SOUL SURMISE

TOXICITY FILLS THE AIR

God, toxicity fills the air of my city

Sectarian vitriol

On social media

Banners

Gable walls

Hatred is spewed

Dehumanising

Those who do not live with us

Think like us

Vote like us

And God when we smear your indelible image in others

We do not only hurt others

We break the heart of you

Creator who made us all, very good

And revealed the preciousness of all

By sacrificing your son for the world

God forgive.

 

And God,

Before we point fingers

In self righteous arrogance

Send your Spirit to search us

To see the toxic vitriol 

And ungodly divisions

Within your Church

Between Churches

Blasphemous schism

God forgive our intolerance

The impoverishment of our love

The absence of relationship building

That Jesus’ Gospel models

God forgive us.

 

God, start with me

Interrogate my soul

My skewed intentions

Towards those who are not like me

Investigate the Northern Irish DNA in my soul

Thran

Holier than thou infallibility

Devil’s speed to judge, exclude and damn

God, if words could kill

I would need a licence

For the bombastic belligerent sentences 

That I swear out

Cutting

Breaking

Injuring

God forgive.

 

God, be faithful and just to forgive

And then purify from all unrighteousness

Give empathy and compassion

Wisdom to deny self 

Courage to carry cross

To love our enemies, 

Do good to those who hate us,

Bless those who curse us

Pray for those who ill treat us

As Jesus asked

God, this is rebirth

This is repentance

This is the grace of God

That dilutes the toxic

In our society

In our Church

In our souls

God open our hearts

To bring it on. 

BEING WITH THE OTHER - JESUS MODEL, JESUS CALL & THE CHARACTER OF GOD

Two 4 Corners Festival quotations have struck a long chord with me. The first was at The New Irish Arts performance in Clonard Monastery in 2015. Taking a mainly evangelical Protestant group  onto the Falls Road for the first time is very 4 Corners Festival. That the them was the First World War, even more so! In that performance was a line, “Hatred is compromised by friendship”.

Then in 2019 we had Catholic Priest Fr Greg Boyle spoke in Skainos on the Newtownards Road about radical kinship. The responder to Fr Greg was PSNI Temporary Assistant Chief Constable, Tim Mairs. This was again poignant as we were just days after the murder of Ian Ogle just a few streets away. In Tim’s address he said, “It is hard to demonise someone you know”. 

Recently, in my BEING WITH sermon series in Fitzroy I was looking at BEING WITH THE OTHER. Friendship. Knowing someone. It is all about relationship. BEING WITH.

Jesus was WITH the OTHER. Whether a Samaritan woman who was OTHER in gender, politics and religion. Zacchaeus who was OTHER in being seen as a traitor, collecting taxes for the oppressing Roman Empire. A Roman centurion who Jesus described in some of the most radical of all his sentences, “Never have I seen such faith in all of Israel”. Oh my!

Jesus modelled BEING WITH THE OTHER. He also called us to it. For those of us who live in conflict zones Luke 6: 27-36 is a tough Gospel passage. Here Jesus calls us to “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you”. This is heavy stuff. Jesus most radical call perhaps. 

Yet, Jesus goes on to explain to us that this is the very stuff that his followers are about. To love those who love you? Anyone can do that. He then repeats the loving and the doing good before he brings this call back to the character of God - “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”

When I sued to take University Chaplaincy team sto South Africa we met with a man called Rev Dr Spiwo Xapile. Spiwo used to say how we always seem to have excuses about feeding the poor or looking after the marginalised. Oh how that is the case with BEING WITH THE OTHER. We have so many excuses. Political, theological even. Yet, in this sermon on the plain Jesus leaves us no excuses.

BEING WITH THE OTHER, compromising hatred with friendship and eradicating the demonising of people by getting to know them. It is the model Jesus leaves us, the call that Jesus gives us and it all comes from the character of God. Let us quit the excuses!

