Belfast, Northern Ireland
"You have to understand that African terrorism is different from Middle East terrorism, and the terrorism the United States is fighting is different again from the terrorism in Northern Ireland," Steven told me. He is an attendant at a Protestant-based coffee shop for spiritual searchers in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It's a modest place amid small shops on a treelined street. It was early morning, and I'd been out enjoying the new Belfast—the one so unlike the besieged Belfast I had visited in the 1970s.
Steven acknowledged that things were better, but reminded me that there still were deep issues that needed to be resolved. The good news is that people are working steadily at resolving them, and in the meantime the army has left the streets, the intense police presence is reduced, and Belfast is full of life.
Roots of the conflict
When I first visited the city in the 1970s, "the Troubles," as they are euphemistically called, were in full force. I had come there for a specific purpose: a friend who hosted a religiously oriented television program asked me to find out what the true story was in Northern Ireland and to come back and tell his viewers about it. He knew I would be doing research in the Republic of Ireland, the country next door, and thought I could just head north for a quick visit.
Although I agreed to help him, the newspaper coverage in the United States gave me pause. It had regular reports about the violence and chaos, and the bombings, which seemed to happen daily—sometimes more than one in a day. I was hesitant to enter what appeared to be a civil war.
That hesitation dragged on, even after I'd crossed the Atlantic and was ensconced in my little flat in the Republic. As the time for my return to the United States drew near, I knew I had to do something or else come up with a good excuse. So I prayed to know what to do. The answer came as a mental image of my own thinking on the subject. It was a vision of the kingdom of heaven that included everything but Northern Ireland. In other words, I had been mistakenly thinking that God controlled every other part of the planet and was doing good all over—except in Northern Ireland. In the North, so this mental image went, chaos and war were in charge. Obviously some rethinking was needed. And I began to do that.
To those looking at the problem from the outside, it seems like "the Troubles" are about Catholics and Protestants trying to kill each other. While the conflict has a religious element that goes back to the 1600s, the overall issue was and is more about civil rights than religion. Based on a heady mixture of politics and hatred, power structures evolved so that people were judged and ghettoed by religion, just as people in some countries have been judged and ghettoed by their race. So in some ways, "the Troubles," are about religious discrimination that has led to institutionalized poverty and lack of opportunity.
To put it in simplistic terms, both sets of extremists—Catholic and Protestant—tend to be economically deprived, but political power resided with the Protestant majority. Protestants have tended to favor continued union with the predominantly Protestant United Kingdom, and so are called Loyalists, or Unionists. Catholics have tended to favor uniting Ulster, as Northern Ireland is sometimes called, with the Catholic-dominated Republic of Ireland. This has given them the name of Nationalists. Both sides have reacted, often violently, when the opposite side seemed to gain some advantage.
This tit-for-tat violence and the linkage with past animosity has often made the problem seem too tangled to solve. Mary Baker Eddy described the insidious influence of hatred well when she wrote: "Hate no one; for hatred is a plague-spot that spreads its virus and kills at last. If indulged, it masters us; brings suffering upon suffering to its possessor, throughout time and beyond the grave." Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896. p. 12. If she had been following news reports from Belfast then—and from some areas of the world today—she couldn't have written a more powerful response.
And the beauty of her response is that a true refusal to hate is always grounded in love, in a positive effort toward good. Over and over again, especially in Science and Health, she makes clear that divine Love is everyone's true source of life and peace. And nobody can be separated from it. That was a pivotal concept for me as I was looking at the mental image of Northern Ireland out there by itself, without God. If God is infinite, I reasoned, then He can't be absent from Northern Ireland, any more than He can be absent here in the Republic of Ireland, where I am presently living.
And when I got to Northern Ireland and was greeted by the Christian Scientists and others who were willing to talk to me about the North and show me things so I could report back to my friend's television audience, I found out that divine Love was alive and well—and also present in Northern Ireland, big time.
Prayer in the city
If you ask residents of Belfast today if anything united them during the height of "the Troubles," a good number will say "prayer.' Protestants of all stripes prayed. Jews prayed. And Catholics prayed. That doesn't mean that all people prayed or that there were no times of discouragement. Nor does it mean that all the people praying were necessarily filled with love. The key thing is that the people who prayed, kept praying, and they refused to give in to terror.
