Pardon & Peace - the only way

Talk given at the Chapel Royal, Brighton

By the Very Revd Nicholas Frayling, Dean of Chichester Cathedral

This talk was given on the 20th June, 2005.

It is a great honour to have been asked to give this lecture.  I am sorry it is a year late, but I was in hospital last year, and David Young and Imam Sajid have been most patient and courteous in allowing me to come after all these months.

There is, in this room, a wealth of experience from many different faiths. Together we shall try to learn from each other how the dimension of faith might help us to address the alphabet of human conflict, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It would be tempting to use my time to list a series of projects, from all over the world, illustrating stories of faith-based community-building and healing.  But that is not for this evening.  Instead, I hope to offer an agenda which is both more specific and more challenging.

We all know with our minds that 'the only way to peace is through the door of justice'1, but to make it work is something else.  We are inclined to avoid engagement with the risky business of peacemaking, for the most convincing reasons.  We find political, social and sometimes theological excuses for this strategy, and we justify it by speaking of our mature consideration, prudence, reasonable caution, or even wisdom.

We lament the lack of a prophetic stance by political and religious leaders, but we do not create the conditions that would enable them to give such a lead, because we are for ever watching our backs, wondering what others will say or think or do.  Bishop George Bell, the Anglican Bishop of Chichester at the time of the Second World War, said, 'To despair of being able to do anything, or to refuse to do anything, is to be guilty of infidelity.'2

One of the problems is that, in conflicts the world over, it seems that the same political leaders use the same methods, the same tools, to till the same ground in order to try to bring about a harvest, and then wonder why the fields remain barren of new growth and new ideas.

Let me explain how I have come to be engaged in these issues, with particular reference to my own area of concern, which is one of the oldest and most intractable conflicts in Europe, that between Britain - or more specifically England - and Ireland, now represented by the apparent collapse of the political process, in which so many hopes have been invested.  If ever there was a place where new vision and new methods were required, it is Northern Ireland - incidentally, statistically the most religious country in Europe.

I acknowledge that, for some of you, this may seem far from your own experience, but I invite you to remain with me, for I have found, in speaking of these matters, that they have a much wider relevance.  Indeed, after I had given an address in Westminster Abbey on the subject of Britain and Ireland, people of seven different nationalities and many religions came up to me and said, 'You could have been speaking about us. Did you mean our situation?'

As an Englishman, I have become deeply troubled by the bitter legacy which my country has bequeathed to the peoples of Ireland, both North and South, Protestant and Catholic.  In summary, these are the reasons for my disquiet:

1. We invaded Ireland, and we fought our own battles there.
2. We robbed the Irish people of their language and their literature, and we attempted to rob them of their church.
3. We colonised Ireland with foreigners, and persecuted the Irish people when they would not conform to our religion.
4. We drove the Roman Catholics into exile, and killed thousands of men, women and children; and we invoked God as our justification.
5. We failed to feed a starving people whose country was politically part of our own, leaving millions to die or emigrate without hope.
6. We degraded the Irish people by caricaturing them in the British press and media.
7. When they protested, we met violence with violence.
8. These atrocities were not confined to the native Irish.  When it suited our purpose, we 'planted' the land with Protestants, took advantage of their loyalty, especially allowing them to die in unparalleled numbers in two World Wars, enriched ourselves from their industry, and then told them we no longer needed them.

It is a bitter legacy. In the light of that, in 1993 I made an unhurried pilgrimage to Ireland in order to listen and to learn.  How is it that people can bear arms, and be ready to kill their neighbours on account of bitter deeds which were perpetrated, perhaps hundreds of years ago?  How can a society evolve, in which people who live in the same town can despise each other, and preserve for generations a climate of mistrust, hatred and fear?  I soon discovered that the underlying question that I was posing was simply this: 'Can history be healed?'  It formed the basis for my book Pardon and Peace.

Now, even to pose a question such as this is to invite a charge of naivety, mischief-making, support for terrorism, or - most wounding of all - lack of patriotism.  But the beginning of patriotism is to speak the truth as we see it, and a patriotism which is founded on duplicity or which enshrines an explicit or implicit culture of inequality - of winners and losers - is unworthy of the name.

In Northern Ireland, despite real efforts to fashion a political solution, there has been little healing of a deep, pervasive sense of pain and injustice, mainly, but not exclusively, within the Catholic Nationalist Community. You will no doubt be making connections with your own sphere of concern or personal experience.

The reality of resentment which is present in many post-colonial, or historically-conditioned conflicts, has been well expressed by Niketu Iralu, writing of deep conflicts in his native Nagaland, on the borders of India and Myanmar (Burma). These take the form of vicious inter-tribal rivalry, and half a century of disagreement with the Government of India. There has been much violence and continuous mistrust.

