Press Releases21 Oct 14

The Archbishop Of Armagh’s Presidential Address At The Armagh Diocesan Synod 2014 : ‘People Of Hope Rather Than People Of Fear’

The Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, The Most Revd Dr Richard Clarke, delivered his Presidential Synod Address this morning at the 2014 Armagh Diocesan Synod in the Alexander Synod Hall, Church House, Armagh. He spoke of being ‘people of hope rather than people of fear’.

Speaking on the themes of the international threats of both ISIL and the Ebola virus, Archbishop Clarke said: ‘Only when we can grasp, and accept in our hearts, that in God’s eyes there are no “people like us” and “people not like us”, can we begin the process of bringing hope, a hope that begins with real solidarity, to those around us.’ He continued: ‘From the very first book of the Scriptures, we are told firmly that every human person has a total value and dignity and a unique purpose in God’s eyes, for every human person is made in His image and likeness. This essential truth is given its fullest expression – its complete expression – in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and in his death and resurrection. This is the basis of all hope, and it is not merely “hope” as an interesting theological formulation, it is a hope that must drive us out to bring that hope into the lives of others.’

Continuing on the theme of hope in the context of the political talks in Northern Ireland, Archbishop Clarke said: ‘Here in Northern Ireland, I believe that the vast majority of people want the talks at present being mooted as a means of resolving difficulties between the different political viewpoints to be pursued with integrity, energy and commitment. We want the talks to work. People want to see hope, they want to believe that those who lead our country are actually interested in holding out hope for all the communities of Ireland, and within both the jurisdictions represented in this diocese.’

Archbishop Clarke also highlighted the importance of road safety in the light of road deaths statistics and the PSNI call for greater awareness, saying, ‘We should all, young or old, take to heart the Christian imperative that we accept the gift of the life we have been given, and that others have been given, with a genuine reverence.’ The Archbishop also commended work being done to raise awareness about suicide prevention and, finally, commended the ‘fab / Flesh and Blood’ campaign promoting blood and organ donation, saying that by taking part in it ‘We can give hope to those who would otherwise have little hope of living a full life or even perhaps of surviving beyond a few months or weeks’.


PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS EXTRACTS

I would like to begin where I believe one should always begin on such occasions – by expressing real gratitude…

I wish to thank in more detail Archdeacon Raymond Hoey for his long active ministry in Armagh Diocese, and in so many different ways. Ordained more than 40 years ago, all his life in the ordained ministry has been in the Diocese, as a Rector, a member of many boards and committees both here and in the central Church of Ireland, and as Archdeacon of Armagh for over twenty years. We thank him, as we wish him and his wife Florrie every blessing on his retirement. But to all the clergy I wish to convey sincere gratitude to you and to your families for your generosity of spirit and of time and energy in the service of the Church of God. To the retired clergy also I wish to express the thanks of us all. Many of you, with the willing group of diocesan and parish readers, enable the worshipping life of the diocese to continue without interruption. For this, we are indeed grateful.

And to the laity, thank you for all that you do in so many different ways to make the presence of God a visible reality in the life of the Church. I have been moved and impressed by the variety of ways in which so many people here in Armagh Diocese – clergy and laity – will so willingly take on tasks at the request of others, without any fuss or any commotion. This should never be taken for granted, but rather be acknowledged with sincere and grateful thanks.

In this context I was delighted when Canon Terry Scott accepted my entreaty to become the new Archdeacon of Armagh. In the few weeks that he has been in post, he has proved a good, wise and energetic lieutenant, and I know that his presence here as Archdeacon will be valued by all of us … In addition to the retirement of Archdeacon Hoey already mentioned, I would like to convey the good wishes of the synod to Canon Michael Kennedy who served this diocese and the wider Church of Ireland faithfully and diligently over fifty years in the ordained ministry. We wish him and Jean every happiness in the years ahead…

On behalf of the Diocese, I would wish to send prayerful best wishes to Cardinal Sean Brady on his retirement and to extend these good wishes also to Archbishop Eamon Martin as he now embarks on a new phase in his ministry, as Archbishop of Armagh.

As you will almost certainly know, one of the priorities we have set ourselves in Armagh Diocese over the past months has been to try, with God’s help, to look further into the future and to seek out how we may respond to God’s call to be a Church with a real confidence in the future. We must of course attend to those matters that are of genuine concern in the present, but we must also see ourselves as a Church for the long–term, a Church which truly believes it has a future. How do we get there?