HOW U2 RESPONDED TO THE OMAGH BOMB

Tears started running down my face. U2 tugged my emotions. I was in a lecture theatre at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They had a screen that filled the entire wall of the theatre. The sound was great. I was showing U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday from the U2 Go Home: Live From Slane Castle film. 

The obvious reason for the tears was that this was filmed in Ireland. I had only been away from home for a few days but there is nothing like seeing home in a faraway place to feel that yearning. 

Bono was playing all the moves. Sunday Bloody Sunday is, of course, all about Belfast and our Troubles. In 2001 when they played Slane Castle we had had three years since the Good Friday Agreement but politicians were still in talks as to whether they could make our peace deal work. 

Bono use the concert to encourage the “brave men” to compromise for peace. He then literally turned the song into a prayer. Bono walks out across the Elipse stage into the middle of this Irish audience and chants:

“Put your hands in the sky
Put your hands in the air
If you’re the praying kind
Make this song into a prayer
Put your hands in the sky
Put your hands in the air
If you’re the praying kind
Cos we’re not going back there”

On that big Calvin College screen, this was epic. This is about home. This prayerful hope sung across a vast crowd. The screams of “No more!” Wow!

Then, as if that wasn’t enough Bono turns the thoughts of this Irish crowd to the events of August 15th 1998. Just three years earlier the Real IRA, opposed to the IRA ceasefire, left a bomb in the centre of the market town of Omagh, on a Saturday afternoon. When it exploded 29 people lost their lives. The island went into shock and grief.

Slane Castle was U2’s first gig after Omagh. As Sunday Bloody Sunday ends Bono starts to name every victim, one at a time. With the band pumping out the beat of Sunday Bloody Sunday the emotion is palpable. Bono’s voice cracks.

Then with Bono sitting down the band move into a stripped back Wake Up Dead Man. Oh my. This is the most perfect location that that song ever had. Right there. After Sunday Bloody Sunday. After the names of the Omagh victims. The grief, the anger, the confusion, the grapple for faith. It has the catharsis of the blues, the protest of folk and the power of stadium rock. Tears… 

This wasn’t actually U2’s first public reference to Omagh. On November 20, 1998 RTE’s Late Late Show broadcast an Omagh Tribute Special that also included The Corrs, Bob Geldof and President Mary McAleese. 

U2 sang two songs on that show. North and South of the River, written along with Irish folk legend Christy Moore, came cross as almost a grown up Sunday Bloody Sunday. 

In this co-write there is an awareness that religion has led minds astray, and there is yearning for repentance, reconciliation and mutual understanding without any need for surrender, a reference to the clarion call of Ulster Protestants: “No Surrender!” The lines that became most powerful and poignant as U2 performed the song for the TV special were those that suggested the loneliness of hurting your own. There are also fragments of hope in the midst of the evil that love is not lost and has its place in the future.

The band also played All I Want Is You which, in this context, metamorphosed from a yearning for love, in a romantic sense, to a lament for those who lost loved ones in the bombing. It was again powerfully emotional.

Today, 21 years on and I will make a little playlist of these 4 songs, as I remember those lost in that horrific afternoon and indeed everyone who lost lives or limbs, or their sight, or mental health or whatever else as a result of our terrible Troubles.

COULD 4-WAY STOPS MAKE RECONCILIATION POSSIBLE AT STORMONT

Let me transport you to the roads of Vancouver in Canada. As another impatient Canadian driver honks his horn, and makes to shout obscenities through windscreens, I want to stop him and tell him how much I am looking forward to treating him as he is treating me when he is trying to find his way around Belfast! The roundabout at The Royal in rush hour will sort you out pal!

The psychological and social implications of cars are frightening. There we are in this little confined space with our entire worldview defined by what we are thinking and where we are going. How dare he turn left here and slow me down. Does she not know I am late? Are they not aware that I am trying to decipher a foreign city’s road signs on the wrong side of the road with two young children
screaming in my ear!?

