Peace and Reconciliation.
Working as I do at Coventry Cathedral those words inevitably
roll off the tongue together, as if inextricably linked from birth, but that’s
really not so. 100 years ago, when the guns fell silent at last, there was peace for a time, – but very little reconciliation.
Paradoxically, that came to the fore a little over two
decades later, when a seed was sown in wartime, amid the smouldering debris of the
Coventry blitz. The morning after that night of destruction, a Church of
England priest, walking in the ruins of his beloved Cathedral chose just two
words to mark what had taken place. Those words, “Father forgive” were
important in themselves – but even more important was the word that isn’t there…..
In the apse of the ruined Cathedral, and in our Coventry litany of
reconciliation that we pray day by day the verb has no object.
We do not say “Father forgive them”. There
is no sense that some need more forgiveness than others, that the world can be
divided into “us” and “them” , goodies and baddies. Instead we face a simple truth
that we all have within us the capacity for good or for evil, and that we all
alike stand in need of forgiveness.
It’s that admission that is essential. Where any party is
convinced that they are innocent,
reconciliation is almost impossible, for it almost always involves letting go
of something – be it a grievance, or something material that prevents us from
turning to the one-time enemy, with open hands and heart.
That letting go, and that turning towards is a challenge. The whole
reconciliation journey, from fractured past to shared future, is fraught with
challenges, as we acknowledge and then seek to mend what is broken, in our
relationship with ourselves, with one another, with God. In the beginning “God
looked at all that was made and saw that it was good” – but since then we’ve
changed the landscape, so that we travel through the hostile terrain of our
wounds and misdoings, our divisions and estrangements.
Rumi,
the Sufi mystic wrote “Out
there beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet
you there.” – and that’s our destination too – a place where peace and
justice, mercy and truth can to find a balance point, to truly rest with one another.
But oh, the way is tortuous and wearying at times.
“If
thou can get but thither” says Vaughan, as if this life-time journey could be
accomplished just like that “ there grows the flower of peace”, while Jesus
offers: “My own peace I give to you”. His is a strange peace indeed, framed as
it is by a crown of thorns – but ultimately, that is the only route to
reconciliation. It is the power of unbounded, unconditional love, poured out
with reckless generosity that can enable
to believe in and practice love once again – to build what Provost Howard of
Coventry called a “kinder, more Christ-child-like world” –so that little by little we no longer need to think
in terms of “them” and “us”, for God’s reconciling love holds all secure.
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