“Deliberately Diverse” represents the individual thoughts and opinions of a group of Taylor friends who almost never completely agree about anything but are gratified by the opportunity to stimulate deliberately diverse discussions in our beloved community. Today’s column represents the thoughts and opinions of The Reverend Jim Newman, PC(USA) Retired, NOT the Taylor Press.
I think of a religion as both a body of beliefs and practices based on a common understanding of “God,” and the organization of its adherents into a community of worship and outreach. Throughout history, religions have demonstrated the capacity to bring us together or to divide us into opposing tribes, depending upon whether the religion is grounded primarily in love or fear. It’s been my observation that no religion is exclusively defined by love or fear, rather that one of thesetends to predominate, and be exhibited in cooperation with, or over against, other religions existing in the same environment.
I think the smallest environments in which two or more different religions coexist are the best laboratories for observing how religions function in relation to believers, to each other and to society. My most impactful experience of religions at work in society was in Northern Ireland during the period of conflict known as “The Troubles.” That laboratory was a society of fewer than 1.5 million in a small country, in which several thousand people were murdered, and many thousands more injured and maimed, in political and sectarian violence over a period of 30 years. Each side tended to demonize the other based on totally opposite communal memories of events that had occurred hundreds of years in the past.
I spent much of 1991 traveling throughout Northern Ireland and volunteering in the Corrymeela (“Hill of Harmony”) Community, an interdenominational peace and reconciliation organization founded by Protestants and Catholics at the beginning of the Troubles in the 1960s.
Total fear and resulting hatred of “the other side” were the organizing and sustaining emotions of the majorities of the Catholic and Protestant communities and their political and paramilitary representatives. Those prevailing negative emotions overrode the desire for peace that was officially professed by clergy and lay leaders alike. I saw this exhibited in discussions and social interactions up and down the country.
In the middle stood the Corrymeela Community, whose beautiful retreat center overlooking the North Sea served as a place of refuge and healing, and whose members were missionaries for civility and cross-community friendship throughout the country. Every week, Corrymeela buses would go into Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods to pick up groups of adults, young people and families, many of whom had never had a civil encounter with someone from the other side. Some, after living together for a week, left still rooted in their attitudes. But many others began to see each other as neighbors and returned to their homes as voices for peace, working together to resolve their differences. A new political party, the Alliance Party, grew out of those relationships. In 1997, the Alliance Party helped broker the peace settlement known as “The Good Friday Accords.”
I pray that we Americans might follow this Northern Irish example and choose love over fear.
