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Remarks by President McAleese at the Annual Church Unity Day for the Clergy Kylemore Abbey

Remarks by President McAleese at the Annual Church Unity Day for the Clergy Kylemore Abbey, Connemara, Co. Galway

I am delighted to be here today on the occasion of the annual Church Unity Day for the clergy. I would like to express my warm thanks to Abbot Christopher for his introduction and, in particular, to Father Paul McDonnell for his kind invitation.

I hope my few words to you here today will not call to mind a remark made by Henry Hawkins many years ago. He described a homily he had heard as “a divine sermon. For it was like the peace of God - which passeth all understanding. And like his mercy, it seemed to endure forever.”

It is inevitable, as we progress through this year, that there will be endless discussion of the new millennium, to add to the endless discussion we have already had. For many months now we have been surrounded by hype about the millennium dome, millennium projects, millennium parties and millennium fever. The infamous millennium bug may turn out to be less a problem for computers and more for us humans as “millenniumitis” takes a hold and we crash from having to endure yet more lists of the “best” and “worst” music, literature and tragedies of the last millennium.

Amid all the hype, the very basis of the millennium – the celebration of the 2000th anniversary of Christ’s Nativity – rarely warrants a mention. Recent surveys in Britain have revealed that a significant number of respondents are not even aware that this Great Jubilee has any religious significance.

What sort of response can the Churches make in the face of such ignorance and indifference? What gesture of love can we, laity and clergy, send, that will be a true reflection of the real meaning of the millennium and will mark it out as a year of special grace?

The start of any New Year provides an opportunity at both individual and collective level to take stock, to look back on what has been achieved and to reflect on hopes, fears and ambitions for the future. The approach of a new millennium magnifies this reflective process. Looking back on a long sweep of failures as well as successes can be a disturbing and unsettling thing. In any journey, we need milestones of progress to encourage us to persevere. When these milestones seem further apart, when we appear to have gone back rather than forward, it can be difficult to find the courage to go on. It is even more difficult when the ultimate destination seems increasingly unclear. As Bishop

Donal Murray recently remarked at the Tionól 2000 Conference, Christians must prepare for the beginning of the Third Millennium “by renewing their hope in the definitive coming of the Kingdom of God, that is, by remembering the goal that makes sense of the journey”.

We need to tease out the practical implications of this message. In a world ravaged by war and hatred, where meaning seems increasingly fractured and information overload crowds out the space for dialogue and reflection, we need to pause and consider how we can contribute to the realisation of Christ’s wish, indeed his promise, for love and unity among all God’s children.

This has a special resonance for us in Ireland, where the shared history between the different Christian faiths has all to often been one of acrimony, mutual suspicion and hostility. If love, unconditional and generous is the hallmark of the Christian, we have to humbly acknowledge that this island has too often allowed the corrosive power of hatred, vanity and contemptuous rivalry to get in the way of building a civilisation hallmark by Christ.

Despite the valiant efforts of many courageous men and women of faith to heal these rifts, the Churches have not always succeeded in providing the leadership necessary to overcome the sectarian hatred that still poisons this island. We are about to enter the millennium with that toxin still eating away at hearts and minds and souls.

Why has this been the case? In a society where one or more groups feel under threat, it is natural that they turn inwards to their own community to find the meaning, dignity and assurances that they feel are denied them within the social or political framework as a whole. Where identity is determined to such a significant extent by religious allegiance, as it is in Ireland, the Churches can and do provide a safe haven of belonging and

solidarity. They have helped to build up and sustain a remarkable level of community spirit within Ireland, through the religious, social, sports and voluntary structures which form such an integral and positive side of Irish life. They have provided spiritual leadership which has given real meaning to so many people’s lives, in a world which seems increasingly devoid of meaning.

There has been a cost to this solidarity. All too often, the Churches have seemed to bleed only when their own are hurt. All too often, they have been drawn into social division, and have sometimes consolidated rather than eroded the chasm in understanding between the different sides.

Coleridge once wrote “he who begins by loving Christianity better than the truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all”. The challenge for the Churches is to distance themselves from the tribalism inherent in society, but to stay close to the people. To stay far enough above the political, cultural, religious or social maelstrom of the day to be uncorrupted by it yet not so far as to be irrelevant to the lived lives of their people. This is the tension that faces all forms of leadership because if you want the crowd to follow you, the best advice is, don’t follow the crowd.

Striking this balance requires courage. As our world becomes more fragmented, there is a temptation to look for absolute truths as a safeguard against the relativism of secular society. Faced, on the one hand, with accusations of abandoning these absolute truths which held society together on the past, and on the other, with criticism of being irrelevant to today’s world, there is a temptation for the Churches to put their head down.

As Seamus Heaney put it “whatever you say, you say nothing”.

Yet silence will not enable us to fulfil God’s wish for reconciliation to Him and to each other. True reconciliation requires us to speak out and, more importantly, to listen to others and to acknowledge their hurt. We have seen from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that listening to the truth can be painful. Yet through this pain comes the possibility of the boil being lanced, the poison being released, and the commencement of genuine healing.

This spirit of listening to others and recognising that we have much to learn from each other, may also be the foundation on which a true ecumenism can be built. There are those who say that ecumenism is dead. Perhaps, as GK Chesterton said of Christianity, “it is not that it has been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried”.

We need to examine what we want ecumenism to mean as we start the next millennium. It should not mean seeking the lowest common denominator, or washing the essence from each religion in order to achieve a uniform grey.

Reconciliation is about recognising and respecting diversity, not seeking to annihilate it.

