Diocesan News11 Oct 10

Bishop of Tuam's Address in St Patrick's Cathedral, Killala, August 22nd 2010

Without vision the people perish.

I am honoured to stand within the inheritance of the practical humanity of my eirenic predecessor of the late eighteenth century, Bishop Joseph Stock, in his cathedral which is now mine for a duration.  My Brief, to echo another Mission Impossible – should I choose to accept it – is to talk to this title: Post Bloody Sunday Inquiry: An exciting vista. Well, I have chosen to accept it, but with great diffidence. I am English by birth, I was not yet fifteen years old in 1972; I have lived in the Republic of Ireland for twenty-something years, but I have never lived in Northern Ireland. I have two hundred and something bones in my body, but I have yet to find a Political one. One could hardly be less qualified. ‘Who is that Episco-pup from Mayo who presumes to comment?’ Indeed.  But I have often advised bishops to make a contribution that only they can, not to mimic others.  So what I offer is just that, a personal contribution to the whole, no more, based more the widest perspectives I can muster..... more on practical Christianity, theology and humanity than on politics. I do not want to be preachy, but I am unashamedly speaking as a Christian.

I do know that without vision the people perish, and without vistas, the gift of vision is not much use; there’s nowhere for your line of sight to travel, and if you can see the way things should be, you are frustrated – if you voice it you’re absurd, if you try to put it into practice before its time you may be sorely disappointed.  A vista, according the OED,  is a view or a prospect, especially one seen through an avenue of trees or another long narrow opening. So we cannot yet be talking about clear vision but we can and must identify vistas. Undoubtedly the Saville Report has removed a particularly huge and symbolic obstacle from the avenue, and new light is now pouring in, at long last reducing our paralysis with rays of hope. So now is a special time to be visionary, with a hope of getting somewhere. Actually, there are many vistas and our task is to create the space for these to intersect so that, in physical metaphor, they constructively interfere. As Rev Norman Hamilton of the Methodist Church has said, ‘most people feel a need to find a way into the future, no matter how great the pain of the past’.

But first, to acknowledge something of what has been called ‘the horrible legacy from a terrible past’. Reading through voluminous press cuttings in recent days, I have been struck again by the awfulness, and deep-rooted complexity of it all. In particular, I have been struck by the sheer magnitude of sustained pain; the immense relief after decades for some of these agonised and unjustly treated people must be welcomed, and with contrition.  Yet, as has been said, there are other victims too for whom the same release has not been found, and may never be.

Which leads to the question of parity. We are emerging, only slowly, into a fairer but in some ways scarier world where sickening secrets are being shouted from the rooftops and almost no-one can rely any more on an inherited sense of assumed decency within authority and power. I say we are emerging because there is a disparity in the current revelations; there has to be, in the time-scale of things. For now, the most powerful institutions, be they state, banks or church, are getting it first. And rightly, for there is much to be corrected. But none of us is without sin. I have to admit that, throughout my sentient life, I have also, and repeatedly, been sickened by seeing great people, who have made great contributions, hounded and humiliated, sometimes for one misdemeanour. In the inevitable particularising of precise charges that goes with finding justice, the wider picture can be forgotten. In the inevitable agony of personal loss, grief, pain and to top it all, injustice, this is the more true, and very understandable.

But with cleansing comes an extraordinary responsibility as to what to do next. In this sort of context, Jesus told a very subtle and eerie parable of a haunted person or house. It has come to mind many times recently. He says that if you banish evil from one place, leaving a clean empty room, and do not replace it with something good and positive, the evil can return compounded; the vacancy must be filled, or evil will once more recover its power. Purging without concomitant regeneration is fraught with danger; to recognise and evict is not the end of the work. All the more reason, John Cooney, for vistas – and you are right, they are urgent and important, especially after Saville.

In such sensitive, sensitive territory, how does one begin to indicate a vision of something broad and fair? Let it be said at the outset, it is hugely problematic to broaden the issue without being seen to lessen the offence. But it must be done. Because of the fear of being perceived to underestimate the atrocity of the offence, there is such a temptation to say nothing, or to be so circumspect, bland and anodyne in utterance that the issues are ducked, or invisible, altogether. Yet somehow to say it in the right way and at the right time may be the entrance into what Bishop Ken Good has called a community that ‘is growing in maturity and confidence’ needing to speak in ‘constructive and respectful tones’ since we are ‘dealing with deep emotion and pain’. Is it possible somehow to take all that has been - and build it into all that can be; to be careful of, and attentive to, all our memories, and beliefs, especially those different to our own? Love is observant, and looks out for the other. Such an ideal must surely involve a united effort and a major change in direction. To make this clear, forgive me if I use a visual aid. I have what is called a strap hinge, the sort of thing you see on old blanket boxes or foldable garage doors. Pivoted in the centre, it tapers along the parallax equally and gradually in both directions. The pivot is now "August 2010" looking from the pivot along one side is our vista tapering into the past. Looking the other way is our vista into the future. The past is fixed, screwed in, painted over many times, and now clarified in some places but not others. The future is open, unfixed. Here’s the point: if the hinge pivot is free and well oiled, the direction of the future need not be governed by the line of past, but it must always remain connected to it. We cannot ignore our history but we need not be constrained by it and must not be dictated by it.

