Healing a Wounded City – Annual Theological Lecture
4 Corners Festival
St Theresa’s, Glen Road, Belfast
5 February 2017
Brian McKee
A Wounded and Wonderful City
The weekend of the 15th-17th August 1969 was a landmark in the life of the Ardoyne community. My story, and there will be other versions of this story, is that of a 10 year boy living in Brompton Park, right at the interface with Woodvale/Twaddell. Given my fresh complexion you will need to set aside your unbelief at this stage.
During the day of 15th August I remember a sense of tension, a grey mood in the district. Adults were running around and talking about building barricades. I had never heard that word before, but it sounded exciting! Men and women were talking about riots in Derry, another new word! They were speaking about preparing for that evening and defending the area against the B-Specials and the UVF. As buses were hijacked from the local bus depot and were being driven around the district and placed side by side at the top of each street, the sense of excitement began to rise. It was like the war movie was being filmed in our own street. Oil drums were emptied and poured over the streets as the plan was to set the streets on fire when the B Specials and the UVF broke through.
As the evening came, that sense of excitement was replaced by a growing sense of fear. As we lived in the direct line of fire, mattresses were brought downstairs into the back kitchen. We listened as the fighting broke out and fear took over very quickly. I remember trying to get to sleep, and the thought in my mind as 10 year old was this: “If I go to sleep I won’t feel it when they shoot me!” That evening a brutal wound was inflicted on the streets of our city.
Tonight I would like to share with you something of my struggle to find a theology of hope for this wounded city. A theology that is open and welcoming to all and that gives a dignity and a purpose to the lives of all.
Just to assure you of the theological depth we are going to engage in tonight, I want to state at the beginning that my talk could be summarized in five words: “Faith is not like gin.”
Billboards often have interesting and amusing posters. British telecom used one that depicted two ostriches standing back to back with their heads buried in the sand. The slogan ran: “I won’t ring my brother until he rings me.”
Another poster appeared after some words of Edwina Currie about eggs that caused a scare about salmonella a few years back. It had a well done up lady egg, with the slogan beside her saying, “I used to have a boyfriend - until someone poached him.” And there was a round of toast and a poached egg beside her.
There was also an advert for gin on a giant billboard that you could see as you drove across the Albert Bridge. In the distance you could see a large blue swimming pool. As you drove closer you could see a slogan rising out of the blue swimming pool that stated “Out of the blue comes…” and following this slogan was a bottle of gin being carried as it were directly into the outstretched hand of a shapely lady in red bikini who was lounging at the side of the pool. I want to state that my focus was not on the shapely lady in the red bikini, who just happened to have blue eye shadow, black mascara, a diamond ring on her left hand, small studded earrings…no, I did not notice her at all, but the message was clear- “Out of the blue comes gin.”
Whatever faith is like, it is not like that. It does not suddenly appear out of the blue. Faith belongs right at the heart of our life experience, and relevant theology can also only be drawn out of that lived experience. Otherwise, it not only risks becoming irrelevant, but it ought to be seen as irrelevant.
But if faith is not like gin, so too I would suggest that building peace and reconciliation in this wounded city is also not like gin – it does not come out of the blue.
Healing and reconciliation cannot be built upon playing on the mistrust and suspicion between communities. We need courageous religious, political and civic leaders who are prepared to take the risks of reaching out and building new relationships where faith, identity and culture are fully embraced and cherished by all. We ignore the past at the risk of recreating it in the future, but facing up to the past must not only include looking at violent acts, but also the violent unjust political structures and systems that facilitated discrimination and lack of equality.
A New Vision of Reconciliation
Reconciliation is a word we have become almost too used to. Maybe we need to discover a new meaning for this often used word. It comes from the Latin. The fact I know that is impressive, given that I failed every Latin exam I ever sat in St. Malachy’s College.
The word consists of four parts. Re: meaning again. Con: meaning with. Cili is the Latin word for eyelash, and ation denotes an action.
So reconciliation literally means the act of bringing back into eyelash contact. The ability to touch eyelashes with another person, to look into another person’s eyes without barriers or obstacles between us. For me, that is a very new, different and dynamic understanding of reconciliation that’s calls us for something new that goes further than we ever even thought about before.