'A chain of revenge and counter-revenge starting from unhealed hurts is the story inside every conflict. The chain becomes bloodier with every act of 'paying them back in their own coin'.  It is easy for those outside to pass judgement from comfortable distances. But for those directly involved the possible consequences of defeat are so grave that hitting back good and hard...is seen as the only safe road map to follow. Meanwhile, more and more families and communities are subjected to fear, hate and destruction beyond what the human spirit should have to bear.  (Other conflicts) are admittedly more complicated, older and wider in scope (than ours), but they too are often sustained by a failure to acknowledge that we each have our share of responsibility in the wrongs of others.'4

My reaction to all this used to be quite straightforward.  The way to deal with the pain of history, with all its injustices, was simply to forgive and forget.  Faced with the day to day experience of sectarian bitterness and all that flows from it, it is hardly surprising that many people in Northern Ireland do, indeed, long and plead for this to happen.

The trouble is, and I ask you to take this very seriously indeed, 'forgive and forget' does not work.  It is untrue to the insights of human psychology, and for that matter, it is bad theology as well.  The only way to deal with deep pain and resentment, whether far in the past or a present experience, is not to forgive and forget but to remember andrepent, or, if you prefer, to remember and change, or initiate change.

This was memorably expressed by the African-American writer, Maya Angelou, in words which have defined much of my own work:

History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage need not be lived again.5

The agony of Ireland, and, I dare to say, the agonies of which many of you have personal, and sometimes, deeply painful experience, come from a failure to apply that principle. We speak too readily of the need for forgiveness, without understanding that it begins with costly repentance.  As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian minister who was executed by the Nazis, memorably wrote from prison: 'There can be no such thing as cheap grace.'6  No, and there is no such thing as cheap forgiveness either.

It is often objected that repentance, or apology, can have no place in the harsh world of politics -  'the real world', as people often call it.  But memories stay alive in people and communities. We live on a selection of memories. In fact, unhealed memories are the stuff of politics and of community life. To repair the past is to prepare the future. In my judgement, there is ample evidence that the politics of penitence can indeed have lasting and beneficial effects.  I cannot go into specific examples now, but the case is convincingly made, with numerous examples from the last sixty years, by Donald Shriver in an important book, An Ethic for Enemies. 7

'In taking responsibility...for the wrongs we have done, we recognize that we need and want to be regarded as accountable. So confession is often the beginning of a new sense of the weight and meaningfulness of our acts, and the need to choose, to commit ourselves and shape our lives purposefully and consistently.'

I am suggesting that the only way to lasting reconciliation is to examine with courage and care the historical record, with as open a mind as possible, before we can even think of setting it aside. How the historical record can be faced with courage is, of course, a very complex matter. A protestant headmaster in Northern Ireland said to me, quite aggressively, 'You don't know what you're talking about. There's no such thing as history in this island, there are facts, and our facts will never be the same as their facts.'

At first, that seems a shocking and thoughtless observation, but I invite you to examine your own study of history at school.  If, like me, you are English, it was probably taught in a thoroughly Anglo-centric way - I know it was in my school.  It stands to reason, in the Irish context, that the events of Anglo-Irish history would be presented in a radically different way in, say, a protestant school in the north than in a Roman Catholic Christian Brothers school in the Irish Republic. You will know, from your own context, what I am saying.

In other words, we have to acknowledge that all historical learning is to a greater or lesser extent culturally determined. On this basis, the headmaster's remark is not so silly, and the connection which is often made between violent actions in the present and grievances in another generation, is at least understandable; but neither approach takes us very far.

I suggest that Maya Angelou seems to offer the possibility of something better - the notion that to face the pain of history with courage is to make it less likely that we shall be condemned to endlessly repeat it.

Let me give just two quotations which I find especially helpful, one from a politician and one from a Christian leader.  Richard von Weizsäcker, then President of West Germany, later of the unified Germany, spoke in 1985 on the 40th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz:

'No feeling person expects (young Germans now) to wear a hair shirt merely because they are Germans.  Yet their forefathers have bequeathed them a heavy legacy ....  All of us, whether guilty or not, whether young or old must accept the past.   Whoever closes his eyes to the past becomes blind to the present.  Whoever does not wish to remember inhumanity becomes susceptible to the dangers of new infection.'8

And Robert Runcie, formerly the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke in an act of worship to mark the 50th Anniversary in 1995 of the liberation of the Channel Islands - the only part of the United Kingdom to have been occupied by German troops during World War II.

'It is in understanding that healing comes.  Those who do not wish to look at the past or understand the past or heal our memories are the sort of people who become easy victims of fatal lies and suspicions about other people in the present.'9

Repentance is the sort of theological notion that people like me are apt to produce at conferences, but I have already suggested that it is a basic feature of human experience that you cannot have true reconciliation - be that personal or
institutional - without sorrow and penitence, or apology and symbolic restitution.  If we repent, others may choose to offer forgiveness - that is a matter for them - but it is not the main object.  The repentance is important for its own sake, and ours.