It also means that we each must be sensitive to the effect of our words and actions on others, to pause before we act and to recognise that the intended effect of what we do and say is often very different from the actual effect on others. We must have the humility to question whether some things we hold to be self-evident and immutable, derive less from

God’s wish for the Church, and more from our own reluctance to change. Change requires us to take risks, and risks open up the possibility of failure. Nevertheless, without change, there can be no growth, only eventual atrophy. As Newman once

remarked, “to be human is to change, to be perfect is to have changed often.”

There are many in our society today who see the Churches as irrelevant, whatever changes they might put in place. If you scratch beneath the surface, however, it is clear that it is often the institutional apparatus ,built up over centuries as a man-made rather than a purely divine construct, that they dislike or are impatient with.

Yet there is a real spiritual hunger in the world, some of it reached by the churches, more of it elusively outside their reach. These years of cynicism have produced a wretched sense of foreboding that churches drained of confidence have drained Christ of his credibility. Sometimes, however, it is when things are at their bleakest and most despairing that the miracle of the fresh green shoots opens up the prospect of rebirth. Patrick Kavanagh, in his poem “From Failure Up” wrote of the hope that can spring from apparent failure:

 

“Under the flat, flat grief of defeat, maybe

Hope is a seed.

Maybe this’s what he was born for,

this hour of hopelessness.

Maybe it is here he must search

In this hell of unfaith

Where no-one has a purpose

Where the web of meaning is broken on threads

And one man looks at another in fear”

The last line of that poem says

“O God give us purpose.”

 

Which is of course what Christ came to give and not just that, but the tools to effect it - the grace, the support to break through all those barriers from self-doubt to hatred of the other and to plant seeds of love in barren places. If a profound breakthrough is to occur, however, the Churches must look outwards with generosity and humility to each other and be prepared to build the kind of bridges which we will need to sustain our society spiritually in the next millennium. Those bridges must become causeways of respect to all the great religions: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu and many more. Already there are people quietly, patiently laying the foundation of firmer causeways to come. How wonderful it was to read of the recent retreat shared by Buddhists and Christians with the Dalai Lama under the very Bodhi tree in Bodghaya where the Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment 2,500 years ago. The beautiful painting of the Nativity which the Dalai Lama had specially commissioned for the head of the Christian group was itself a sign of the awesome respect which is possible and essential between those of hugely different perspectives, faiths and cultures.

At the very core of each of the world’s great faith systems there is an acknowledgement of God’s presence in the world and his presence in the human soul. This is not to deny the kaleidoscope of differences in doctrine and form, practice and prayer that exist.

These very differences provide us with the profoundest evidence of the scale of God’s embrace of diversity. How does he want us to approach that diversity? Fearful and

contemptuous? Offering embrace or respect only on our terms? Or full of joyful curiosity, interested in each other’s perspective and history because of the new light it sheds on our own and our understanding of each other and God.

Some years back, I developed an interest in meditation as a way of enriching my own prayer life. I was greatly helped by the tapes and writings of Dom John Main. As a young lawyer in Malaya before he became a Benedictine monk, John Main had asked the Hinu Swami Satyanada to teach him to meditate.

The Swami did not ask, as many of the Christian faith would have done, “I only teach those of the Hindu faith” or “I will only teach you the Hindu way”. He accepted John Main’s Christianity, not as a problem but as a discipleship he wanted to honour and enrich. He was secure in his knowledge of God and knew that everyone who seeks God’s real presence, no matter by what route, adds to the sum total of love in a world hungering and thirsting for love.

The Swami was not betraying any sacred tradition, or contaminating his own faith. Rather he recognised in John Main a brother in God whom he could welcome in love and without fear. He recognised too, that to limit this love only to those who belong within our own religious and cultural framework, serves to impoverish, never to enrich. His embrace of Main, welcoming, trusting, uncomplicated stunned me in its integrity, its sheer rightness. Yet it ran and still runs counter to so much of the exclusivity, the preciousness, the circle-the-wagons mentality which bedevils interchurch relationships and allows even the most hope-filled dialogue to trickle into the sands. The pattern of the present world so often snares us, acts as a braking mechanism on the impulse of love, the impulse which would seek and find the divine in ourselves and in the other.

It was St Paul who told us: “Adapt yourselves no longer to the pattern of this present world, but let your minds be remade and your whole nature thus transformed”.

The new millennium offers all of us an opportunity to take up this offer, to explore the forms this transformation might take. For those that fear that the chasms between the Churches and society is too wide to be bridged, let us remember the chastening words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey - the Church is always “one generation

away from extinction”.

In Ireland we have seen, with gratitude the good which can come from even modest compromise and pursuit of partnership, the new energies which are unleashed by tiny generosities, even the most begrudged. The Peace Process is built on a philosophy of giving, of not seeking to be the sole triumphalistic winner, of pursuing consensus where possible, of accepting and accommodating difference. We have seen, in the words of Minister for Foreign Affairs David Andrews, a great empowerment. Behind the work of the politicians there was always the power of prayer, working quietly, subtly, unobtrusively but effectively, softening the hardened hearts, making spaces where none existed before. The churches and people of faith are entitled to credit for their commitment and fidelity to that difficult work over many years.

The challenge to the Churches now, is to catch the wind of that empowerment. In this week when the word Unity runs together with the word Christian, our time is running out to make the millennium the great Christian festival of joyful and joint celebration.

Let us remind ourselves once again that what we seek is unity, what we are called to is unity, not uniformity. Have we allowed ourselves to substitute uniformity instead?