I believe that what we are being challenged to face up to in these days in this wounded city is summed up very well by T.S. Elliot in his poem Four Quartets:
...Last season’s fruit is eaten
and the fulfilled beast shall kick
the empty pail.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language,
And next year’s words await another voice.
We are waiting on another voice. We are being challenged to create something new.
Tolkien was writing his epic stories about the struggle between good and evil at the same time of a writer from one of our 4 corners, CS Lewis. In his book, the Fellowship of the Ring, he says:
I wish none of this had ever happened…
Can we all not identify with that statement in relation to the recent conflict in this wounded city? But Tolkien goes on to say:
The only choice you have to make is what will you do with the time that has been given you?
The only choice we have to make is what will we do with the time that has been given to us. So in a city that is home for people who profess both different faith and no faith allegiance, how can we together promote the healing and together build a new future?
The Reign of God
I would like to remind us of those verses from the book of the prophet Habakkuk.
"God how long will I cry for help while you pay no attention? I denounce oppression and yet you do not save. Why do you make us see injustice everywhere? Are you pleased to look on tyranny? All we see is outrage, violence, quarrels, wars."
Those are the words of Habakkuk 600 years before Jesus, but they could almost be read from our daily papers today. They could also be applied to the experience of the conflict here in this city. Injustice; oppression; tyranny; violence; quarrels; war.
People tell us that we need to move on from the past. That is undoubtedly true. Perhaps though one of our problems is that we have forgotten too soon the horror of the conflict we endured, and in doing so have robbed ourselves of the energy we need to create a new shared city together. It is no accident that among those most committed to peace today are those most affected by and involved in the experience of the conflict, now working towards a new vision.
How does God respond to the people through Habakkuk?
He says,
"There is a vision that you've got to hang onto."
He describes it in rather vague terms.
"Write down the vision; inscribe it on tablets so it can be easily read since this is a vision for an appointed time. It will not fail, but will be fulfilled in due time."
The vision is then proclaimed by Jesus in the fourth chapter of Luke's Gospel, at the beginning of his public life.
I am sure you know the story well. They give him the scroll to read. He unrolls it carefully until he finds the words of the prophet Isaiah. Then Jesus reads,
"The Spirit of God is upon me. God sends me to proclaim good news to the poor, to give the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim God's year of Jubilee, of blessing.”
A vision that speaks of the time when all debts are set aside, when prisoners are free and where all people are welcome. An opportunity for a new beginning without carrying the burden of the past. A time for peace, when everyone will share all that God has given for all. A time where there will be fullness of life for every person. That's the vision. What does that vision mean for this wounded city?
You remember what Jesus said at the end of that incident? He gave the scroll back to the assistant and then he sat down and all the eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him. Jesus said,
"This day, this passage is fulfilled even as you listen."
The reign of God, but Habakkuk reminded the people that it would take faith to make this happen,
"The upright person will live by faith."
That's how the vision will be fulfilled -- when we live by faith. I don’t think living by faith though meansmerely giving ascent to doctrines. We recite a creed at every Sunday liturgy, and we believe in this doctrine, that doctrine, one after the other.
I do not believe that is what is meant by faith as referred to by Habbukuk, or by Jesus when he refers to having faith as small as a mustard seed. At times in the Church today it seems that we are too busy defining doctrine and defending orthodoxy to take the risk of faith and imagination and creativity that will lead to the path of peace, and so we find ourselves increasingly irrelevant to the lived lives of people.
The healing gospel of Luke portrays the mission of Jesus as bringing the power of God’s justice to those in need: those who are poor, captive, blind, oppressed. His life will be filled with illustrations of this mission, from the cleansing of the leper and the healing of the paralytic, to the raising of the widow of Nain’s son and the Sabbath healings of the woman bent double. Several times he warns the rich not to neglect the poor. Luke’s gospel is filled with examples of what we today might call subversive activity!
His message of healing and justice for those who are vulnerable evokes the voice of the prophets of Israel who also challenged Israel for its lack of justice. In Luke we find the recognition that if we are to commit to building a reign of God based upon justice and equality and dignity, then we must have the courage to challenge the inherent unjust systems and structures within our community.
The task in our wounded city to truly work for a situation in which healing for all can occur and where all can freely express their identity and culture without threat or hindrance from others.
