Editorial: Spring Fever
Anna Rankin

Comment: What is Reconciliation?
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From the Director: Ireland is changing and so are we!
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The Whole Gospel for the Whole World (and beyond...)
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Rwanda Ten Years On
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Anglo-Irish Relations
Russell & Katherine Norton

The Hard Gospel
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Interview with Robin Eames: RECONCILIATION - A View from Armagh
Anna Rankin

Interview with Sean Brady: RECONCILIATION - A View from Armagh
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Church-based Peacebuilding
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Evangelism & Reconciliation - are they irreconcilable?
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Dogville and the Drama of Redemption
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Blessed are the Peacemakers?
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Review: Bitter Fruit
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Review: The Colour of Darkness
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Review: The Lost Message of Jesus
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Review: The Futures of Evangelicalism
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Review: Evangelicals in Ireland: An Introduction
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RECONCILIATION
A View from Armagh

The Most Rev Dr Robin Eames is Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland. A lawyer by training and a cleric by vocation, he recently served as Chairman of the Lambeth Commission on Communion, which produced the Windsor Report in October 2004. Alf McCreary’s 2004 biography of Archbishop Robin Eames, Nobody’s Fool, is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

How do you see the current situation? Are we more divided than ever?
The Peace Process is the in-phrase that people use and for years it has worried me that this phrase is perhaps clouding the real situation. Everybody talks about the Peace Process, but what they mean is the political process. I always try to draw the distinction between the political, which establishes structures that will allow reconciliation to take place and government to move on, and what is happening in the hearts and minds of people on the ground, because you cannot impose reconciliation. You can produce legislation geared to help people to live together, but until people on the ground – in their homes and their jobs, in their churches, wherever they are – are prepared to see reconciliation as something worthwhile, you are only dealing with part of the process. I have been dealing with people in the pastoral realm and because of my position I have to have very close contact in the political world, but to me the number one priority is what happens to ordinary people.

I share the disappointment of so many about the progress of political agreement. However I remain optimistic in the long term that some agreement will emerge. But I still have to concentrate on the hearts and minds battle, which is for people. Comparing the current situation with when I was ordained in 1963, Northern Ireland has progressed beyond all recognition in so many ways. The dreadful dark days of the murders, violence and atrocities are over. We see paramilitaries now in terms of criminal acts rather than in terms of involvement in political violence. We still await decommissioning and ‘the end of the war’, but in terms of the normality of Northern Ireland we have come light years.

When people get a bit disheartened and say to me, ‘There are so many problems still to tackle’ I say, ‘Yes, but see how far we have come. Take heart from that.’ And that is biblical because the prophets were always saying that vision is linked to experience and your experience of the past should inform your perception of what’s possible in the future. Memory and dealing with memories is probably the most important ingredient in people’s lives. How they deal with their past experience determines to a very large extent the sort of person they are and the sort of person they will become. Deep resentment of something you or your family has experienced in the past will colour your judgement. If, on the other hand, you can say, ‘The past is the past, and we move on,’ it helps. But in a Christian sense we have to constantly turn back to the experience of the goodness and guidance of a God who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Can we find a way of remembering that doesn’t reinforce sectarian divisions?
Forgiveness, recognition of hurt, acknowledging that everyone, irrespective of political outlook or religious tradition, is made in the image of the same God, all of these are vital.

The desire to move on puts things in perspective and other things find their own level of importance, but I think it is important to realise that unless we recognise the role of memories, the future will be artificial. Your generation may not have the same memories that some of us have of the very darkest days and what it did to people. I think irrespective of our age group or our tradition we need to recognise there are those in this society for whom memory is a very, very controlling thing.

We have yet to deal with memory in the wider collective sense. Over the years I have had close contact with my friend Desmond Tutu. When it was first voiced that we might have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Northern Ireland, similar to the one in South Africa, I took the trouble to get him to give me all the data on what happened in Cape Town. The more I have studied it, the more I am convinced that we cannot simply take the South African model and say this will work in Northern Ireland. But I do think the time may come when we may have to find a way to allow people to bleed in public. Now I haven’t the answer. I’m not saying, ‘This is the model’. I am simply saying, collectively, we may have to find a way to allow people’s memories to be recognised.