I asked my hosts how they dealth with conditions on a daily basis. First, they told me something practical: if there's an object on the road. even a small one, always avoid it, because it could be a bomb. Ditto for touching unattended packages. But instead of cowering in their homes, these people went out and did what they needed to do. They said that after a while, if they were downtown and a bomb went off, they would find themselves thinking, "Oh, it's just another bomb." They felt guilty about that because they didn't want to ignore evil. The fact was that generally people couldn't truly ignore the evil, and they didn't.
At the same time, there were people in Belfast in the 1970s who were looking beyond the chaos to a time when the country would be at peace. Some of them were city planners designing the beautiful waterfront developments that are now a part of the city. Some were people who refused to hate despite the loss of loved ones to the terrorists—no matter which side the terror came from.
Máiread Corrigan Maguire and Betty Williams were aroused to protest the war when two of Máiread's nephews and one of her nieces were killed by an out-of-control car driven by a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who had been shot by a British Army patrol. They founded the Community of Peace People and shared the 1976 Nobel Prize for work toward peace in Northern Ireland. Twenty-two years later, in 1998, John Hume, a Catholic politician, and David Trimble, a Protestant, both members of the Northern Ireland government, would receive the prize for their work in the same cause. All of these people were being influenced in some way by love—whether it was love for their families or love for their country. And directly or indirectly, such love reflected hope that there could be a solution.
Murals in a beautiful city
If you walk the streets of Belfast, you will see wonderful Victorian architecture, active and varied businesses, Internet cafes, nightclubs, and restaurants of seemingly endless variety, parks, busy streets, a feeling of industry. And you will also find the signs of a war that, though quiescent, isn't over just yet. Murals in various areas of the city carve out political positions in the conflict. The images on at least some of them warn the viewer that here are people who still need to be won over to peace. This animosity lives on in pockets of the city and in some other places. Go along the Protestant section around Sandy Row in Belfast and you'll see an image like the one above.
It's meant to be intimidating, and I must admit that I felt intimidated by it and by some of the other images on the walls in Sandy Row. The tension was palpable in this hot spot. At the moment, besides their fears of growing political power for Catholics, the community is dealing with an influx of people from other racial and ethnic groups. It isn't an easy time.
The motto under the message in the photo, "Quis separabit?" means "Who shall separate us?" It encapsulates the feeling of insularity, of people facing an outside world on the defensive. In some ways, it has its Catholic counterpart in the name of the IRA's political wing, "Sinn Fein," which means "ourselves alone."
Yet people in this city and country are learning that separation will not work. Peace began to come when people were willing to work together, to give up past hatreds (however well justified they may be by history), to be willing to genuinely listen to what others had to say, to work for peace instead of indulging hate.
Taking the path of hope
Like churches in other parts of the world, the ones in Belfast weren't always quick to see what role they could play in winning peace. For those who weren't directly affected by the economic and social conditions, there may even have been a reluctance to get involved. Nevertheless, church congregations—Baptist, Methodist, Church of Ireland, Christian Science, Roman Catholic, to mention just a few—have been a part of the journey out of darkness. At first, the separateness within their denominations exacerbated the problem. But while there were—and still are—ministers who preached hatred, sometimes in clever, almost racist terms, there were—and still are—others who preached peace and meant it. And there were the people who prayed—and kept praying even in the darkest hours.
Such prayer bore fruit in interesting ways. The hotel I stayed in this time has the reputation for being the most bombed hotel in the world, having been bombed at least 37 times. Sometimes these were major explosions, but over the whole period, only two or three people were slightly injured and no one was killed. Once, the front office manager noticed a truck that looked suspicious in front of the hotel. Acting on an intution, she decided to clear the building. Fifteen minutes later—after they'd finished getting everyone out—the truck exploded. Although there was a huge hole in the side of the hotel, everyone was back to work by lunchtime. Quoted in Clive Scoular, In the Headlines: The Story of the Belfast Europa Hotel (Belfast: Appletree Press Ltd., 2003), p. 37 .
Renewal and reconciliation
Sometimes it was an individual, sometimes a group of people such as spiritual communities that became centers for reconciliation. The Corrymeela Community, the Christian Renewal Centre, and the Columbanus Community for Reconciliation, which is in Belfast itself, opened up doors of hope to people suffering under the crisis. These and other organizations helped to turn hatred toward trust, and eventually love. Ronald A. Wells presents a wonderful example of this in his book, People behind the Peace. At the Corrymeela Community, which was founded by a Protestant clergyman, members found themselves helping mostly Catholic refugees, driven out of their homes by the violence. He wrote: "One little girl confided to a Corrymeela member,'My mummy knows what is wrong with this country. It's them Protestants.' The member said that she herself was a Protestant. The girl responded, 'But ah, you are not a Protestant when you are at Corrymeela.' When this kind of unconditional love is given and received, words are often intrusions and the labels 'Protestant' and 'Catholic' irrelevant.'" Ronald A. Wells, People Behind the Peace: Community and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), p. 76 .
