REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE THEME OF HEALING THE BROKEN HEARTED RESTORATION MINISTRIES
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON THE THEME OF HEALING THE BROKEN HEARTED RESTORATION MINISTRIES, DUNMURRAY MONDAY, 18 JUNE 2007
Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?
Good evening and thank you for that warm welcome and for the Rev Ruth Patterson’s kindness in asking me to be part of this series of talks. As always, where Ruth is, the focus of discussion takes us away from everyday politics and the big things in the news, to the things in the heart of the individual and in the hands of the individual, to the place where life is lived either well or badly by each one of us. So this evening, she asks us to stop and think about ‘healing the broken-hearted’ and we begin to wonder just who they are - the broken-hearted.
The songs we hear on the radio are full of love that ended, hearts broken by relationships that didn’t work out. I hope I am not the only person here who remembers Jimmy Ruffin’s 1966 Motown hit ‘What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted?’.
“What becomes of the broken hearted
Who had love that's now departed?
I know I've got to find
Some kind of peace of mind
Maybe.”
Every one of us in this room has either had or will have a love that breaks down or disappoints us or rejects us or robs us of our peace of mind for a time. It is the most commonly talked about source of a broken heart and sometimes it is easily healed by time or a new relationship, sometimes it is simply part of our essential growth and experience as human beings and sometimes it is a lot more profound than that and the consequences of the hurt last a lifetime. Here in Northern Ireland, as in many places in the world where there has been a violent, political conflict, another very obvious group of broken-hearted people are those who have been bereaved or left disabled as a result of the violence. The dead that they loved are gone forever. The health that they had is gone forever. The best they can hope for in facing their broken hearts is to find some meaningful way of living with the scars and the loss, enough healing to allow them to enjoy rather than endure life for most of the time.
The chances are that in this room there is already plenty of experience of either being broken-hearted or knowing someone who is. Our hearts get broken in thousands of different ways. We can be hollowed out by all sorts of experiences and traumas and sometimes it shows on our faces and most of the time it doesn’t. Sometimes we have no idea just how much heartache is going on in the lives of people right next to us. Often I have met people who have been bereaved through suicide and they are haunted, even tormented by the fact that their son or daughter, father or mother, friend or partner said nothing about the inner turmoil that led them to suicide and so gave those who loved them no chance at all to help or find professional help. In my job as President I get to meet a lot of broken-hearted people and it would surprise you how many of them there are and how much you can do to help them or to help yourself if you are one of them.
Who are these broken-hearted people I meet almost every day? They are the mentally ill, who feel stigmatised by their illness and people’s reaction to it. They find it hard to make and keep friends, to get and keep jobs so the spiral of self- doubt and depression just keeps on diminishing their lives, pushing them further and further towards the edges, the margins. Without friends, without love, a light goes out in our lives. We live in shadows and yet the interest, the kindly word of just one other human being can give us courage to face another day and a glimpse of what the world would be like if only we treated each other always in a loving and sensitive way.
The new immigrants I meet carry in their faces a mix of hope and fear, of sadness and curiosity. Their friends, families and familiar places are far away, so they are naturally lonely and a little bit lost - all characteristics of being broken-hearted. But they want their new lives to work out and so they try to learn the language, to work hard, to make new friends. A smile, a handshake, a word of welcome from any one of us can lift their hearts and take away the physical, nauseating pain of feeling excluded. If we don’t do the smiling and the welcoming, their lives keep on hurting.
The carers I meet are looking after family members with chronic illness or children with disabilities or parents with Alzheimer’s. They are often worn out with the sheer burden of the work they do, looking after others around the clock. An offer to help even for an hour, to let them get a chance to shop in peace or get a haircut or have a cup of tea handed to them - these small things can send a surge of energy through them, enough to get through another week of relentless pressure. How many of us know people who are in that situation but something holds us back from offering and their pride and fear of rejection holds them back from asking? We should not wait to be asked - for we have this healing in our hands right now; this minute and every minute we don’t offer is a minute of healing time wasted.
I meet children who live with unhappy family relationships, it could be their parents are divorced or separated or that there are new partners in their parents’ lives or that they have alcoholic or drug-abusing parents or abusive parents. They often feel there is no-one who understands them, no-one really listening to their needs. They are in your circle of friends, your school, your street. They may put on a show of coping but inside they are being hollowed out by grief and they need good friends to help steady them through this difficult part of their life’s journey.
I meet children and young people who are bullied by their peers. Sometimes it is because they are seen as different, they may have special needs, have a hearing problem, they may be poor, from a minority group like the travellers, they may simply be well-spoken and well-mannered or clever or bad at sports or it may be sectarian as it often is here – it doesn’t take much to bring out the bully in another person, for bullies are at heart pathetic cowards who are so often themselves given bad example in their homes, but it takes real character and decency to bring out the defender and befriender of the person who is bullied. To be bullied is to feel horribly alone and while part of the answer lies in self-help, in refusing to accept bullying, having helpful friends who stand with you and for you makes self-help a lot easier. In a place like this where sectarianism has poisoned the past you are the hope of the future, the voices that insist it has no place in your lives.
I meet too many people whose broken-heartedness comes from drug abuse, from talent wasted, health lost, lives destroyed by drugs so insidiously introduced into their lives by so-called friends who played up the highs of drugs and deliberately overlooked the much more chilling and pervasive lows. The best way to heal those broken hearts of addicts and their broken-hearted families is to say ‘no’ to drugs and to say ‘no’ to friends who offer them. There is a very wealthy industry out there that makes its money by creating that brokenness. There is no money for them in healing and no conscience about the hurt they create and exploit. They start their evil work early – in your lives, hoping to catch you while you are naïve and inexperienced, when you are seduced by image rather than reality. They are ruthlessly clever but they can be reduced to nothing by your care of your own lives and the lives of your friends.
I meet the broken-hearted bereaved by stupidity, stupid driving, drunken brawls and all the rest - you want to heal them, their grief is too deep, but what they want more than anything is that no other families endure what they are enduring so what you do matters to them.
To become healers you have to become problem-solvers, intuitive people who scan beneath the surface of things, who look for the evidence of brokenness, who do not judge by appearances. These could be and should be times of deep gratitude for you are the first generation to have this powerful confluence of peace, prosperity and partnership. You are the first generation to have the experience of growing up in a community where all are equal. You are the best-educated and in particular you are educated at the macro level about equality and about human rights. You are also educated at the micro level about how human beings flourish where there is praise and encouragement, how they wither where there is exclusion and brokenness.
When the song asks, ‘What becomes of the brokenhearted?’, no other generation has as much insight into the answer to that question. The formidable, transcendent power of love is the world’s greatest overlooked natural resource. Used well, used every day in all sorts of small gestures of care, concern, interest in the otherness of others it can build a future to be proud of and part of.
Look around and start the healing where you can - do you have a friend who is depressed, could you help the homeless, could you give a carer a break, could you raise funds for hospice, for the poor …?
In that 1960s song it says
“I walk in shadows
Searching for light
Cold and alone
No comfort in sight,
Hoping and praying for someone to care”
It is a remarkable and wonderful thing to think you could be the answer to that prayer.
Guím rath agus séan oraibh.