REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE DURING A VISIT TO THE COLUMBANUS COMMUNITY OF RECONCILIATION
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE DURING A VISIT TO THE COLUMBANUS COMMUNITY OF RECONCILIATION BELFAST, ON FRIDAY 8 OCTOBER, 1999
I would like firstly to say how delighted I am to be joining your Community here today, and to have the opportunity to meet again with a man I know well, the founder of this Community, Fr. Michael Hurley. My thanks also to Rev. Glenn Barclay for invitation to me to come here today. I was disappointed to have missed your Annual Lecture in September, but I feel that this visit affords me a greater opportunity to hear about your work at first hand.
- I’ve just been outside hearing about your plans to develop the garden into a Columbanus Prayer Garden of Peace. And, as we approach the new Millennium, it is particularly fitting to acknowledge the vision that you yourselves have realised – a community built on true reconciliation. You have shown by example what a more united church, a more just society, and a more peaceful world could be like.
Reconciliation involves finding a new language for, and new ways of seeing, familiar situations. It is a learning curve on listening – being sensitive to the effect of our words and actions on others. It is about recognising and respecting diversity, and having the courage to change. Change requires us to take risks, and risks open up the possibility of failure. Nevertheless, without change, there can be no growth.
- 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. The real challenge for the Churches now, and indeed within ourselves, is to allow ourselves to get caught up in the wave of change sweeping this island at the moment, and to adapt ourselves to meet that challenge. Our own human ability to continually refocus and what we are doing is a quality which needs to be channelled in a positive way – not to bury the past, not to forget the hard work and commitment of those who travelled this road before us, but to reassess the means to achieve an openness of faith. Nowhere is that openness, that spirit of reconciliation more necessary than in Northern Ireland.
- There is really little to fear from meeting and listening to the other person. Are we so insecure in our own beliefs that we fear destruction if we open ourselves to scrutiny? To echo the words of Dom Bede Griffiths,
‘I do not feel that religions can go on simply following their own path separately.
We have reached a point in evolution where we have to meet. We have to share, to discover one another’.
- Let me finish by commending you on your valuable work promoting contact and co-operation between schools of different traditions, through your inter-school community relations project. Lets hope that the next generation will never know the pain that this generation has endured. By focussing on the next generation your Community has rightly judged the importance of ensuring that the seeds of reconciliation are sown at an early stage, and are given an opportunity to grow to maturity in an environment free from the bitterness of the past.