Press Releases06 Jun 04

Bishop Jackson's sermon at the RUC Old Comrades Association Service in Clogher

Sermon for

THE RUC OLD COMRADES ASSOCIATION

by

THE RIGHT REVEREND MICHAEL JACKSON, BISHOP OF CLOGHER

in

St. Macartan's Cathedral, Clogher
Trinity Sunday, 6th June 2004

Romans 5.3 and 4: And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

This afternoon we gather in Clogher Cathedral for a service of commemoration, of thanksgiving and of reflection on past and future. It is our privilege in Clogher to host this most significant of services on this the first Sunday in June of this year 2004. We gather to honour the service of men and women in their tireless work to ensure the stability and the security of Northern Ireland as members of The Royal Ulster Constabulary since the formation of the force on 1 June 1922. We honour likewise those men and women whose cumulative and continuous service resulted, as the twentieth century came to a close, in the awarding of the George Cross to the RUC as an organization in its entirety. This award recognized ?the collective courage and dedication to duty of those who have served in the Royal Ulster Constabulary and who have accepted the danger and stress this has brought to them and their families.? Such are the words of the significant citation from 23 November 1999. It is only the second time in the history of the George Cross that it has been awarded to an organization. This rightly engenders a proper pride which must indeed sustain us as the world as we know it tries to move forward peacefully in what we pray will be years of hope. Hope is one of those elusive realities. If you take your eye off it ? through despair, through cynicism, through hatred or for any other reason ? it ceases to be a reality and becomes no more than a mirage. We need to retain both realism and idealism in our thinking and in our doing as together we seek painfully to build a better Northern Ireland for all our citizens.

The phrase years of hope I do not use lightly ? far from it - but I develop it out of my text from Holy Scripture for this afternoon in which St Paul unfolds for us what we hope can be a threefold movement and development within ourselves and within others: suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. I say it also on the basis of the way in which this particular passage of Scripture continues: and hope does not disappoint us ?As Christian people it remains our firmly held conviction that our life and our work, our sorrows and our joys are held within the love of God. At any given point it is often difficult and sometimes terribly terrible to discern the thread of what is really happening, to catch the glimmer of light beyond the pain, to hold on to the sparkle which guides us through the fear. At times it seems as if we are totally on our own, and that the best of our efforts is of no avail. It is at such a time that we turn in hope to God seeking, from within our own real experience of the God who has stood beside us and beside whom we too have stood, for the future years of hope.

It would indeed be a wrong thing to give in, to surrender to hopelessness in this present climate of political and social insecurity. Our aspirations and our activities are for peace. Yet we know well that today?s peace is uneasy, it is fragile. Nonetheless it is essential to the future of our country, our society and ourselves. We must engage with these processes otherwise we might rightly fear that they will pass us by and rule us out. But there are new and old forces of lawlessness and we must remain on our guard while at the same time we dare to hope. The work of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, building on the work of its predecessor the Royal Irish Constabulary itself established in 1822, is well enunciated in the preface to the first edition of the Constabulary Manual of 1866 (and for this information I am indebted to my good friend Mr Robert Fyffe of Fivemiletown): Let it be remembered that the repression of crime ? its prevention if possible, its detection when committed ? is a vocation than which there is none more honourable or useful; none more essential to the well-being of society; none more certain of securing, in the right discharge of its duties, the approbation of every right-minded person in the community.

We may not use prose like this today, in a world of sound-bytes and text-messages, in a world of tabloid extravagance and cliché-d headlines, in a world where how you act bears less and less relation to what you say. However, these words well express an ideal which lies at the heart of a civilian force whose intention is to enable society in all its lawful and honourable parts to grow and to develop, to strengthen its sense of community and to enhance the fellowship of its citizens one with another. It speaks of the expectation of work well done and the active response of the whole community to that work honourably defined as the well-being of society.

I speak of the Royal Irish Constabulary to sketch something of the background of what we know as the RUC. I mention it also because the Constabulary Force had been policing Ireland in 1822, some seven years before Sir Robert Peel raised the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1829. It was out of the part that the Constabulary of Ireland played in restoring peace in Ireland after the rebellion of 1867 that the force was entitled by Queen Victoria: Royal Irish Constabulary and given as its badge the harp and crown of the Most Illustrious Order of Saint Patrick. Throughout the years of Empire the RIC provided the first senior officers for the many forces created and established world-wide. Hundreds of such officers were trained in its depot. When the RIC marched out of its depot in 1922 the police force of the new Northern Ireland retained the rifle-green uniform together with the harp and crown and received the title: Royal Ulster Constabulary.

