practice pushes further the boundaries of vision”. For us, the doing of peace may well push further the boundaries of the vision of peace. There is a time for defining the vision, but there is also a time when we have to stop talking and start practising.  By all means let us have a vision of where we want to be, but let us also have the discernment to realise that practice of peace - the doing of peace - will certainly change the vision of peace. 

And rather than merely lecture politicians, north and south, on their shortcomings, the churches need to ask the hardest question of all. Where do the churches come in to all of this? We are after all part of the story and we are certainly in no position to harangue others about their shortcomings in the search for peace. If we are to expect others to seek out peace, we ourselves can do no less, and we should ensure that we are no less honest than we expect others to be.. Those in leadership, south as much as north, whether in Church, in politics, in paramilitarism -  each of us needs to have the courage to face down those within our own ranks who try to blackmail us into keeping in strict obedience to their version of the past,  those who do not want the story to move on from their fantasies of “what used to be”.. None of us has a story of which to be proud, of that we can be sure. But we must at least be truthful about it, and most also accept that we ourselves are part of a whole story. The message of the Gospel is that Christ seeks always to bring us on from where we are, to a place where the past can be recognised for what it is, and can then be redeemed in him. Those within the story must not be afraid of the truth, and, equally, they must be ready to move the story on.

We in the Church have to set ourselves to move the story on, to practice peace, in a way that is costly and time-consuming (just like a great musician’s practice of his or her instrument). We are called to practice peace between Church and Church, between Christian tradition and Christian tradition. And if we do not seek out that peace in a way that is costly and sacrificial we are being utterly hypocritical in expecting those in other areas of the national life to do any better. And there are certainly many places in which we as Christians are being called here and now to forego the slogans and instead to practice peace..  to do peace..

• Peace between Christian people on this island of different traditions, backgrounds and cultures.
• Peace between traveller and settled.
• Peace between immigrant and indigenous..
• Peace between economically advantaged and economically destroyed..

There is peace waiting to be practiced, and right  under our noses. There are prayers to be prayed and songs to be sung, but those prayers are empty, and those songs are banal without the honesty to accept the whole story, and without the will to practice peace.