Put even more basically, in the British/Irish context, there have been atrocities on all sides: violence begets violence, and blood will have blood, as the Scriptures teach us; but somebody has always to make the first move.

What about this business of restitution, or reparation? Dudley Thompson, formerly the Foreign Minister of Jamaica, reminds us that this is no easy matter:

'Reparations is not about asking for money. You can't pay me for raping my grandmother. You cannot compensate me for lynching my father. What we demand is the restitution of our human dignity, the restoration of full equality, socially and economically, between the oppressors and the oppressed.'10

Restitution, reparation, penance if you like, may be largely symbolic, but at least a sincerely conceived gesture, an attempt at restorative justice, is an inescapable part of the process of closure and moving on.

Sorrow and penitence, then, are the business of theologians, but they have a wider and more worldly reference, too.  They can provide a means, and sometimes the only means, to break an inherent pattern of evil, and make possible new freedom of action. Furthermore, since sorrow and penitence presuppose humility, they are of particular benefit to the person or institution or nation which offers them.

Much is made, and rightly, of the miracle of the new South Africa.  Of course, the situation of Northern Ireland is hardly comparable, but I believe South Africa has a vital lesson for us.  When the  will for change is strong enough on all sides, and where there exists creative and courageous political leadership, and where there are prophetic and engaged religious leaders, then - and perhaps only then - it becomes possible to sit down and discuss the unthinkable with those one has always regarded as unspeakable.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has expressed this with characteristic directness:

'Never be afraid to talk, because when people sit down and talk to each other they discover each other. Old obstacles seen in the light of a new relationship become less formidable and progress is made.

What occurred in South Africa was a great leap of faith and creativity, which seemed miraculous at the time.  Urging some such process of truth and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, a British Member of Parliament, Kevin McNamara, said (in a speech at Westminster) in June 2004:

'Surely if the recovery of truth is to serve as a step in the process of reconciliation, the beginning of truth must precede the final end of conflict. Of course, the recovery of truth has already begun. So, too, has the ending of conflict. We must bring the two processes together.'11

In Northern Ireland, the new legislative Assembly which came to birth after the Belfast, or Good Friday, Agreement of 1998, was an astonishing advance, and owed as much to the skill and persistence of Senator George Mitchell and the commitment of President Clinton as it did to the politically risky efforts of Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair.

Yet now the Assembly is suspended. Elections have been held, but they have been to an institution which remains in abeyance - an extraordinary state of affairs, and one that is fraught with danger for the democratic process. We have often been told that the longed-for breakthrough is near, that the parties would carry on talking; but one is forced to observe that the majority party refused even to meet, still less to sit down with, its main opponents.

We should remember, however, that, until the Assembly was suspended, people who in other circumstances would not speak to each other, were doing business to discuss the nuts and bolts of a normal society: education, transport, commerce, healthcare, tourism.

They did not, of course, discuss the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons in the same spirit, but even here, South Africa is instructive.  Nelson Mandela has told how precisely that issue became an almost impenetrable obstacle in the peace process.  Indeed, it threatened to derail it. They dealt with it by deciding to sidestep it altogether, resolving to return to the issue when new institutions were firmly in place.  They realised that no organisation which defined itself as freedom fighters would ever lay down weapons in advance of a settlement.  That would seem to be defeat, and to negate the sacrifices made along the way.

How, then, are we to move forward? The beginning of wisdom is to acknowledge that we do not have all the answers.  I guess that is why we are here!  The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann has expressed this very well:

'Compassion ... demands a solidarity that goes beyond activism and the illusion that there is something to be done about everything.  It demands a fellowship in impotence, in helplessness, and even in silence.  This is what I would call community in the depths.  It has become something alien for modern men and women.  They find it deeply repellent, because it is in such crass contradiction to their 'active' attitude to living ...  Anyone who responds to pain merely with activity, to suffering simply with offers of help, and to grief with attempts at distraction, knows nothing about this solidarity in the depths.'12

So we are to listen -  not as those who come bearing gifts, but as those who come in the certainty of their own inadequacy and impotence. I first began to learn that, incidentally, when I worked as a Welfare Officer in a large London prison, with some of the most degraded and disturbed men in British society.

Our listening is not a substitute for action, but an absolutely essential precursor.  It is, if you like, the raison d'être of the peacemaker. But that does not make it straightforward. I was once involved in a discussion between some keenly motivated American conference delegates and a group of Indigenous Americans. The delegates really did want to listen and learn, but one man could only say, and keep on saying, 'You stole our land...You stole our land.'