In our cars, we are Kings and Queens and Presidents; almost dictators! We rule the world and everyone should do as we need them to do. There is no understanding of the crisis going on in the cars around us. There are no rights for those drivers. They need to serve my needs of getting to where I want to go. Anything short of that leads to finger gestures, bad language and road rage violence!

Transporting you back to our little piece of Ireland, we live like we are in cars without regard for the stories and histories around us, the hopes, fears and hurt of those who are travelling alongside us. Our world views are confined making us feel we are totally right and they are wrong if they are not serving our ambitions and dreams. If they get in the way of us reaching our destinations then they can be cut off.

Jesus calls for another way. His revolutionary plan for peace was forsaking our own egos to serve, forgive and love the guys in the other world view cars. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” he said. He knew they would change the world for the good of everyone in every car.

Bizarrely the North Americans have such a place on their roads. At crazy places called 4-Way Stops, every driver is disarmed from his arrogant self seeking and in order for this road junction to function, everyone needs to be heard, given time, and served. You literally give up yourself to let others go.

When we observe such an alternative to normal road attitudes driving is made possible, easy and thoroughly pleasant. What about bringing the etiquette of 4-Way Stops into our attempts to get our local government up and running again? Could all sides change the mindset of their confined world views and give the other road users priority so that life would not continue to be chaotic and dysfunctional but possible for all. 

Come on Arlene and Michelle!

TAKE ME TO THE PLACE - A Song And A Story For Northern Ireland's Day Of Reflection

 

 

"Take me to the place where your heart hurts most

Lead me through the dark world gates down there

Where all the ghosts of sorrow and pain

And fear and despair stay hiding

And well walk right through to our own way, our own place"

- from Take Me To The Place by Deacon Blue

I had an amazing experience using this song in a Day Of Reflection event in 2012. June 21st, the longest day is when Northern Ireland takes time to remember those who were injured or lost loved ones in the Troubles. Invited to be part of an event I reached for this amazing pastoral song by Deacon Blue. It was a b-side, not one of their best known songs.

After the event a woman asked to speak to me. She had lost her husband near the end of the Troubles. Loyalist paramilitaries walked into the printers that he was working in and shot him. He was not involved in The Troubles. He had been a Deacon Blue fan and on the way to the event we were at she had reached for a Deacon Blue CD as a way of remembering. When I played this she sensed that something beyond us was happening. It was moving for us both and a reminder to me how important music is in our healing.

Donald and Emily Saliers wrote a fascinating book together called A Song To Sing, A Life To Live. The fascination is that both of this father and daughter duo are musicians, Don a Professor of Theology and Music and Emily one half of the popular rock duo The Indigo Girls; thus bringing Saturday night and Sunday morning together in their ponderings. Sharing their own personal loss of Emily’s younger sister they write, “Music was one of our primary ways of coming to terms with her death.” I believe that one of the conduits for God’s comfort is lament.

The Bible is full of it - angry, frustrated, painful. Songs of lament do something deep in our souls. They can drill to the nerve centre of our pain, somehow empathise, soothe and mysteriously be companions as we journey through dark days. As a pastor I often give friends or parishioners a song or some music that will be a resource through their grief.

Deacon Blue’s song Take Me To The Place is the most perfect catharsis song I have ever heard. It was written in memory and dedicated to Italian Scottish photographer Oscar Mazaroli. Growing up in Church writer Ricky Ross has a real sensitivity for such scared places and spaces and based the song on the hymn Abide With Me and the traditional melody “eventide.” It’s stunning poignancy in Ricky’s yearning breaking voice, Lorraine Macintosh’s angelic wail, the sorrowful stark piano, the words and the tune, opens doors to the soul and let’s out the raw ripped up heart pain and let’s in some healing holy balm and the daring and courageous almost alien thought of hopefulness and grace.

I offer it as song to be used on every Day Of Reflection.