These types of contacts were leavening thought. And there were also contacts between politicians and the terrorists through various back channels. A growing cooperation between the prime ministers of the United Kingdom, which includes Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland, did much to forward progress.
Gradually, the pieces began to come together and people on opposing sides were willing to meet and come up with a plan. This plan, now called the Good Friday Agreement, was mediated by former United States Senator George Mitchell, of Maine. The gathering marked a subtle shift, a growing conviction that killing was not the way to solve the problems. That hating each other could not lead to ultimate answers. So all sides came to the table and stayed there until an agreement was thrashed out. The symbolism of the name—heralding the day when Jesus gave his all on behalf of humanity—is well worth considering.
Recognition was growing that individuals—no matter what their religion—deserved to live in peace.
In some ways, the growing recognition that individuals—no matter what their religion—deserved to live in peace must have been developing. Because when the peace process seemed to get stuck, disastrous events helped to move it forward, instead of stopping it. A bombing in Omagh in August 1998 killed 29 people and injured 300—the highest individual toll of the conflict, which had already killed thousands of people. The shock and outrage it precipitated was a stimulus to get opposing parties back to the conference table. Though some progress was made, problems continued to fester.
Then came the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. They were a major reality check for the IRA, which over the years had received weapons and explosives from Libya, and which had been intransigent in its unwillingness to decommission its weapons. Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein—the political wing of the IRA—was blunt: "When viewed in the awful context of other conflicts, or in the enormity of human suffering in New York and Washington, it is true to say that great progress has been made here [in Northern Ireland]. Is this to be squandered?" Quoted in Peter Taylor, Brits: The War Against the IRA (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2002), p. 390 .
Neither side wanted to be seen as standing in the way of peace, especially in light of the intensified efforts to eliminate terrorism in the world. During this period of intense negotiation, which had dragged on for a couple of years before September 11, educational, social, and religious organizations continued to build bridges between ordinary people of different religions.
One of them was NICHS (Northern Ireland Children's Holiday Scheme). For over 25 years it provided activities for literally thousands of young people, aged 9–21. It strove to build trust and cooperation, showing people how to deal with conflict in ways other than by war.
One outcome of this work was a mural of great symbolism—far greater than anything I'd seen in the Protestant Sandy Row or the Catholic Falls Road area.
The mural, at Durham Street and Grosvenor Road, definitely depicts Belfast, because the giant cranes from the Harland and Wolff shipyard (marked H&W as they are in real life) appear at the top of the mural. To the far right, people of varying colors are walking with what seem like ropes attached to them. Each one is carrying a candle. As the procession goes on, the ropes fall away, and they move closer together, walking toward a sunrise. Their little flames of light are bright. Is it possible that the ropes depict the entanglements of the past, of hatred and confusion?
In the background, the dark blue of the River Lagan, which runs alongside Belfast, takes on an arklike appearance, seeming to gather the city together in safety. For me, it echoes this part of Mrs. Eddy's definition of ark in Science and Health: "God and man coexistent and eternal; Science showing that the spiritual realities of all things are created by Him and exist forever. The ark indicates temptation overcome and followed by exaltation."Science and Health, p. 581.
Belfast may not be ready for exaltation just yet, but it is certainly filled with hope.
Hope in the city
The violence isn't over. Even as I've been writing this, there has been another bomb blast. Old scores are still being settled. There are also intransigent parties who refuse to make a solid commitment to peace. When you think about the number of bombs exploded at the height of "the Troubles," however, its clear that Belfast has come far in its journey toward peace.
In the long-term conflicts that are going on in the world right now—the Mididle East, the struggle between India and Pakistan, violence in the Sudan, the fate of East Timor—perhaps Belfast, small as it is, provides a model and a vision. It says that if people are willing to abandon prejudices at least enough to sit down together and truly work on a solution—and courageous enough to stand by it when they get back to their constituencies—peace is possible. But more important, perhaps, it says that if people are willing to join together in prayer—to genuinely do this and then to keep doing it— answers can and will be found. Candles of hope, instead of fires of destruction, will be lighted, and they will lead everyone to a safer, better place.
