Friends, What a privilege it has been to both visit
Northern Ireland after no less than sixty years! Yes, and Southern
Ireland after twelve years. Indeed, I will narrate the purpose of the
northern visit and I’ll leave it to Doreen to narrate the purpose of the
southern visit. They both have their own message to tell, although only
one month had elapsed between both these memorable tours.
Doreen knew of how I’d repeated so many times how, as
a mere twenty year old I’d gone across to Belfast, had come across the
young Ian Paisley, four years my senior; and of how – after so much
narrow and Puritanical style of fellowship with such Calvinistic
narrowness - I’d then swung from that extreme to the other direction.
Yes, seeking fellowship and understanding with the monks of the
Redemptorist monastery, off the Catholic Falls Road. Yes, as a young
enquiring religious enthusiast, anxious to know how the many branches of
Christianity ticked, I was looked upon by many as a spiritual vagrant
revealing lack of stability and was told by one well meaning cleric that
I was fast becoming ‘a spiritual tramp’. Well, I thought to myself then
- as I still do today! - that I would much prefer to be viewed as a
spiritual tramp than as a denominational clone or just another sectarian
pea out of the same sectarian pod.
Doreen was determined that before I got any further
into my eighties that I should see the old Belfast haunts I’d reiterated
to her so many times. What a wonderful wife! Consequently we made our
way across the sea from Holyhead to Don Lougherne, and then - by the bus
that had picked us up from outside our Holywell home - right up from the
south of Dublin all the way up to Northern Ireland, and ultimately
across to the Stormont Hotel in Belfast. Yes, directly across from the
parliament buildings.
What then followed was four days of wonder and
nostalgia. Indeed, I know of no more hospitable, clean, open and upright
folk as those of the Belfast folk; though of course there are bound to
be the exceptions.
Since those personal experiences of religious rivalry
and segregation way back within 1950 - when tensions were starting to
simmer - the 1960s were later to see them, via the media, having ‘come
to the boil’. Yes. with most viscous clashes, bloodshed and death in
several localities of that delightful city. Friendly banter in which
opposite sides referred to the other as either Mickies or Proddiedogs
was later – as we all know - substituted for less congenial terms such
as that of heretics or idolators. Yes, and I knew only too well, that a
very large percentage of this segregation had been fuelled – if not
spearheaded! - by Church leaders on both sides of what would become a
literal fence of demarcation! Well, Doreen and I were able to view - via
a tour around the great city - several such fences still in existence to
this very day. Yes, and not so deep under the surface, I sense that in
some quarters much bitterness is simmering today?
.
Nevertheless, I was anxious to view both sides of the
prevailing divide today; so on the delightful Sunday morning of our
brief trip Doreen and I visited dear Ian Paisley’s quite remarkable
church; and then – believe it or not – in the late afternoon, we made
the long journey up the Falls Road to eventually reach Clonard and its
memorable Redemptorist monastery.
Well, apart from the warmth and welcome received from
both these extremes, one was made to realise that, for the most militant
Christians in Ulster, there is little place - if any art at all - for
‘grey’! One has to be, figuratively speaking, either black or white. I
sense we would not have been approved of ‘on either side’ should we have
told either church we visited, that we felt guided by God to visit and
pray with their ‘opposition’. Indeed, how very sad all this is,
especially when past religious leaders – claiming to represent the Jesus
of the gospels - have been so terribly responsible for this appalling
sectarian divide.
Indeed, most children – who, left to themselves,
would have seen no sense in a colour bar or a sectarian divide - had
religious leaders in the 1950s instilling the perverted need of
segregation into their rival flocks. What a lot of bigots they were in
those days! Yes, and regrettably quite a lot of them are still around
today. The following lines sum them up, admirably:
We’re members of God’s ‘one true church’; all other
ones are damned.
There is no place in Heaven for them: we can’t have heaven crammed!
O my friends, if only the emphasis given by
Paisleyites had been on Christ the good shepherd laying down his life in
search of a ‘mere’ member of an ‘lesser’ species – a mere sheep that had
obstinately gone astray due to its very nature – then Belfast would have
become a Beulah rather than a bloodbath in those 1960s that were to
follow. Indeed, the same could be said of Papists of the same past
period. For example, if they had made more of the likes of a humble
Francis Of Assisi whom they never made a priest, rather than that of a
haughty and doctrinaire academic called Aquinas - or a later ‘father’ of
vivisection termed Descartes! – then more could have been said in that
denomination’s favour! Rather than, around the 1960s, being suspected of
‘possibly’ hoarding ammunition under its vaults it would have been
renowned for compassion, and an all embracing love, endearing its
protestant protagonists who, on the contrary, were led to view it with
suspicion.
I speak with honesty - and past first hand knowledge
here! - when I say that both sides of the sectarian divide in that,
otherwise, most delightful of cities holds in common. It is that both
Catholics and Calvinists uphold one basic scriptural lie in common: and
– believe me - it’s a big lie at that! It is the dogmatic assertion that
animals have no soul and, consequently, when they die then they cease to
exist and any thought of them entering heaven is viewed as heresy. Well,
what absolute human chauvinism! Their rival concepts of some exclusive
heaven - limited to the pious prigs of either Roman Popery, or of so
called ‘Reformed’ Protestantism - would be a veritable hell for any
simple soul with only a bare minimum of true Christ like compassion.
Animals lived peaceably in the first paradise and all
was great until the first human couple messed everything up. Yes, humans
made such a mess that Noah built an ark as directed by God; and God saw
to it that far more animals occupied it than humans! Yet ‘today’s
assumed ark of salvation’ - as interpreted by both these bigoted
extremes – well and truly sees to it that our brothers and sisters in
the animal kingdom are well and truly shut out! What a deadly, distorted
view of scripture these past and present prominent ‘pious’ prigs and
protagonists have perpetrated! Jesus said: “They shall be known by their
fruits”. Well, just look around and you have the answer: enough said!
I tell you this: the ordinary people are not to blame
for the past sectarianism of Northern Ireland. Such folk are amongst the
very salt of this earth. They are not to blame for walls of division and
graffiti today; nor for bombs and bloodshed of the past! However, such
cannot be said for church leadership that claims to be the moral and
spiritual mouthpiece of the nation. On the contrary, they have ‘much
blood on their hands’. Would to God that they might seek to emulate -
and disseminate - the true spirit of Jesus of Nazareth, that of Francis
Of Assisi, and in more recent times that of a St Martin de Porres, or
even an Albert Schweitzer!
A step in the right direction would most surely be
the inauguration of animal blessing services on a true ecumenical basis
throughout the past troubled parts of Ulster because nothing brings
Christians of different persuasions more closely together than do
services of animal blessing! I would be delighted to lead such a
service, though I might never be asked? Meanwhile, I’ve not only been
honoured to consecrate a sanctuary last month in Eire – which Doreen
will tell you about in this newsletter – but we’ve also been asked to
consecrate a church for animals in Poland next year. This, I know, will
again bring Christians of all persuasions together; as well as many
sceptics into its sanctuary. If church leaders only but knew it, this is
a most wonderful way in which to evangelise. Yes, by following Christ’s
final command and taking the gospel ‘to every creature’; and that
includes a blind dog such as this one rescued by a wonderful ‘Pro
Animale’ greyhound sanctuary which I dedicated, on opening, in 1998
.
Animal Padre's
