Slow Work

I’ve been trying to get a post together for several days.  We wrapped up our time in Belfast yesterday and today we made our way to the Corrymeela community near Ballycastle.  But before we get to that let me catch you up a bit:

Sunday we attended the annual Day of Reflection on the longest day of the year.  As I said previously, this is a living memorial for all lives lost in The Troubles, a service of lament and hope.  In the service we each picked up a piece of broken pottery and then placed our piece in a mosaic Celtic knot.  We are both broken and healed together.  We can’t become broken without others and we are not healed nor whole without others.  

In the evening, we were treated to a private concert by Tommy Sands, a singer, songwriter, and storyteller who has a brilliant gift of setting the stories of pain and sorrow to music not to make us sad but to open us up to release it so that there is room for healing.  Tommy spins a good yarn.  We laughed and cried and listened and sang and learned to look for lots of small answers instead of one giant one to life’s big questions.

On the day before the Peace Agreement was signed in 1998, there were rumors that the talks were faltering.  Tommy and other musicians, along with some school children, gathered outside where the politicians were meeting and sang.  And sang.  And sang.  Until the politicians came out and sang with them.  When they went back inside they were able to come together and sign the Agreement.  Here’s a video of that day: https://youtu.be/94RgWPUCdBM?si=UHJhncEaeDbQnReH

Yesterday, we went to a place that is an intentional community space that brings people from different neighborhoods together to build and foster relationships.  To know our neighbors, even those who may live on the other side of a barrier, either real or perceived, intentional or unintentional, is how we begin to build peace.  All that we’ve learned about and talked about has seemed so large and global.  It’s felt daunting.  But it really comes down to the simple question, do we know the people who live on our street, the street behind us, the real live human beings who inhabit the same town or city that we live in?  If not, why not?  Are we afraid of them?  If so, why?  Do we not like them?  How do we know if we’ve not spent time getting to know them?  Are we too busy, too shy, too something else?  

I’m not asking these to make us all feel bad.  Our culture as a whole (pardon the huge umbrella statement) has decided knowing our neighbors isn’t important.  But if we don’t know them and someone else comes along and says we should fear/mistrust/hate them, we are much more likely to believe them.  Jesus tells us to love our neighbors and our enemies and when we learn to love our enemies, they too become our neighbors.  

After our short journey from Belfast to Corrymeela, we had time to walk and relax.  I went with some folks to the beach and we walked in the sand barefoot and stepped – briefly – into the North Sea.  It was good to be grounded in creation for a bit.  

Tomorrow we continue our work of being shaped as peace makers and conflict competent leaders in this community that has been doing that work before the start of the Troubles and continues that work even now. It is the slow, slow, slow work of relationship. It is ongoing, lifelong, life-giving work. It is how we live into God’s Kingdom-on-earth-as-in-heaven.

Keep lovin’ louder than the hate, Y’all!