Remarks by President McAleese at the Third Annual Charismatic Renewal Leaders’ Conference
Remarks by President McAleese at the Third Annual Charismatic Renewal Leaders’ Conference Emmaus Retreat Centre
I am delighted and honoured to have been asked to join you here today for the third annual Charismatic Renewal Leaders’ Conference. I would like to particularly express my thanks to Reverend Cecil Kerr for his kind invitation to speak to you on the subject of social responsibility in the Church.
If I were to pick one person who provides a model for all of us in demonstrating what that social responsibility should mean, it would undoubtedly be Cecil himself. Back in the 1970s when ecumenism was neither popular nor profitable, as the saying goes, he set up the Christian Renewal Centre in Rostrevor. Cecil has proved to be an invaluable friend over the years. Indeed, he is the reason my family and I moved to Rostrevor, not least because he spotted a house there for us!
I first met him on my very first day in Queen’s University, where he was the Church of Ireland Chaplain. He had placed an open invitation to the chaplaincy for tea on the notice board, and I went along. It was the first time I had attended a Church of Ireland tea never mind a service. It was through this simple act by Cecil, a call to sharing and to hospitality, that he changed my perspectives on life in a very real way. There are countless others who have had the same experience.
Let no-one say, therefore, that prayer cannot have a very real social effect. Now that we have the beginnings of peace, if sometimes an uneasy peace, in Northern Ireland, it is easy to forget how difficult it was back in the 1970’s to stretch out a hand of friendship across the barriers of sectarianism and suspicion. Those who took that risk, those who dared to recognise that we all pray to the same God, those who dared to listen to the other side, sometimes attracted the suspicion and hatred of their own. For when dialogue starts to take place against the background of dissent, group identities become less rigid. This is deeply uncomfortable for many people. It leads to the dreadful suspicion that not all of “the other side” are demons, and perhaps that our own side does not have a monopoly on the truth. The courage of that first step in reconciliation challenges those on the other side of the barrier to re-think their preconceptions, and a few brave souls invariably accept the hand of friendship.
Politicians have been given credit for creating the conditions under which peace can be given a chance, and rightly so. Let us not forget however, that it was the courage of people such as Cecil, and of all those involved in the Christian Renewal Centre, that helped to slowly and painfully till the soil on which that peace could be sown.
It is a lesson that applies universally, across creeds and cultures. On his return from Iraq last year, the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, was asked how he had managed to forge agreement with Iraqi Government that averted, at least for a time, further threats to life in the area. He replied “Never underestimate the power of prayer”. I spoke to him some time later and I know that he meant it. Archbishop Desmond Tutu made the same point in Dublin late last year when he acknowledged the role of prayer of the South African Peace Process. The prayers as he said did not go into the ether. Instead they lodged in the hardened hearts and did the slow slow work of softening.
So to Cecil, and to all of you who have had the courage to struggle on in the conviction that nothing is impossible through prayer, I want to pay the warmest tribute. There can be no finer example of how prayer does not have to be something which happens in isolation, divorced from the society in which we live. It shows that the place of Church is in the wounded places in our society, and it has both a right and a responsibility to provide courageous leadership in spreading the gospel message, the commandment – to love one another – as God our creator loves us.
This conference offers us an opportunity to reflect on the role of the Church and its position in a world that is undergoing constant change. We witness, on a daily basis, the increasing fragmentation of society. We see profound and growing cynicism at those values which bound together our society in the past, including the values of the Christian Gospel and the Church. The increasing prosperity of our society, far from supporting greater equality, has led to an increasing gap between rich and poor, the included and the outcasts. Unemployment remains a scourge within many of our most disadvantaged communities. In Northern Ireland, despite the very real beginnings of co-operation that have emerged from the Good Friday Agreement, there remains a frightening level of polarisation and sectarianism on all sides.
We have a choice as to how we, as Christians, react to such problems. To a small but growing element in our society, the Christian Churches are associated, at best, with being out-of-date, archaic and irrelevant; at worst, with sectarianism and intolerance. This type of labelling is clearly over-simplistic. It is a way of silencing diversity. It can pose the danger that those within the Church feel obliged to remain silent, for fear that sticking their head above the parapet will lead to ridicule or abuse. This can lead to a type of siege mentality, which would only serve to confirm the irrelevance with which the Church is charged.
This, to my mind, is not an option. All of us, who profess to be Christians, have a responsibility to live our lives through that faith. This means we cannot hide it away or allow it to become subverted by political ambitions. If it is to have any meaning of real integrity, we must build our lives around it, make it the core of our vision, as Cecil Kerr has done.
Many of you will be familiar with these words of Edmund Burke “It is necessary only for good men to do nothing, for evil to thrive”. Christianity is a message of love. It is also a call to action. For love cannot just be measured in words, but in the extent to which we reach out to other people, in their poverty, loneliness or despair. These do not have to be great acts that grab headlines. As President, I have been privileged to witness over and over again, how the Gospel is being lived every day by ordinary people whose lives are quietly redeeming the bad that is happening around them. I have seen countless voluntary and community groups around this island, North and South, reach out to others in their community. I have met hundreds of people who have given of their time and energy and love to help the embittered, the sick and the lonely. They are the ones who give us hope and demonstrate by their actions that the Gospel is being lived every day in the world around us.
In considering the social responsibilities of the Church, we must therefore ensure that our values are lived, not put away in an ivory tower to be admired from afar. This is one key response to those who feel either that the Church is irrelevant in our society, or something which can be neatly confined to Sunday worship.
We must also, however, recognise that we need to constantly review and critique these values we call Christian, to acknowledge that Christians have no monopoly on them, that they live in the hearts of many others of all denominations and none. We acknowledge how so often the label Christian has been abused. We are all aware of how within Northern Ireland over the last thirty years, people have become trapped in blinkered attitudes and blind convictions – and have sought justification for their stance and bigotry in the Gospels. As Shakespeare put it “the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose”. The criticism levelled at the Church for past actions – or failure to act – is not totally without justification. For some things were done in the past, in the name of Christianity, or of a particular Church, that were very far removed from the teachings of Christ.
Yet the deepest reality is that God has no favourite – but loves each equally – he is the great creator of diversity, the very source of difference. I have previously written about that extract from St.John’s Gospel “I know my own and my own know me”. The sense of inclusiveness in belonging to a particular grouping, be it religious or cultural, provides a bulwark against the uncertainty of today’s world. However, it carries with it the danger that the inclusiveness of group members also represents the exclusion of those outside it. It can lead to a suppression of diversity through the certainty that “we alone” have access to the truth, that we have “God on our side”.
The fact that others do not share our beliefs, traditions or values does not necessarily make them wrong. Yes, it makes them different. Embracing the world in all its diversity, in wonder, awe and joy at the way diversity is the essence of the message Christ came to bring to the world.
In considering, therefore, what the social responsibility of the Church should be in today’s world, it is clear that there are no simple answers. We have a responsibility to practice as well as preach the values of the Gospel, through how we live our lives and interact with others. We must also have the humility to constantly re-assess our actions and beliefs against the standards that are the basis of our Christianity – to ensure that it is the message of Christ, not an edited version customised to suit our own class, creed, or culture, that we are upholding.
Through all of this, weaving it together, is the thread of prayer. If we are secure in our knowledge of God and of God's real presence, other beliefs, religious or secular, do not pose a threat. This is the ethos that has sustained and enriched people like Cecil Kerr and all those he has gathered around him in the Christian Renewal Centre. It is a message we can all bring confidently into the world around us, in the knowledge that all things are possible through prayer – even and especially the impossible.
Thank you.