Reaching Out and Absorbing the Pain
Luke also emphasizes the boundary-breaking character of Jesus’ mission. While his hometown audience in the synagogue in Nazareth is asking him to do in his hometown what they have heard he did in Capernaum, Jesus provocatively recalls the mission of Elijah to Namaan the Syrian and that of Elisha to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon. Here Jesus is challenging them to look beyond their own self-built borders that both hem them in but also keep the foreigner out, into a recognition that the reign of God speaks of a welcome for the stranger and an openness to the world.
What would it mean for this wounded city if we looked beyond our own green and orange borders to both recognise and celebrate the richness, and to heal the woundedness of those we perceive to be the “other”? What would it mean for this wounded city if orange and green together reached out in welcome to those wounded people who have come from foreign shores to find a new home among us? Welcoming the stranger will help heal our own wounds of division and separateness.
The outcome of Jesus’ inaugural proclamation is to trigger the hostility of the hometown crowd. Just as the prophets of Israel were rejected, so the hometown crowd threatens to throw Jesus off the cliffs at the edge of town. Several times Jesus alludes to the fate of the prophets in Jerusalem. It is being made clear for those with the eyes to see and the ears to hear that even at the beginning of his mission, Jesus is to face opposition and even death in the pursuit of his mission. For Luke, the death on a cross is a “necessity” (the Messiah had to suffer…”), not as a grim stroke of fate or to make suffering into some kind of noble idealism, but a clear recognition that if you set out to lead the kind of life that pursues healing, inclusion, welcome for all, the fight against unjust social structures, the turning on their head of long accepted social norms, then you will be asked to give nothing short of everything.
Whatit means to proclaim the reign of God and how it challenges our lives to be transformed as we work for justice was illustrated by Fr. Alex Reid, a tireless hero for peace in this wounded city. You will have seen that iconic but horrific photograph of Fr. Alex kneeling over the body of the dead soldier just a few hundred yards from where we sit this evening. If you look closely you may be able to see the blood around his mouth as he attempted to give the kiss of life. What you will not see is the blood soaked letter in his humble anorak pocket, a communication from Gerry Adams to John Hume that was the beginning of the Pathway to Peace process. After he was thrown aside from ministering to the dead soldier, Fr. Alex continued on his journey to Derry. A Redemptorist priest, who by his bravery and actions, open the way to redemption from violence to us all. He absorbed the pain in his own person so that healing could be brought to this wounded city.
But we have examples of countless men and women who on the streets of Belfast absorb the pain of the healing process as they proclaim the work of justice; teaching justice; teaching the need for change; for the transformation of their community, once filled with injustice and division to be replaced by equality and a respect for difference. A community where orange and green are not a source of conflict but part of a growing array of different colours and cultures in this wounded city.
One thing that I struggle within the current electioneering, is when I listen to people talking about getting rid of orange and green politics. It starts to sound like an unattainable aspiration to rid our community of something precious that is at our core. For me, patriotism and loyalty are good things. I am proud to be green. I am also proud of my grandmother who came from Berlin Street in the heart of the Shankill Road. So my greenness is tinged, but not tarnished by orange! I suspect that many people in Belfast can say something similar.
Loyalty and patriotism are causes to be celebrated, but when orange and green demonise each other and where we allow people to create fear and suspicion about each other then they become distorted and life taking rather than life giving.
Different gods
I want to borrow a story I heard was told by a priest in Derry a number of years ago. In Belfast there are two gods; a masculine god and a feminine god.
The masculine god is orange and he marches to the beat of vibrant drums. He loves to tell stories of forefathers and of battles fought and won. His songs are angry and tell of faithfulness and fidelity and a heritage hard won. His favourite colours are red, white and blue and he dreams of a future when his loyalty will be rewarded by a restoration of power and privilege.
The feminine god is green. She is somewhat melancholic and constantly laments a fourth green field and calls her sons and daughters to mourn over what has been lost. Her songs are sad and speak of betrayal and victimhood, and of innocence stolen away by the oppressor. She dreams of a future when the fourth green field will be restored and the foreigner in her midst will be banished forever.
And caught in the middle of this struggle between these two gods are the modern day crucified ones. The one who is shot; lying by the side of the road. The one who is tortured. The disappeared. The one who receives brutal beatings and kneecapped. The one who is expelled from his home and his family. The one who was a victim of collusion and false imprisonment.