Bishop Michael Jackson - Churches' role in dealing with Northern Ireland's past

The Rt Rev Michael Jackson, Bishop of Clogher addressed the role of Churches in dealing effectively with issues of the past in Northern Ireland in a keynote speech at a conference run by the Irish School of Ecumenics in Omagh earlier this week.

Entitled, Acknowledging the past: remembering together in church and society - A role for the churches in Northern Ireland today and tomorrow, the Bishop said that the engagement of Churches must be actively directed towards positive inter-denominational dialogue.

He also said that Churches had to offer public expressions of mature, courageous leadership, and to model the fundamental principles of equality, respect and inclusion for every member of society.

The address can be read in full here:

Introduction

I wish to suggest three areas in which the churches, individually and together, need to take an active role in making a fresh contribution to the evolving life of Northern Ireland for the future.

You might understandably say: But is this not the sort of hand-wringing exercise in which the churches themselves already indulge all too often? In many ways, the churches are every bit as 'lost' as is anyone else in the new Ireland of today. Deliberately I use the plural.

In Northern Ireland society, we are going through a painful process of political maturing after years of brutal violence, years of uneasy truce, and now years where active community-building and peacefulness lie before us.

In the Republic of Ireland, there have emerged deep questions about the importance of readily recognizable values in a society whose expectations are set instinctively by the spread-sheet of economic achievement and expansion.

There are gaping holes in the moral substructure of both societies. These all too often are glossed over because a type of future different from the past is much more exciting and seems, from our irreversibly consumerized perspective, to make fewer demands of us as individual moral agents.

Call it secularism if you like! Call it mammon if you prefer! It is part of the air we breathe and the churches are powerless to reverse the trend. They are not, however, voiceless to speak into the situation critically and compassionately.

Three aspects of the future role of the Churches

(1) I myself have often said that Northern Ireland suffers just as much from religious indigestion as it does from religious hunger. A result of this is that the conventional language and ideas of religion are not 'new news' to anyone, nor indeed are the caricatures of the convictions and practices of people who try to live a religious way of life.

The first suggestion which I have as a role for the churches is that they or we, if we are part of them, be honest about the chain reaction, and often the causal link, between denominational conviction and rank sectarianism. One of the big, bad scary words in today's society is: pluralism.

But if religions embed themselves in exclusivity as a primary definition of who they are and what they do, then their shelf-life is limited when people generally are no longer looking instinctively to religion or to religious practice to enhance their understanding of their own self-respect.

One of the basics of Christianity is that, in a primary way, it exists for others and for those outside the church. In technical terms, this is called mission. Too often mission has been understood as little more than recruitment of someone else to a set of religious practices and ideals, the philosophy behind which is already obvious to you yourself.

Such an exercise has also frequently suffered from that fatal practice of comparing the best expression of one's own tradition with the worst expression of someone else's tradition.

The unchallenged articulation of exclusive certainties diminishes trust between individuals and erodes cohesion in society. While we luxuriate in a sophisticated two-party denominationalism, there is an Inter Faith reality to be addressed already in our midst. My first role for the churches is one of generous humanity in this new society.


(2) Religion needs not only to do an autumn tidy-up in its own garden but needs to be confident about presenting to the emerging generation what it has to give in terms of what people now call 'value added' to the people of Ireland.

If I may indulge myself with another modern cliché, I do not think that the church as an institution in our societies is 'no longer fit for purpose.' But it does have to re-focus after a radical re-appraisal.

In a post-modern world, political correctness has the capacity to draw out of people both defensiveness and aggressiveness.

Those who feel that things which matter are slipping away from them in the new marketplace of ideas become increasingly protective, not knowing what is next for the shredder.

Those who are impatient to 'set out their stall' feel that every opportunity for a fresh expression or a new make-over needs to be taken.

Appropriate dealing with the past is a casualty of both scenarios. And so we can move into a situation where - dare I say it once again - the churches bicker with one another and other people wonder why they cannot offer any recognizably common Christian witness to the world around them and beyond them.

