The conflict about the Orange Order's march along the Garvaghy Road last year led to a series of obscenities, which faltered only when three young brothers were burned to death. It was a vicious twist to the ideas of blood and brotherhood long commended by the order. Ordinary, decent members of the order were shocked.
The wounds went deep, too, within the Church of Ireland, whose tiny parish church was at the eye of the storm. Everything its members believed had been inverted. Instead of tolerance, there was hatred. Instead of peace, there was unrelenting trouble. Instead of prayerfulness, there were words and deeds whose spiritual signature wrote more of hell than it did of heaven.
Days after the protests at Drumcree, a group of worried people came together to write to the Church of Ireland Primate, Dr Robin Eames. They were "deeply disturbed" and they wanted change. Their concern was all the greater because the issue had already been raised at the 1998 general synod, to little effect.
Dr Eames's subsequent letter to the Orange Order appealing to their Christian consciences had not even won the courtesy of a reply. In the end, it took the intervention of the Rev Willie Bingham, a Presbyterian, to name the actions around the church for what they were: wrong.
"We believe the issues are of such importance that they must not be left until the next meeting of the synod in 1999," the informal but fairly representative group wrote. Yet later this month, that is precisely what will happen. Top of the agenda at this year's synod is the question of what to do about Drumcree.
The question bothers other people, too. But it has a special resonance for the Church of Ireland. The church has learned throughout this century to keep its head down, to stay on board by the simple expedient of never rocking the boat of either state. Its principal survival strategy is to be polite; so polite, for so long, that in every area of the public domain it has been insulated from the kind of public scrutiny and criticism levelled at the Roman Catholic Church.
The politeness had its own rationale. At London's prestigious Frith Street Gallery last year, Daphne Wright visualised the role of the Irish Protestant as akin to cultural autism. She made landscapes out of cold, impenetrable tinfoil that were completely self-absorbent; this in reflection of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the South the Church of Ireland suffered a massive identity crisis for much of the century. Roy Foster noted the effect on the "non-demotic" Church of Ireland community of being "marginal men and women" within a national narrative in the South which equated being Catholic and being Irish. That has changed.
The Church in the North went through its own dark days, to a point where some members wonder whether it is now letting extremists make the running about what it means to belong to the Anglican communion. It has had to be in two minds, without engaging in double-think.
The call "for God and country", which is so much a part of its theology, meant very different things depending on how you said it, as Risteard Giltrap explores in part in An Ghaeilge in Eaglais na hEireann, a study of how the elements within the Church of Ireland tried to come to terms with aspects of its Irishness. The same observations are made in studies of its relationship with Britishness.
There is, however, a fine line between two-mindedness and double-think, just as there is between politeness and vacillation. Because the contemporary Church of Ireland finds it so difficult to draw that line, it risks being torn asunder by the strength of its own good manners. The split that Dr Eames so fears may happen directly as a consequence: the cost of keeping everyone in the Orange Order on side may be the loss of even more members of the laity outside.
The informal group had wanted to give the bishops a new authority, so that that they could act to distance the parish church from any unlawful activity. They believed that bishops should be more empowered and more accountable; that they should request officers and members of the Orange Order not to attend church services if there was convincing evidence that the parade would lead to civil disturbance with a likelihood of injury, death and damage to property.
New church laws should, they argued, empower bishops to move, postpone or cancel the service. Finally, bishops who failed to take such action where violence erupted subsequently should be obliged to explain why they had not, to the Church of Ireland standing committee and, in turn, to the synod.
But in striving to balance the many submissions it received after the group's letter to Dr Eames, the special sub-committee may once again be failing to find the line. A watered-down version will hit the desks of the synod members in the form of new resolutions designed to urge, rather than to oblige. The resolutions it proposes rely on appeals to individual conscience, and are understandably reluctant to give any bishop an authority which may seem counter to the church's founding ethos.
Some are clever - a pledge of good behaviour required from all who frequent the parish church makes sound psychological sense. However, the same pledge may be impossible to sign for members of the Orange Order to whom their founding oath comes first.
When Dr Eames wrote last year of the challenge Drumcree presented, his words caught the spirit of Protestantism he has worked so hard to maintain over the years: "How do we balance the freedom of attendance by anyone at a church service with influence over their behaviour once the service has ended?" The dilemma was compelling. The Orange Order had marched to and from Drumcree since 1807: if he alienated the order by banning its extremists from Drumcree, he could stand accused of fostering a split within an already vulnerable church.
At any rate, he did not have the legal power to intervene at parish level.
His authority was a moral one, and if people chose to ignore that, there seemed little he could do. When the order chose to do so before Drumcree, he was characteristically discreet. There had been, he wrote, "a response of threat to me personally and to the Church of Ireland in general. Enough said."
The 1999 synod cannot solve the problems of Drumcree. But the challenge to confront its own history faces the Church of Ireland more than ever before.
The complex balancing between individual conscience and individual rights, between stale competing versions of Britishness and Irishness, are issues which can no longer be postponed. How tragic it will be if a church which began this century on so strong a note should end it with a tone of perplexity.