It would be presumptuous from my ignorant perspective to try to describe the vistas, but I can perhaps indicate some conditions and reflections that would help us work together towards clarity. It seems to me to be self-evident that envisioning for a whole community needs, as far as is humanly possible, to involve the whole community.  I would like to suggest that Government, Churches and other religions, business, academics, arts and media need all to work together: first to create a space and climate for change, and then together to find a vision that is owned by as near all as is possible. In some ways this is harder in a relatively prosperous country; there is not the obvious agreed imperative of dealing with abject poverty and ruin that have stimulated the rapid reform of other nations. I have some ideas, but they come with usual health warning when utopian visions are concerned – they may contain traces of nuts.

The main thing is to do with leadership – the sort of leadership that, whilst aware of its past and its responsibility to its adherents, is nonetheless willing to take the risk of extending beyond its historical norms and boundaries. The miracle of this sort of leadership is that it releases, models and makes possible a benevolent and mature climate for others to start doing the same thing.  Likewise, taking the lead in saying ‘sorry’ can have same liberating effect: ‘I’m sorry, too’. And if this happens more and more, a really attractive and long overdue vista of leadership emerges; transcending the role of leading tribes or parties, and reaching towards shared leadership of a corporate vision. There is real hope here.

A great example was set recently by the courageous and much-publicised visit of three Protestant leaders to the Bloody Sunday Memorial at the time of the Saville report, together with the rapid and unequivocal statement and apology from the British Prime Minister. The Bogside visit was unexpected, unsolicited and well, extravagant in the literal sense of the word – going beyond the usual confines. It is exactly what Jesus did all the time, and it frequently got him into trouble. In a very human way it indicated a true acknowledgement of the pain and need of the ‘other side’. Such brave generosity has done much to create trust and good will, even if it was inevitably unpalatable for some. And mark the sculpture that was given, of two figures with extended and meeting hands, while the feet arise from and remain on totally different ground told, in art, the story of what was happening. And the role of media was essential. This was by no means the first courageous stepping-over of lines, but the fact that, thanks to the media, it was made so public, released a huge and very widespread wave of relief. It reveals how much we were hoping for this, even if we had not quite envisaged it or thought it were possible. This wave of relief is a very strong signal of another reality. It is this feeling of the silent majority that  is not often seen, neither its voice heard. It is hardly ever reported.

And here, if you’ll forgive me, I do want to say something about the media. A couple of nights ago, I learned that in the UK people on average watch four hours of TV a day, spend half of their waking day on the media, and one third of their time using more than one media-medium at a time! This is an utterly phenomenal indicator of the power – and thus of the responsibility – of the media. Despite some appalling instances, it is too easy to lambaste the media as being irresponsible and ruthlessly prurient and invasive; in so much responsible journalism you can easily sense the discomfort of the task of finding and telling the truth. But what is lacking is truth telling about the middle ground which often shifts hugely but imperceptibly and is unreported. It doesn’t make for great news, but it is news we need to hear. How often, relatively speaking, do you hear the clear views of a passionate moderate? And there’s another thing, too. In deeply contentious issues, I would suggest that truth is best found and portrayed in narratives of lives that could be told in documentary form. But rather than this, night after night you watch so-called debates – with people with opposite, usually entrenched views, invited to spar with each other and talk across each other. And one often feels wearied, even to the point of feeling ill, rather than edified. There are encouraging signs when you hear or see narratives of people’s lives, side by side with the very different, even diametrically opposed, stories of others; not compressed into propositions or point scoring, let alone linked into politics or church, but standing singly and together, bound by a common humanity. There is a huge need for this sort of reporting if the untold stories are to be released sufficiently for people to move on, and for us all to see how great the pain is and how great the consensus and wide the consultation will need to be to find peace. In the post-Saville quest for vision, we need to move from adversarial engagement (and reporting) to something fairer by far; what we commonly have so far is not the only way, and it is not the appropriate way. We all need to broaden our sympathy beyond our religious and tribal boundaries, and this will be best achieved in story, sympathetically viewed, and not through combat.

