South is losing out by distancing itself from North healing process

I JOINED the Columbanus Community of Reconciliation in Belfast in September. I had already paid a preliminary visit there in early August, the weekend before the ominous Apprentice Boys marches in Derry.

For my hosting community that was to be a weekend of intense and widespread prayer. On the mornings of Friday and Saturday in St Anne's Church of Ireland Cathedral; again on Saturday evening in the nearby Rosemary Presbyterian Church, and in many other places. The power of that unity in prayer was, for me at least, something palpable. It did not, even need the peaceful Derry outcome to vindicate it.

Surely, I felt, as I left Belfast on August 12th, there must be many others in the South who would be happy to make Christ's promise of peace come true by more than merely deploring the recurrent violence in one corner of the country, and hoping for a political settlement. What I envisaged - for those in a position to make such a generous gesture - was their taking an active part in one of the many voluntary groups working's and praying in the North for peace and reconciliation.

At all events, a month later, I arrived myself to join the Columbanus Community for at least the year - which most newcomers there covenant for. I was gravely out of touch not merely with the North, but with events in Ireland as a whole.

TWENTY TWO years working in West Africa, especially in a monastic context, had left me more or less in a bland cloud of unknowing. The IRA ceasefire which followed hard on definitive return in July 1994 further tended to blur my vision. But the Drumcree week, so vividly communicated by television, was for me explosive. I knew I would be in for a culture shock.

Even in a few days visit I had glimpsed something of what life at the Columbanus Community would, mean. There is a legion of other groups in Belfast working for the same goals, but the emphases at Columbanus, I felt, would be more congenial for one coming from a religious community background.

It is one of the few residential groups. Like others it is open members of all the Christian churches, not necessarily the mainline ones. A German Lutheran lady whom I had met in August was leaving for home after a year's stint as an English Quaker who acted as librarian was due back in October. There was an English Anglican widow, and an Antrim Methodist.

Though the present community leader (elected annually by the community) is a Roman Catholic sister, more Protestants than Catholics haven been members since the group was, founded 13 years ago. As their folder of introduction puts it: "Anyone over, 25, who is young at heart, willing to experiment, happy to live in a small, do it yourself community, open to a spirituality of reconciliation, and ready for a ministry of reconciliation, is welcome."

Open as it is to men and women, married and single, lay and clerical, young and old, this unpretentious group is certainly a practical example of what a more united church, a more just society and a more peaceful world could be like.

I WAS to find that while the adjoining buildings which house the community were at an appreciable distance from the major Belfast flashpoints, it was far from being detached from the civil and political scene. The folder of their Monday night lecture programme was enough to convince me of this.

The general theme bore the revealing title: "Moving from fear to trust". Nine lectures from September to November covered every aspect of the deep seabed beneath the surface of the political peace process, with titles like "historical sources of fear in our society"; "the psychology of fear"; "the healing of fear"; "politicising our theologies"; "the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer" (by Pastor Fritz of the Lutheran Church, connected by marriage to that famous war victim). The series ended with a talk on "the courage to forgive" by a member of the AVE (Widows Against Violence Empower) group.

Drumcree may be a very distant item now in memories down South. We here still live in its wake, as under (pace my change of metaphor) the shadow of a precariously extinct volcano. Attitudes would seem to be dangerously hardening on the extremes of loyalism and republicanism.

In between the extremes, however, things are more positive. More of the "silent majority", of the church attending middle class seem to be losing their apathy, or should we call it their silent mental emigration from a social and political problem difficult, if not impossible, of solution. Still, church attendance would seem to be increasingly down, even among Catholics. And that tends to yield the field to the fundamentalists.

The authentic source of hope, however, lies in the continuing vigour of ecumenism. Happily for me the Irish School of Ecumenics uses the Columbanus Community as one of its two Northern centres (the other is in Derry), with a weekly lecture on our premises. And, apart from this academic core, cross community groups of every sort and at every level, from schoolchildren to busy adults and retired professional men and women, are meeting to talk, to listen, to debate, to hold dialogue, to understand, and, perhaps imperceptibly but undeniably, to start to sympathise and unite.

Belfast may be an unlovely city, but its beauty can be within: divided, yet mending daily, hourly. This is not a view one can catch easily on TV, this "speaking the truth in charity". Men and women speaking from deep pain of loses suffered; but facing this pain with trust, forgiveness, concern and hope.

More and more I am dismayed at what a loss it is to the South to be living at such a mental and emotional distance from these outstanding Northern kinsfolk of ours. Their courageous wrestling with these intractable life and death issues here day by day make so many Southern concerns seem trivial in comparison.

Yes, indeed, "for evil to prevail in the world, it is enough for good people to be content to do nothing".