I have buried many, many people who were murdered. I know their families and what they have gone through and I know what it has done to their faith. Therefore I am conscious that there is no easy answer. But I have to recognise that, as we move into a new era, we cannot push away memories and say they are not relevant. We mustn’t loose the lessons of the past, because we know what the dangers are.

Is reconciliation still about Protestants and Catholics or is there a need for reconciliation in other areas?
Traditionally and historically the divisions in Northern Ireland between Catholic and Protestant, unionist and nationalist/republican. But while we were preoccupied with our narrow sectarian divides the world has grown.

In Northern Ireland we were a fertile ground for racialism because sectarianism in the religious and political sense taught us how to be over-defensive. In the past, if you were from the other community immediately you were seen as the enemy, as someone out to undermine my position and the position of my community. You were nothing to me other than a threat.

In the early days of the Troubles I was a rector in east Belfast and I saw the UDA born in my parish. It taught me that for a society or a community under threat defensiveness is the first reaction, retreating into your own kind whenever you feel or perceive you are under attack.

The same principle applies to other things, if I don’t like your sexuality habits I will defend mine at all costs, I won’t even seek to understand you; if I don’t like your politics, I’ll defend my position, I’m not going to move, ‘not and inch!’ – the unionist thing. Because I don’t like what you are saying, you are a threat to me. Sexuality, politics and religion are all the same in this respect. If you get the human reaction to it you begin to understand much more why people say and do the things.

Now, thanks to the political process, we are beginning to see that in fact there is room for power sharing, there’s room at a government level for acting together. What we haven’t yet done is to realise that our defensiveness in that realm has so easily been translated into our attitudes towards anyone who isn’t of our outlook, or gender, who doesn’t hold our particular ideas of justice.

I have just finished a year’s work on behalf of the Anglican Communion on the whole homosexual issue – the Windsor Report has just been published. Very serious divisions arose within the Anglican Communion over the question of our attitude to sexuality, particularly in official positions in the church. What I have seen in Northern Ireland in terms of the sources and the depth of sectarianism is not confined to political and religious issues. We have yet to understand the universality of humankind – that what binds people of colour, gender, class, creed is far more positive than what divides them. What we are seeing now, in terms of these divisions, is the world coming of age. These divisions are at least out in the open and for that we are grateful. They are no longer whispered in dark corners. Political and religious differences, differences on the issue of sexuality are all coming to the surface and forcing the world in our generation to say, ‘What is our attitude to this?’ ‘What does difference mean?’

The Anglican phrase ‘unity in diversity’ is part of my makeup. It is my experience that there is a basic unity in people being different. Two things matter: how you recognise difference and how you allow difference to coexist. Those are the keys to these questions. It doesn’t matter whether it is political, whether it is Protestant/Catholic reconciliation or race-relations, my answer would be the same.

The word ‘reconciliation’ has become the most misused and misunderstood word of our generation. If I reach out to someone of a different colour or creed or political outlook there are many people in my community would say, ‘You have surrendered,’ the implication being that it is a sign of weakness. Reconciliation has got to be seen as a sign of strength not weakness, in whatever context.

When asked the question, ‘What is reconciliation?’ I have tried to say reconciliation is like this: there are two people walking through a field, talking. One is whatever label you want to tie to him the other is another label. True reconciliation comes when A says to B, ‘This is what I believe and this is why I believe it, please tell me what you believe and why you believe that.’ Or, ‘This is the sort of person I am and this is what has made me what I am. Tell me what sort of a person you are and what has made you that person.’ Then the next question, ‘How can we see what is common in our concerns and what makes us human?’ And all the while we will continue to walk through that field. I won’t ask you to change your colour, religious conviction or your political aspiration but I will try to understand what is important to you so that I do not infringe upon you, and what is important to me I would ask you not to infringe in my case and we continue to walk together, we don’t stop walking. The next step is not to speak but to think about how much we have shared and to realise we are still walking in parallel across that that field. For the word ‘field’ you impose your locality, your world, your nationality – anything you like – but the two figures walk on into the distance. But they have made a million miles’ progress in terms of understanding and that’s reconciliation.