I suppose the first thing to say is that we will only get there with God’s guidance and through His grace. All the human strategising in the world cannot – and must not – try to compete with God’s plans for our future. And so we have to be ready to ask God to do great things to us, great things through us, and great things for us. And note each of the prepositions:
– doing great things to us, means that we will be changed, and even – let’s be honest – in ways we neither expected nor perhaps would have wanted.
– doing great things through us, that others too may be changed and strengthened in their path of discipleship as God’s spirit works through our efforts.
– doing great things for us, in that if we expect great things from God and work faithfully and energetically for Him, he will do great things for us.

The practical work is already beginning. At present, the project of visits to all the parishes (undertaken by the rural deans and other senior clergy with experienced laity) is underway. The purpose is to seek out from the parishioners of Armagh diocese what their vision for the future of their communities might be. Standing still is not a Christian option. Managing decline is even more faithless. We must look ahead towards a good future with God – one that will not be precisely the same in every place – but a good future for every parish, every community, in the diocese.

I hope that the decision of the Diocesan Council to seek to appoint a part–time youth officer who will give guidance and support for work with our young people at local parish level will show that we wish to invest in the future. I hope that the decision to appoint a part–time communications officer also will enable us to promote and to share what we as a diocese are doing and also as individual parishes. It should also help us to learn from one another and work together more effectively.

…Next month, I hope to continue the series of ‘Archbishops’ Roadshows’ that I initiated last autumn. Again, in the context of finding our future with God, I intend to hold two roadshows (again in three venues in different parts of the diocese) over the two middle weeks of November, looking with you at the theme of ‘Disciples and Apostles’ – we are all called to be disciples, followers, pupils, learners. Yet we are also to be apostles – sent out to bring the Gospel (of which we are still disciples) into the world around us.
All of these projects are building blocks as we set ourselves to work together for God’s future for Armagh Diocese.

Before leaving this theme however, I want to tell you briefly about what I call the ‘Roosevelt Principle’. Franklin D Roosevelt – FDR as he is known – was by any standards one of the great American presidents. He was the president who led the USA out of the terrible recession of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and he was also the president who led America during the difficult days of the Second World War; in fact he died just before the end of the war.

In a famous essay on Roosevelt, the Oxford academic Isaiah Berlin wrote that the key to understanding Roosevelt was to grasp that for him, the future was never to be feared but was always to be grasped with confidence and without fear. This is what Berlin wrote about FDR.

Roosevelt stands out principally by his astonishing appetite for life and by his apparently complete freedom from fear of the future; as a man who welcomed the future eagerly as such, and conveyed the feeling that whatever the times might bring, all would be grist to his mill, nothing would be too formidable or crushing to be subdued and used and moulded into the pattern of the new and unpredictable form of life, into the building of which he, Roosevelt, and his allies and devoted subordinates would throw themselves with unheard energy and gusto. This avid anticipation of the future, the lack of nervous fear that the wave might prove too big or violent to navigate, contrasts most sharply with the uneasy longing to insulate themselves so clear in Stalin or Chamberlain.

Let us then together set ourselves to be a Roosevelt kind of diocese, welcoming the future, rather than a Stalin or Chamberlain sort of place, trying to protect ourselves from what lies ahead. Incidentally, I hope you do not take from this paragraph from Isaiah Berlin’s essay that I think of myself as Roosevelt and you (to quote a phrase from the passage I’ve just read) as my ‘devoted subordinates’. We are in this together or we are not in it at all.

Moving away now from the diocese per se, but remaining with a sad portrayal of a fear for the future that can so diminish and weaken people, you and I need to see ourselves always as people of hope rather than people of fear. Yet fear is all around us. At present, people throughout the world are in the grip of fear. If we were to put a name on the two things that symbolise globally the fears of today, they would be the words ‘ISIL’ (or ISIS) and Ebola. One is a fear of other people. The other is the fear of a killer disease. The saddest aspect of it all is that these seem only to have become real fears for many in the western world when ISIL and Ebola, in their different ways, began to affect white westerners, ‘people like us’.