Over the next ten years, a thoroughly divided Christian witness will become an increasing conundrum and a focus of impatience to more and more people.

The churches, individually and together, have a role and a powerful one in the Northern Ireland of tomorrow if they give expression to the divine invitation to find God present and at work in today's Ireland.

It is the role of religion to talk about God. Again, this is a rather obvious thing to say. A religion devoid of theological purpose has already shrivelled and, unknown to itself, is crumbling.

If I speak of the causal link between creation and redemption; if I speak of the operational love of God in giving life to human beings with a free will and a responsibility for all aspects of creation you will, like everybody else, say either: I don't know what he is talking about or I think that is better left to the clergy.

But if, instead, I talk about respect for person and respect for place, about ecological awareness; if I talk about The Enniskillen Bomb or The Omagh Bomb or human trafficking, you will, I hope, see that there are tangible, everyday manifestations of the theological language which I used just a minute ago in terms of good and evil and how we respond to both.

And that is a totally, if unselfconsciously, theological thing to do. I think that the churches can and must do this work time and again within all aspects of contemporary life - ipods, internet access, consumerism, ecology, justice issues - precisely because of the fact that they did offer hope and compassion in the decades of human suffering, intimidation and death.

Most people think that normality is something which is always there. I disagree. Normality is something which needs to be fought for, constantly re-asserted and thought through from first principles. So, my second role for the churches is to be agents of courage and confidence.

(3) A third area where the churches have a role is in revisiting the use of language. Let me give you an example. Stick to your principles, whatever you do! How often have we heard it, or even said it? Yet very few of us, I imagine, are willing to own up to having prejudices.

Prejudices are what other people have. As I see it, a principle is a beginning, a starting-point to which we return again and again to find our bearings, to re-position ourselves, to set out once more on the same sort of journey of life which we all must take.

A prejudice is a mental attitude or decision where a judgement which we made once - in particular circumstances which we are convinced have not changed, or on the basis of something which we took over from others without really thinking it through for ourselves - holds fast and we will not, or cannot, deviate from it.

The irony is that it may well have started out as a principle but developed into something non-negotiable, that is a prejudice. And this brings me into a further area where the churches, through their title deeds and through the personal example of Jesus Christ, can play a role in challenging the many noxious misunderstandings of power and authority. Not only is authority earned, it is also derived.

Power, on the other hand, needs constantly to be tempered and challenged by a critical assessment of any entitlement to use it over against other people. It is not of itself bad but, all too often, is used to dismantle the authority of others - particularly children, women, disadvantaged, disabled, poor people - and to zap their capacity to ask for equivalence of status or make a contribution which they alone, from their perspective and position, can make.

The churches have the role of being the place where this sort of human accommodation is modelled. So, my third role for the churches is to be upholders of honourable first principles.

Conclusion

The churches have no automatic role in the future of Northern Ireland. The churches however, in my opinion, individually and yet at the same time from an agreed common perspective, have a strategic role of both service and leadership because: they are, as we hear endlessly, present throughout the total community; they have principles and practices which too often have become confused with prejudices and exclusivities and yet, once re-thought in the fresh contexts into which they wish to speak and act, can act as yeast.

They, in fact, need the society at large to ask more not less of them, rather than allow them to move increasingly into the lay bys and cul-de-sacs of an emerging society because not enough is being asked of them.

The society, in all its good and bad manifestations, will be experimental for quite some time and will change whether or not the churches decide to take up the role which lies at their feet, if not yet in their hands as a strong force for honesty, healing and cohesion.

Members of a fledgling democracy such as ours in Northern Ireland, living through the birth-pangs of political maturity and mutuality, have little time for theoretical musings.

They, that is we, will be receptive to practicalities and living examples of generosity towards others. They will also, whatever their creed, be sustained by a Christian witness which derives the parables of its teaching from unpretentious, complex contemporary life. And they will undoubtedly respond to an institution and its people who make the first move.



Acknowledging the past: remembering together in church and society conference
The Tara Centre Omagh, County Tyrone
12 November 2007