For most of us present here today, coming as we do with vivid memories of times past, the life of the RUC will be bound up with what has become synonymous with Northern Ireland world-wide, The Troubles. Many times members of the RUC will have had to dig deep into their heritage to sustain their vocationthan which there is none more honourable or useful, as it was expressed in the words of the Constabulary Manual of 1866. Those years showed little sign of being the years of hope that many might have yearned for. They were days of anxiety, nights of fear, households of anxiety, people of alarm. None of this can be gainsaid and yet we must hold to years of hope for the future. The Troubles took on various forms, they assumed various guises in different parts of the country. I can speak personally best of the Border Regions which are my home territory. These Border Regions have their own character and charm, they have their own political terrain and human geography. They also have their own need and tragedy, the human faces behind the tabloid headlines, the keeping up of a brave face for the cameras when the appetite for publicity simply was not and is not there. For we in Fermanagh and Tyrone are a reticent people with a gentle sense of humour and a noble sense of tradition. We have never had an instinct to make our neighbour ? whatever the colour, class or creed of that neighbour ? our enemy and yet for so many somehow it happened. And its happening was both sporadic and sustained over those legendary years which have passed into history as The Thirty Years of The Troubles. So many of us are grateful for the committed work of the RUC in those days and nights when anarchy might so readily have replaced law and order on many sides. So many of us still carry scars and fears.

Those years claimed the lives of far, far too many individual people including 321 members of the RUC who died at the hands of terrorists. 950 people died in service and a staggering 11,000 people were injured, many with severe and chronic disability resulting from their injuries. And all of this relates to a Constabulary where 33,000 officers passed through its ranks in 79 years. A friend and clerical colleague of mine wrote a poignant poem entitled War in the heart. It traces international warfare through the tears of Jesus who, as we remember, wept twice in the Gospels, over his own friend Lazarus and over the city of Jerusalem. Part of the poem goes like this:

Men looked in horror at the effect of a nuclear device
And reckoned ?no more of that? to be good advice?
A skirmish here, a battle there, nobody seemed to care
And a new instrument of fear did appear.
They called it the terrorist and death to its mill was grist.
All were victims to its mindless attack;
Innocent child and passer-by, alack!
All human decency to one side was swept
And Jesus wept.
Fair isle of mine you have seen freedom?s decline,
Security force and the culvert mine,
The Cave Hill, Warrenpoint and Enniskillen,
Will they ever get tired of the killing?
They?ll fight to the end their end to defend,
For as long as there is war in the heart, my friend
There?ll be death and destruction, fear and corruption
And Jesus will weep the tears of despair,
For peace will only appear it is clear
When he is near,
Until then we?ll look at the graves so well kept
As Jesus wept.

The prayer of this Society holds within it the germs of how we might with St Paul make the transition, the essential journey and the progression through suffering, endurance, character and hope as we seek daily to follow Christ Jesus. This prayer, known to you all, takes three pictures from the badge which we associate with policing in our country: the shamrock, the harp and the crown. The shamrock by its very form speaks of community, of Ireland itself and of the mystery of God the Trinity. The harp draws us towards music which is so much a feature of the organization which we commemorate and celebrate today. It also suggests to us harmony and the ways in which we express joy and sadness as inescapable components of our lives. The crown points us heavenward as it draws us into the realm of faithfulness, righteousness and kingship of the Christ returned to the Father. He brought with Him all the earthly experience of human life which was His from the little town of Bethlehem to the wondrous cross on which the King of Glory died. The spirit of the prayer of the RUCGC Foundation is one of sacrifice and solidarity, of tunefulness and dutifulness, of righteousness and challenge.

But these words have to be more than words. It never was the work of the Constabulary to talk and not act, to speak without being willing to do. And it no different for us today. We have to live today today, in thankful recognition of the past. We also have to live today in the spirit of tomorrow for the good of all who have given so generously and for the good of all who are waiting and ready to receive. Any inertia on our part can simply play into the hands of anarchy. And we don?t want to be there. It gives to none of us the fair run that all deserve as together we seek to move Northern Ireland forward into active, participative, inclusive government of devolution and into playing our full part in the emerging, expanding, exciting Europe.

On Trinity Sunday we embrace and accept the total being of God. As we yearn for our sun-loungers, as patio barbecues tempt us out of doors for evening meals, God meets us in God?s totality. The fragmentation of Good Friday is past, the uneasiness generated by the departure of Jesus from the disciples in the resurrection is over, the ascension has happened and the Spirit has come. God-in-total is with us and our worship today needs to recognize this. We have it is the Foundation Prayer in the shamrock, the harp and the crown; we have it in the Scriptures as together with St Paul we grapple with three movements: from suffering to endurance, from endurance to character, from character to hope. God the Trinity is present to inspire us, to give us strength and to offer us hope in all of this. And this is a hope which we need to grasp for ourselves and for others for the future.

Deep in the mind of this same God is the wisdom of which we have also heard in the First Reading. The cry of Wisdom goes out to everyone:

To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live.

The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.

Often in my youth I had quoted to me at home, when I lacked concentration, when there was no sign of the homework being done, when examination panic set in, the following advice:

And the best of all ways
To lengthen our days
Is to steal a few hours from the night.

I certainly did not know that these words come from The Young May Moon written by Thomas Moore ? a different Thomas Moore (*) - and that the tune is that of the Regimental March of the RUC adopted officially in 1867 when it was the RIC. More often than not such stealing a few hours from the night is the only way to survive the following days and weeks. I shall remember from now on as I seek to do this that, as I slave over a hot computer, I am indeed marching to a tune of antiquity, venerability, service and dedication, to a tune which the world over is the call to service as suffering keeps moving into endurance, endurance into character and character into hope.

I leave you with this prayer: God grant me the courage to change the things I can change; the serenity to accept those I cannot change; and the wisdom to know the difference.

(* The present Dean of Clogher is also called Thomas Moore)