ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE FOR THE ANNUAL CHAPLAINCY LECTURE UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER AT COLERAINE
‘FORGIVENESS AND EMBRACING THE ROAD TO DISMANTLING A CULTURE OF CONFLICT’
I am delighted and honoured to have been asked to join you to deliver this annual chaplaincy lecture. I would like to especially thank Sr. Mary Elizabeth Kirke for her very warm and welcome invitation on behalf of all of the chaplains here.
The joint nature of that invitation says a lot about this university. Universities are sometimes scathingly accused of being ivory towers, remote from the world around them. And yes, it is possible to be too remote but it is also possible to be too close. Finding the balance calls for courage and here you have found the courage.
In a prevailing culture of conflict where spontaneous human relations are always vulnerable to being skewed or stillborn because of old learnt hatreds, old taught contempts, a university may have to fight hard to be local and global.
Universities are special places; people of very different backgrounds, perspectives and interests gather to teach and to learn, to research, to unlearn to teach and learn all over again. In the world of research and scholarship yesterday’s orthodoxy becomes tomorrow’s heresy, today’s certainty tomorrow’s embarrassing mistake. In any university diversity is not just a nice and decent thing, it is a life-blood, a resource, an energy. Homogeneity is the cancerous cell which kills the universality of a university. A university should never be a comfortable place intellectually but it must never be an uncomfortable place personally. It is the energetic and healthy debate between differing ideas, cultures and attitudes which sparks off creativity, enables lazy assumptions and preconceptions to be questioned, challenges people to think anew and finds fresh pathways to discovery.
That culture of creativity, the hallmark of a good university needs the oxygen of an atmosphere of trust and respect, space for people to freely express their views knowing that they may be challenged but not abused, questioned but not shouted down. It is a tribute to this university that it has achieved that balance, risen above the prevailing culture where closed minds and hearts nurtured mutual contempt, hostility and woeful ignorance.
But Universities are also very human places. Here people live lives, meet each other, weigh each other up, befriend or make enemies of each other, work collegially, work in teams. They bring into those places and spaces the concerns and preoccupations of the prevailing culture and here in this place, this space they struggle to work things out - for this place is not a comfortable place for those who carry bigoted or jaundiced views of the other- here the other is present, his/her ears are open, his/her eyes can see the coldness, intuit the hostile body language, here there is no hiding place. Places like this expose us all, make us vulnerable for there are few in this place who can say they carry no baggage that they are not carriers of the toxic virus which contaminates human relationships and compromises human decency whether that toxin is sectarian, sexist, racist, elitist or whatever pernicious form it takes.
None of us needs any more lessons in the damage these toxins cause. This century is liberally laced with more lessons than all the rest of human history put together. Hatred when it runs wild has a destructive potential which is bottomless. It keeps on creating and recreating itself until a voice, an urgent and crazy voice says once again and over and over again - I refuse to hate though I may be hated. I will love, I will forgive whatever the cost, whatever the hurt, because someone must break the cycle of despair, the circle of mistrust - someone must reach out the hand which will build the bridge to that other hurting and hurt human being.
The theme I have chosen for today is ‘Forgiveness and Embracing the Road to Dismantling a Culture of Conflict’. There is no doubt that universities have a role to play in this, in inspiring our young people to make sure that the future is not simply a tired replica of the past, in helping to strip away the prejudices, preconceptions and skewed worldviews that have locked us up for so long in a deadly and dysfunctional stalemate. But we need to go back far beyond those university years, in fact back to the cradle if we are to achieve real change.
It was both terrifying and chastening to read in the papers recently that children as young as two are aware of categories such as Catholic, Protestant, RUC and IRA. The research carried out by Dr Paul Connolly from the University of Ulster, also found that by the age of three, children may develop negative attitudes to such categories, and learn by the age of five to react negatively towards figures such as Catholic Priests and Protestant Ministers. To anyone who has been a parent of young children, that capacity to absorb labels and perceptions has a frightening ring of truth about it. Children are sponges who absorb from their parents not only the rudiments of language, but the sentiments behind it – the passions, nuances, attitudes, prejudices and hostilities. Mammy and Daddy are the centre of their small world, the infallible source of all knowledge, their guide as to who they are, where they fit into the world around them, how to make sense of that world. They want to be just like their parents, to earn their approval - and how quickly they learn to repeat the phrases, labels, attitudes which will earn them an indulgent smile, a pat on the head.