An ancient Babylonian text leaves us with these words:

By three things does the world endure:
Justice, truth and peace...
The three are one, because if justice is done, truth has been effected,
and peace brought about.13

The Palestinian Christian scholar, Dr Naim Ateek, reminds us again that the only way to peace is through the door of justice.  That begins with listening and truth telling.  Therein, and only there, lies the beginning of trust, which is deeper than mere emotion.

You would expect me, as a Christian priest, addressing an audience well-versed in the language of religion, to approach this subject from a religious perspective, though I hope what I have said has also a more worldly and practical application. At the centre of the teachings of Jesus was forgiveness and tolerance, though balanced by a firm denunciation of injustice, oppression and hypocrisy.  He did not speak of the virtue of peace-loving, or even peace-seeking.  'Blessed are the peace-makers' is not the same thing at all.

We can all take heart from this. Johnston McMaster, a Methodist theologian at the Irish School of Ecumenics, puts this very succinctly. He reminds us that peace-building and reconciliation are not merely secular activities.  It may be that we in the faith communities have allowed the agenda to be secular-driven, because it is worked out in the public square, and because religion gets a bad press these days, and that is hard.  But he reminds us,

'The church, mosque and synagogue are also part of that public square and need to be committed to its well-being and public good.  Peace and reconciliation are relational issues and therefore spiritual issues.
Secularists may see religion as a cause and an intensifier of conflict in society and therefore want to ignore or eliminate religion from the processes of societal transformation, peace-building and reconciliation.

But whilst religion has much to acknowledge and repent of, and religious people and institutions require forgiveness and conversion, there are deep and authentic resources at the heart of all faith traditions which are indispensable for the processes of building new relationships, transforming communities; and imaging, and working for reconciliation. There is a spiritual depth, a mystical-prophetic treasure to be unearthed.'14

To which I would add, that is surely nowhere more true than in the families of Abraham. What, we may wonder, would it mean for the Abrahamic spirit of peace and reconciliation to find fearless public expression in the Christian, Jewish and Islamic communities of faith?  I leave the question hanging in the air...  It is one we should ponder carefully as we reflect on the practical outworking of the making of peace in the circumstances of our own lives and in the communities to which we belong.

My hope and my prayer is that by opening up this subject together, we will be enabled to renew our appreciation of the importance of reconciliation, and at the same time awaken our sense of wonder at the richness of human diversity and experience, so that we ourselves may become more effective bridge-builders and peace-makers.

Above all, I hope that we may recognise the importance for this work of pardon and peace, and may resolve to study and interpret the connection between the two.

What I have been talking about is no mere intellectual exercise - it is deadly serious. The world is set upon a perilous course, for want of what religion at its best can offer. I say 'at its best' advisedly. The great 19th century essayist William Hazlitt uttered a stark warning:

'The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion and turns it into rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence and famine into other lands; it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness.'15

Those are extremely tough words for us to hear, but hear them we must. The greatest challenge for people of faith is to reject the absurd idea that 'different' is bad, and to embrace the vision of hospitality...

'...To treat anybody as we do everybody - a person created by God and endowed with dignity and worth, a need for grace, a hunger for love and desire for
inclusion - and invite them (into our thoughts and prayers, and) into the realm of our relationships. When that happens, the spirit blows across chaos again, creation takes another step forward, the world moves closer to community, and somewhere in our world, or everywhere in the cosmos, the voice of Mystery and Love says, "Good."16
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REFERENCES

1        Naim Ateek Justice and Only Justice.  Orbis Books,           1989.

2.       George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, 1929-58.

3.       Nicholas Frayling Pardon and Peace - A Reflection on the Making of Peace in Ireland. SPCK 1996.

4.       Niketu Iralu  'Who will break the chain of hate?' in For A Change Aug./Sept. 2004.

5.       Maya Angelou On the Pulse of Morning. Random House, New York, 1993.

6.       Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-45  Letters and papers from      prison.

7.       Donald Shriver An Ethic for Enemies.  Oxford          University Press 1995.

8.       Richard von Weizsäcker : Speech to the Bundestag 1985 quoted in Shriver  op.cit.

9.       Robert Runcie, Sermon (unpublished) May 1995,    Guernsey.

10.    Dudley Thompson  Quoted in The Witness December        2002.

11.    Kevin McNamara MP  Speech in the House of           Commons, June 2004.

12.     Jürgen Moltmann The Power of the Powerless. SCM          1973.

13.     Ancient Babylonian Talmud quoted by Tony Graham With Sure Fierce Love    (unpublished) 1999.

14.     Johnston McMaster   Paper at U.K. Fellowship of the Kingdom conference, summer 2003.

15.     William Hazlitt (1778-1830)  'On the pleasure of hating' - The Plain Speaker.

16.     C.Welton Gaddy   Responding to Outsiders: A Spiritual Challenge, a Personal Pilgrimage.

Copyright: Nicholas Frayling 2005
Published by the Brighton & Hove Inter Faith contact Group
July 2005