 

 

 

 

 

"Take me to the place where your heart hurts most

Lead me through the dark world gates down there

Where all the ghosts of sorrow and pain

And fear and despair stay hiding

And well walk right through to our own way, our own place"

- from Take Me To The Place by Deacon Blue

I had an amazing experience using this song in a Day Of Reflection event in 2012. June 21st, the longest day is when Northern Ireland takes time to remember those who were injured or lost loved ones in the Troubles. Invited to be part of an event I reached for this amazing pastoral song by Deacon Blue. It was a b-side, not one of their best known songs.

After the event a woman asked to speak to me. She had lost her husband near the end of the Troubles. Loyalist paramilitaries walked into the printers that he was working in and shot him. He was not involved in The Troubles. He had been a Deacon Blue fan and on the way to the event we were at she had reached for a Deacon Blue CD as a way of remembering. When I played this she sensed that something beyond us was happening. It was moving for us both and a reminder to me how important music is in our healing.

Donald and Emily Saliers wrote a fascinating book together called A Song To Sing, A Life To Live. The fascination is that both of this father and daughter duo are musicians, Don a Professor of Theology and Music and Emily one half of the popular rock duo The Indigo Girls; thus bringing Saturday night and Sunday morning together in their ponderings. Sharing their own personal loss of Emily’s younger sister they write, “Music was one of our primary ways of coming to terms with her death.” I believe that one of the conduits for God’s comfort is lament.

The Bible is full of it - angry, frustrated, painful. Songs of lament do something deep in our souls. They can drill to the nerve centre of our pain, somehow empathise, soothe and mysteriously be companions as we journey through dark days. As a pastor I often give friends or parishioners a song or some music that will be a resource through their grief.

Deacon Blue’s song Take Me To The Place is the most perfect catharsis song I have ever heard. It was written in memory and dedicated to Italian Scottish photographer Oscar Mazaroli. Growing up in Church writer Ricky Ross has a real sensitivity for such scared places and spaces and based the song on the hymn Abide With Me and the traditional melody “eventide.” It’s stunning poignancy in Ricky’s yearning breaking voice, Lorraine Macintosh’s angelic wail, the sorrowful stark piano, the words and the tune, opens doors to the soul and let’s out the raw ripped up heart pain and let’s in some healing holy balm and the daring and courageous almost alien thought of hopefulness and grace.

I offer it as song to be used on every Day Of Reflection.

 

 

 

 

JUNE 21, DAY OF PRIVATE REMEMBERING - FR MARTIN AND I, SPEAKING AT WAVE EVENT

You might not be aware of it BUT June 21st, the longest day of the year, has become a special day in Northern Ireland for honouring anyone killed in the Troubles. Started in 2007 by Healing Through Remembering, it is offered as a day of private reflection rather than any large public events.

In 2012 Paul Gallagher, then working for VAST (Victims and Survivors Trust) invited Fr Martin Magill and I to lead a short reflection. It was one of the first things that Fr Martin and I ever did together and ever since I have found June 21st a poignant day.

This year Fr Martin and I are guest speakers for another small event organised by WAVE at their Belfast Centre, 5 Chichester Park South, Belfast, BT15 5DW. 

Wave is a cross community, voluntary organisation formed in 1991 to support people bereaved of a spouse as a result of violence in Northern Ireland. It has since been expanded to include anyone effected by The Troubles.

Fr Martin and I are thrilled to be invited to speak, by Alan McBride, Centre Director of the Belfast WAVE Trauma Centre, at this significant evening. Tommy Sands will be singing. The event runs from 6pm to 8pm and will include a barbecue. The event is free but your name must be given to reception 02890779922 or adminhq@wavetrauma.org

Please, take some time on June 21st to remember those still living with the grief, injuries or trauma of our Troubles and, if you're the praying kind, pray for their healing, our community's healing and a brighter day ahead. If you can make it along to the WAVE event it would be great too ee you.