Reconciliation has to involve pain, it’s got to involve sacrifice and it’s got to involve compromise, but it has also got to involve truth. You may be different to me in many ways, but I don’t ask you to change totally so that you can be reconciled to me. I have got to be reconciled to the fact of difference and to respect that but to realise that at the bottom of it all you and I were made in the image of the same God.

What do the churches need to do?
First of all the churches need to recognise they are no longer in competition. What is at stake is that the one gospel has to be expressed in ways that people will understand the universality of humankind. Secondly, we need to be far more active on the street level – we must come out of the sanctuary and out of the pulpit and get our hands dirty.

We must be prepared for people to say, ‘You have given us a bland answer to this issue. That’s not good enough’. We have got to be prepared to listen when they say that to us. We have got to say to them ‘Isn’t it important that we believe in a Calvary experience?’ That Christ who was sacrificed through the evil of the world so that he might raise us to a new realm of understanding?

I cannot see a gospel in any other terms than getting my hands dirty. It may mean misunderstanding of what I am doing or saying, or anger and resentment for what I am doing, but for me the important thing is at the end of the day can I get on my knees and say, ‘I have tried today Jesus to do what I think you would have done in spite of the fact that people misunderstand me and don’t accept the way I want them to go.’

The churches must get new courage in speaking the truth from the heart. I think we have to be more courageous on speaking out on big issues, such as racialism. To me the needs of the world are the most important aspect. When you get to the basis of human need you realise the common call of humanity and that is nothing to do with religion or politics or nationality or colour. It is to do with the fact that in a world that God made there is such want and need and injustice and so many people in the so-called civilised west are going through their lives as though that didn’t exist.

The churches have got to recognise that they are often preaching to the converted. Young people say to me more and more, ‘We haven’t lost faith, we haven’t lost a sense of the spiritual but we don’t like or don’t understand what is coming out of the sanctuary or the pulpit.’

The church has got to leave the comfortable pew and has got to go out to the real needs of people. In a secular Ireland, in a racially motivated and a sectarian Ireland, until we have people who are not necessarily wearing a clerical collar doing the work of Christ we won’t have really grappled with the real problems. The ministry of the laity has become a priority in my lifetime, for my tradition and for most churches, and I think the role of clergy in relation to laity is changing vastly. We have to motivate and empower laity to do the work of Christ rather than thinking we are the only ones who are equipped to do it. That transformation is going on and it will take a long time but I think it is a total priority for the churches. In the structure of a church like mine, yes there is authority, but if I have contributed anything to the understanding of authority in the Church of Ireland I hope it is that service is more important than authority.

Sectarianism remains the really deep illness of this society and we haven’t conquered it yet, nor are we within sight of conquering it. The Church of Ireland has engaged a very expansive approach called the Hard Gospel. To me, that is one of the most valuable things that has happened in my primacy in the Church of Ireland and it is bringing results. It is getting local congregations to think. It’s not, ‘You’re sectarian, I don’t want anything to do with you.’ It’s, ‘What have I got that is sectarian in me?’ That’s the way in which I believe it is beginning to bite in my own tradition. I think we have a lot to share with others because of what we are going through in this project.

The churches have never worked more closely together as they do now. In my lifetime there has been a tremendous coming together of, not just church leadership, but people at the ground level realising the commonality of faith, of forgiveness and of religious experience. When I was ordained there was very little real contact between the main churches. Now the Roman Catholic Primate and I meet regularly, the Presbyterian Moderator, the Methodist President, the leaders of all the other churches, we are in very, very regular contact. This is the way I believe it should be. If the church has been part of the problem in terms of sectarianism, it’s the old phrase; it has got to be part of the solution. We are slowly learning that.

ARCHBISHOP ROBIN EAMES was interviewed by Anna Rankin on 26th November 2004.

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