What is our legacy to be?

November 2023

Following a three month exploration of Turkey and the Western Balkans, moving between places where I was hearing the call to prayer five times a day, to places where the call to prayer was interspersed with church bells, then to places where there were only church bells on Sundays, my abiding impression will be of how we humans, even in our seeking to be 'good', create difference and division whenever we encounter people who are different.  Understandably, at our most primitive level we are neurologically programmed to  differentiate 'others' as potential competitors, rivals or dangerous enemies.  But our human evolutionary advantage is that we can also connect, collaborate and co-create with fellow humans.  We are creative, driven to learn and grow and we live longer, happier lives when we are in wholesome, connected community with others.  The excavation of Gobeklitepe in South Eastern Turkey. a 12,000 year old pre-pottery Neolithic site, is challenging long-held theories about when organised religion started to feature in human evolution.  It is now being posited that while humans were still hunting and gathering, even before establishing settled, agricultural communities, he/she/they created a meeting place at Gobeklitepe, possibly for worship, and decorated tall stone pillars, hauled from far away places, with carvings of birds, boars, scorpions and reptiles.  That will have required huge feats of communication, co-operation, leadership, resilience, and a sense of a big, longer term purpose held between a lot of random hunter gatherers, who decided that their commonality was bigger than their differences.  I'm curious. How did they organise themselves, decide who was in charge, choose which carvings got on the pillars ?   Did they even have the language to disagree? 

Gobeklitepe's elegant circular spaces and carved megaliths declare that long before those early humans migrated from the 'fertile crescent', settling and domesticating and putting up fences and boundaries and borders and fighting each other to maintain them,  they shared a higher purpose. Could we somehow, with all our cleverness, find our way to that place of shared humanity, that allows us to hold all our differences while we work together for a higher purpose? 

Ready for Christmas?

2nd December 2021

Today I walked 7.5 miles from the centre of Belfast up and down the Falls Road and then through the peace wall and up one side and down the other side of the Shankill Road, back into town. It was a sort of pilgrimage. I passed churches and graveyards, murals, memorials, womens’ centres, community centres, job and benefits centres, leisure centres, shopping centres, front doors with Christmas wreaths, children at bus stops in school uniforms, mothers pushing buggies, middle aged men smoking and betting and butchers advertising Christmas turkeys. So what? It was the Christmas turkeys that got me thinking. About all the families who will hopefully, Covid allowing, sit down around a turkey dinner to celebrate the birth of Jesus, on opposite sides of the ‘peace walls’ and ‘interface’ derelict wastelands that divide them. I was walking off my lunch with Fr Martin Magill and Rev Tracey McRoberts whose shared vision of working together for the benefit all of the people of ‘the Falls and the Shankill’ is inspirational. They were out talking to their communities during the riots on Lanark Way earlier this year, modelling to young people in particular what ‘church’ could be – a place for dialogue, a safe place for people who need support and a listening ear, encouragement and healing from trauma.  But in a society where there is endemic inequality, social injustice, low trust and animosity between communities, does church also have a role to play in challenging the status quo, as Jesus did?