VOTE THAT WAY!

The prophet said,

Seek the peace and welfare of the city

Pray for its well being

Because if it fairs well, we all fair well.

Vote that way!

 

Jesus said,

Seek first the kingdom of God

And his justice

Then everything you need, you will have

Vote that way!

 

Jesus also said,

Love your neighbours,

Just like yourself

And love your enemies

Do good to those who hate you

Bless those who curse you

Vote that way!

 

Then on he went,

Cloth the naked

Feed the hungry

Welcome the stranger

Visit the sick and the prisoner

Vote that way!

 

The apostle wrote of love

Holds no grudges

Hates evil

Protects

Hopes

Perseveres

Vote that way!

 

If we voted that way

God’s kingdom come

God’s will would be done in our Councils

As it is in heaven.

 

Now there is an election result!

PRAYER ON 21st ANNIVERSARY OF GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT

Lord,

The Good Friday Agreement,

 

We give you thanks

For the prayers, played by so many for so many years, finally answered

For the miracle grace time peace we have enjoyed for 21 years

We give you thanks that we know longer fear bombs or bullets

Or morning news headlines

We thank you for all of those people alive today because of our peace

We thank you for a city thriving with night life

With development, opportunities, art, imagination and hopefulness

We thank you that we do not remember being searched every time we went in

We thank you for a generation who has no idea what this prayer is about

We thank you for the new relationships

On the ground

Between Churches

And even tenuously, as it is, among politicians

We thank you Lord for the Good Friday Agreement and the peace makers who made it and continue to make it possible.

 

Lord we ask for your forgiveness

When we have frustrated the potential of the Agreement

With those we have voted for

When we have put the new wine of peace into old wineskins

When we have lived the past in the present and curtailed the future

When we have continued to live in our apartheid area rather than love neighbour

And beyond that followed your clarion call to love our enemies

Lord we celebrate the Good Friday Agreement at a time of void and impasse

We feel frustrated and sometimes angry

Lord forgive us for the part we play in frustrating your miracle Grace time peace.

 

Lord give us resilience

In the uncertainty of Stormont, Brexit, hard borders and back stops

May these steps backward not derail the leap forward

Help us to see that coming out of conflict is long and hard

Give us patience with each other

Give us patience with the politicians 

In the delicate task that they have of leading the communities that for them

To come with them on the journey of bringing well being to everyone

And help us to make our contribution in bringing hurting, hating communities together in peace

Lord, when we take the inevitable step back

Help us to hear Ignatius advice

To run towards your doubts

May we not run from the challenge 

But constantly recommit 

Help us to try and try and try again

Lord we have no choice but to be involved in the long haul of trying

You call us to peace making

You give us a ministry of reconciliation

Your gift of grace in Jesus

And his death and resurrection are your example

That we should follow

Particularly in a divided, sectarian, violent place very like the one he taught us from

So, Lord give us your resilience and mercy and wisdom

To be involved in your miracle grace time peace

As the Father sent Jesus into a work of reconciliation

Send us 

To bring your shalom

On the streets of Northern Ireland 

As they are in heaven

In the name of the Prince of Peace we pray

AMEN.

SURMISING THE HORRIFIC EVENTS IN CHRISTCHURCH... WITH AN ANTITHESIS OF A TRUE STORY

Like all of us, I woke up to the horrific news from New Zealand that a white supremacist terrorist had murdered 49 Muslims while they were at worship. 

As I prayed for the injured and the families of the dead and despaired at the evil and hatred that is poisoning our world, I was reminded of this true story shared by Jim Wallis. It speaks more eloquently than any words of mine. It describes beautifully the kind of world that I want to build and live in.

Jim Wallis tells the story in his book On God’s Side. It is of how Steve Stone, a Christian pastor in Cordova, Tennessee, was concerned when he heard that the Memphis Islamic Centre was moving onto his block, across the road from his Church. However, after praying, Steve decided that Jesus was telling him to love his neighbour. Having put a sign in front of his Church that read, "Heartsong Church welcomes Memphis Islamic Centre to the Neighborhood,” friendships developed and both communities learned more about one another. They became good neighbours.