When ISIL began to murder Americans and Europeans in cold blood and circulated revolting videos of these, we in the west took the threat seriously. It was no longer people unlike us somewhere else.

When Ebola began to take the lives of westerners, we began to take this disease more seriously. Even though Ebola has been around and has been taking lives on Africa since the late 1970s, it was never thought necessary to look for pharmaceutical solutions until now. Why? Because it was a problem for poverty–stricken Africa rather than wealthy white people.

Only when we can grasp, and accept in our hearts, that in God’s eyes there are no ‘people like us’ and ‘people not like us’, can we begin the process of bringing hope, a hope that begins with real solidarity, to those around us. What then is the Christian hope? If I were asked to sum it up in relatively few words it would be in this way:

From the very first book of the Scriptures, we are told firmly that every human person has a total value and dignity and a unique purpose in God’s eyes, for every human person is made in His image and likeness. This essential truth is given its fullest expression – its complete expression – in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and in his death and resurrection. This is the basis of all hope, and it is not merely “hope” as an interesting theological formulation, it is a hope that must drive us out to bring that hope into the lives of others. Because if we truly believe that every person has that supreme meaning and dignity in God’s eyes, and that Christ died to make that dignity and that hope complete, it can only change our relationship with God and our relationship with every other person. No longer can there be an “us” and a “them”; there can only be God’s children, each with an equal dignity – the image of God – for whom we must care and to whom we must bring hope because they and we are one in God’s love. What can we then be, other than children of hope, a hope that is not merely theoretical (in which case it is pointless) but a hope that bursts out into what we are and what we do each day of our lives.

But there is a terrible hopelessness in the world around us that we must seek to dispel as Christians, and there is hopelessness in our land that we must also challenge in the name of Jesus Christ. Yes, we have not only the right but the Christian duty to ask those who are entrusted with the political leadership of this country what is their vision of hope for all. Here in Northern Ireland, I believe that the vast majority of people want the talks at present being mooted as a means of resolving difficulties between the different political viewpoints to be pursued with integrity, energy and commitment. We want the talks to work. People want to see hope, they want to believe that those who lead our country are actually interested in holding out hope for all the communities of Ireland, and within both the jurisdictions represented in this diocese.

But even closer to home are other fears that we must seek to counter in our everyday lives and in practical ways. Three are of particular importance because they can affect any one of us and any person we love without any forewarning.

The first is a matter that we have been asked to highlight by the PSNI as a moral issue and this is the matter of road safety. On the roads of Northern Ireland, far more people have been killed already this year than were killed in the whole of last year. In 2013, 56 people died in road traffic collisions in Northern Ireland (and 48 died in 2012); the figure has risen to well over sixty already this year and there are almost two and a half months before we reach the end of 2014. Of drivers killed, almost half fall into the 16–24 age group category. We should all, young or old, take to heart the Christian imperative that we accept the gift of the life we have been given, and that others have been given, with a genuine reverence.

This elides with another matter. Throughout this island, the high level of suicide is terrible and terrifying. The Samaritans estimate that on average, over 6,000 people die by suicide each year across UK and Republic of Ireland. Here in Armagh Diocese, a number of people have sought to help this terrible situation by arranging training for those wishing to know how they might recognize some of the signs that an individual is contemplating taking their own life. I am grateful to Revd Andrew Rawding for the work that he and others have put into this enterprise. I know that if members of the diocese do wish to learn more about how they can provide support for someone who has suicidal ideation and help them to gain access to professional help, additional training sessions can be arranged. Do please take it seriously. We can give hope, where a person feels only darkness and hopelessness.

At the General Synod last May, the Church of Ireland opted to become part of the ‘fab / Flesh and Blood’ campaign, a project which began with the churches in England Scotland and Wales to encourage Christian disciples, as part of their Christian giving, to become blood donors if they can, and also to allow their organs to be used after death so that others may live. We hope that this will be given a proper launch in the New Year and I hope that we as a diocese may play our full part in making ‘fab’ known. We can give hope to those who would otherwise have little hope of living a full life or even perhaps of surviving beyond a few months or weeks.

As the people of God, we should be characterised by our willingness to work together in love and to give together in love, ‘steadfast in faith and active in service’ to God and those around us. I hope and pray that this may typify not only this diocesan synod but also our whole life and work together as a diocese as we step fearlessly into the future.