So I think there are indicators that our existing leadership still  has much to offer, and the place of well timed and deeply symbolic gestures is not to be underestimated. Indeed, it is just such symbolism in action, and in art, that helps to address the enormous symbolic importance of tragedies such as Bloody Sunday.

But, still and all, this leads me to suspect that some of the leaders we need are yet unseen or unrecognised. In the beautiful and touching Old Testament story of the choosing of David to be the young king, he has to be brought in from the fields, completely unconsidered in the face of the obvious candidates who are lining up for the job. And yet his skills, honed in unlikely places, are the ones that are needed for seemingly impossible new vistas – again, linked to the past but not bound by it.

Take art for example. We are used to our artists commenting, sometimes devastatingly, on what is happening, but it is not so often we ask them to help shape and build our future. I can sense the dangers and the hackles rising, but I am not talking about the propangandist State-driven ‘Art’ of for example the fascist and communist states of the twentieth century, or indeed of a tied and beholden Press, for that matter. But in the right climate of new co-operation, art and media can be part of the collective  envisioning leadership without losing their critical freedom. Art and symbol and communication can do more than interpret the past and comment on the present; they can illustrate hope for the future. Or consider the power of a single song. The fact is that many will simply not look to existing leaders, whether political or church – we are seen as irrelevant, suspect, old, intolerant or worse. So who and what - will speak to the next generation? Surely, it is for them most of all that we are trying to build peace.

Understandably, many people have been quoting the biblical statement: ‘The truth shall set you free’. Our freedom allows us to make deliberate choice – but what shall we do with it? Go all the way and look for retribution and punishment? Or settle for mercy and forgiveness? At this distance I cannot possibly presume to pass a judgement on this. But it is a question.

In a society that has lost its way, and whose religious leadership is very questionable, Jesus has these words: ‘you tithe mint and cumin... yet you neglect justice, mercy and faithfulness’. Of course, at one level, it’s another example of the mote and the plank, straining a gnat and swallowing a camel. But it’s worth thinking of Jesus’ list of the huge and essential things that matter, justice, mercy and faithfulness. After justice comes mercy. Justice has been found for some. What shall we do with it? Show mercy? Easier said than done;  one of the toughest things throughout the Troubles  is that those who have borne the most already may need to be asked for yet more forbearance. People are asking whether truth is sufficient justice? Or at least, all that is likely to be achieved. From a Christian viewpoint, I think I want to say this: mercy does not ignore guilt – but it refuses to exact the punishment for guilt. And Christ takes these two in the context of faithfulness; justice and mercy, legalism and liberalism are balanced by faithfulness, and the discovery of what, under God, may yet come to pass. For the sake of the vision of what might be, is there room for restraint? It would be totally unreasonable to ask for this in the absence such a vision. So the vistas are more important than ever. 

To work towards a vision is a sign of keeping faith. The paradigm of this for Christians, is St. Peter – the one who repented of his past, and yet believed that it would not  irrevocably dictate the future, in the hands of Christ.  This is the climate of reality and hope that we need. Faith in the future, and where possible, faith in God makes me return to the hinge. Notice that it can also turn upwards; to point to or connect with a vertical dimension, or what we might call a God-dimension. It is not ours exclusively, but there is a massive role for the churches in pastoring the peace process, and in nurturing and comforting those who will feel betrayed and left behind. In the churches, we do still have much of the vocabulary, and the means, of reconciliation, again not ours exclusively. And to those who say the churches have been part of the problem, I say that that is why, reforming all the time, we need to be part of the solution. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has said in his The Dignity of Difference, in a much wider context, ‘if religion is not part of a solution, it will certainly be part of a problem’.

As a further essential role for the church, I am convinced of the power of prayer, especially when we gather in silence before enormities that leave us stunned and confused. Further, we humans have an extraordinary gift of imaginative sympathy, if we choose to use it, that can be expressed in corporate remembrance. Whatever our background or politics, each of us, separately and together, whether directly affected or not, can gather in silence to remember, to sympathise, to imagine, to grieve, to be challenged, to resolve to change.  It is a most powerful way of acknowledging the past, for a day, letting it grip us and grieve us, and then – significantly - letting it go, so we can build for the future. Prayer together of this sort is profoundly healing.  There is a mysterious communion in remembrance, where we respond together but not identically. It unites, without prescribing the form it takes. It unites, while respecting difference. And it sets us free to live again.

+Richard Tuam
  August 2010