It remind me of two phrases that we at the 4 Corners Festival have been sharing. Fr Greg Boyle at this year’s Festival said, “It is hard to demonise people that you know.” It was an echo from a line in a musical evening about World War I by New Irish Arts a few years ago - “Hatred is compromised by relationship.” Christians and Muslims in that community of Memphis had indeed compromised hatred!

Yet, the story goes. When a national media hot story arose over another pastor Terry Jones’ planned burning of Qu’rans, CNN ran a piece that interviewed Steve Stone and his neighbouring Imam. Their obvious friendship had prophetic impact.

That impact was not just in America. A group of Muslim men seeing the news package in a Mosque in Kashmir, north-west India, responded in a remarkable way. 

They were so moved by Stone’s welcome to the Islamic Centre that one of them went to the local Christian Church and cleaned it inside and out. They phoned Steve Stone to tell him that they would now be supporting this neighbouring Christian community in whatever way they could. 

This is not a diluting of Steve Stone’s theology or his belief in Jesus. It is the very opposite. This gives the life, cross and resurrection of Christ robust proof and positive witness. The radical way that Jesus laid down his life for the world is preached in our actions as the word is literally made flesh in our neighbourhoods, media centres and across the world! 

That is the world I want to live in. That is the Jesus I want to follow. Let us stand against these atrocities against God and humanity in Christchurch. When it seems too massive an evil for us to make an impact, then remember those most powerful weapons of peacemaking from the 4 Corners Festival and compromise this hatred with relationship. Love your Muslim neighbour... and any other neighbour... just as Jesus called us to do! 

RECONCILIATION AT THE HEART OF GOD

(Fr Martin and I are writing for the Youthscape Website this month... here's my contribution.)

READING: LUKE 6: 27-36

27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.

Growing up during the Northern Ireland Troubles, I decided to follow Jesus as a 17 year old. When I read “Love your enemies” I did not need to think too hard about what that meant and who they were. Yet, for maybe thirty years I was what I would call a passive peacemaker. I was against the violence. I wished for peace. Prayed for it, even. Yet, I wasn’t doing very much about it. 

These words of Jesus are a radical challenge, an other worldly attitude towards your enemies. This is not just passive non retaliation, this is actively living in a way that benefits the conditions of your enemy. It is serving your enemy. It is loving your enemy. It is doing for others what God has done for us, in Jesus. 

The Amish community live this out in their everyday lives. Their idea of forgiveness is to reconcile with the enemy to the point where you make them a friend! 

In 2006 Charles Roberts entered an Amish Schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and shot ten young Amish girls, killing five of them dead.

Within hours of the shootings, the Amish had visited the killer’s wife and family. They not only told them that they forgave them but they actually set up a charitable fund for the killer’s children.

Love for the family of the killer of your children. This is loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate and mistreat you. Forgiveness for the Amish is not about wiping some objective slate clean. Forgiving is a loving act that seeks to build friendship with those that they should be at enmity with. Every Thursday night Charles Roberts’ mother now reads and prays with a severely brain damaged little girl her son shot.

This kind of mercy and love is at the heart of the Christian faith. God doesn’t only forgive us… he reaches out to build relationships with us. When we find ourselves in spaces where there is need of reconciliation we find ourselves in places where we can get closest to the heart of God and with opportunities to follow our call to follow Jesus.

God’s love led him to action. He didn’t just talk about his love. He didn’t just believe it as an idea. God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). There was nothing passive about that. We don’t follow Jesus into ideas… but to action. Revolutionary action.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

    for they will be called children of God (Matt 5:9)

 

PRAYER: Lord, lead us close to your heart, to be about what is closest to your heart that you might make our hearts like yours.