They say that what is learnt in childhood is engraved on stone. Dr Connolly’s research confirms just how early that engraving begins, and how deeply it goes, forming a screen through which all subsequent experiences are channelled and interpreted, accepted or rejected, found to be the self-evident truth or a tissue of malicious lies.
If we want to dismantle this culture of conflict, it is there in the cradle that we must begin. We often say that the hope for the future lies in the hands of the young, sometimes assuming, that those pristine new minds which enter this world uncontaminated by hatred, prejudice, suspicion and fear, remain in that same virginal state until the age of 18. By that age, most if not all of the engraving will have been done. So if we want the young to be the instigators of change, the ones who have the courage to forgive, to break free of the complacent assumptions and hate-filled certainties of the past, we must teach them to do so. It will not happen by accident or divine intervention. We have to be the hands, the mouths, the eyes and ears of that work.
Teaching is traditionally about telling people what to learn and how to learn. But it can also be about teaching people how to unlearn – to unlearn the perception that one identity, and one only, has a monopoly on the truth. To unlearn that there is only one version of history, only one set of victims, only one set of heroes, only one side that knows the agony of loss. And perhaps that intellectual ‘spring cleaning’ will clear enough space to learn a few things. To acknowledge that we are all, to some extent imprisoned in certain perceptions, knowledge and beliefs which are long past their sell-by date. To discover that it is possible to step outside some of those assumptions without betraying our own side. To accept that unless we are prepared to listen with truly open hearts and minds to the other, even and especially to those whom we have been taught to oppose and fear, we will never really hear them, never really comprehend their hurt, never really understand how they see ours. Until we give our children the confidence and the skills to escape the mental, emotional and spiritual straitjackets they have inherited, we cannot hope to build a culture of forgiveness, to dismantle that culture of conflict.
We stand now on the brink of the 21st century, a celebration of the birth of the Child of Bethlehem who came to change the world, to transform it, to teach us to learn new ways and unlearn the old. Never before has a generation had so much going for it, so many opportunities, such capacity to bring about change, to ditch the baggage of the past and make this new Millennium one we can be proud of – one which is an apt celebration of the birth of Christ.
That will not happen if we stay in our bunkers, each carefully counting up the number of concessions we have made, the number of times we have forgiven, and triumphantly announce it’s the other side’s turn. It will not happen if ‘forgiveness’ is a mantra we repeat but which does not penetrate our souls. It will only happen if we genuinely allow the spirit of Christ’s forgiveness, which knows no limits and keeps no count, to heal the anger and pain within us and to acknowledge that same anger and pain resides in the hearts of others.
This coming Millennium is an invitation not to let the sun go down on our anger, to allow the dawn of this new century to be a time when our efforts are focused on building hope for the future.
It is not only a culture of conflict we need to dismantle, but a culture of included and excluded, of those in the centre and those who are forever spectators on the margins, stranded in their own misery and hopelessness. As we struggle each of us to make our little contribution to this emerging culture of consensus, the vision which drives us should be the creation where every human being counts and believes that he or she counts.
We stand on the brink of the 21st century, a century full of possibility, which has as yet no shape, no story yet written. It is this generation that will write some of that script, craft the values which shape it, decide the priorities on which resources and energy are spent, collectively and individually. It is this generation too, which will decide whether the old barriers of sectarianism will be replaced only by new forms of exclusion, new categories of defining those who are not ‘one of us’. Or whether this new century can genuinely be a break with the past, a time when the twin demons of hatred and poverty are finally put to rest. Other generations have had such dreams but no other has had the means of realising them. We have the tools. Now do we have the will?
John Hewitt in his poem ‘Winter Day’ says of Ireland
‘The past persists in every knuckle and sinew…../ the future can find no crevice to enter by….’
We have come a long journey since he wrote those despairing words. Now we know the crevice is in each human heart. We each have the key to our own. It is mercy, pity, forgiveness which melt our hearts of stone and give us new hearts fit for a new century, a new society.