LORD DELIVER US - YES, BUT WHY?

This time every year ( January 17th - January 25th) Christians pray publicly and privately for Christian Unity.

Christians have fought wars with Christians  and with others described by their Founder as "neighbours",  Christians or not. A minority of Christians have been pacifists, talking, working, suffering, dying to persuade all fellow  Christians to  abandon all  war against everyone. They have kept alive an ideal but failed miserably in fact.

Christians still ask God's help for their governments who wage war for profit and  sell arms to others to do it too, at the same time  asking God to unite us all in peace, starting with fellow Christians, as if God could do it against our will.

 

In 1988 in Belfast a citizens' writers  collective , most of whose  members  were of  Christian background,   produced this :

Little Pieces  :  An Incantation 

So we took the people all                                        

Sliced them into sections

Sacred bricks in holy wall

Severed all connections

Singled out the willing few

Safe for our elections

Stifled all the rest with new

Scripts for free injections....

So they promised people all

(Speaking each to sections )

Safe behind a holy wall

Separate resurrections....

 Nothing more  nothing less

Nothing change nothing bless

'Don't tear his cloak ' the soldiers said

So we divided Christ instead.

                                           (Published by Springhill Community House Belfast 1988)

A curious thought : Will unity among Christians come about only when Christians become  pacifist,  against war, totally dedicated to recognition of every person's dignity and right to live in peace ?

And an even more curious thought  perhaps : If Christians don't do this, do they deserve to have their prayers for peace heard ?

This question  is one of the great dividers in Christian life. Some few may favour complete pacifism - like Father Dan Berrigan who came to West Belfast in the midst of the recent war waged in Northeast Ireland in the seventies to  nineties. At the invitation of Fr Joe Mc Veigh and  local people Dan  publicly discussed this with a fellow priest , Herman Verbeek  a member of the European  Parliament. Dan said we should always take literally the Jesus saying of turning the other cheek. Herman Verbeek  argued that that was all very well but if attacked we had not only the privilege but the duty to defend our own lives and those for whom, as parents, neighbours or whatever, we had responsibility. There need be little doubt which the audience in those sad circumstance favoured.  The  important thing  was that in the midst of their trouble they had the conscience to ask people to come and talk realistically with them about it.

During the German occupation in France in the nineteen forties resistance fighters used to come down from the hills to ask advice from Church about the morality of their  armed resistance to the invasion!  That's how concerned they were about such matters, although they got little credit for it.

During the years when we were even more afraid of nuclear weapons than we are now, a prominent Catholic cleric in  London fell out with his archbishop. The Archbishop insisted that nuclear weapons were necessary  " as a deterrent". The cleric disagreed and so the Archbishop lost the services of one of the most active workers for peace in England.

So if Washington exploded two nuclear weapons  when they did not need them to win a war, what would happen when any powerful government would do even worse, having persuaded their people  they were in danger of attack ? The persuasion is on already.

Christians could have a powerful voice pushing us towards peace. There is an  honourable  place for us in this modern world even though we failed dismally in the old one. Whatever  internal arguments we have that  drive people away from us , we could unite on one issue that would enable people to believe that our prayers,  processions  and hymns are serious.

As a united  human and humane body  powerful for peace there will be no doubt about our place in this modern political world where death is used to solve problems, where war is for profit and human beings  are made to fight plenty but not to matter much.