IT IS called the Church of the Ascension, in honour of an event which lies at the heart of Christianity. Most churches are reminders of our mortality; and we know that most of us will spend the first hours after our death, before we are burned or buried, encoffined in a church. Churches are for life and for death, and it is not surprising even as secularisation proceeds apace that we invest so much emotion in them.
Generally speaking, Catholic churches do not serve as memorials to the communities which worship within them. Certain individuals who have generously endowed the church might erect a window or a plaque for a loved one, hut otherwise Catholic churches are more places of worship than a physical reminder of those who have been within its pews. This is not surprising. They are more hieratic than are churches of the Church of Ireland. They are more purely vessels for the renewed consecration of the bread and wine into body and blood of Christ as at that first communion, before Golgotha, before the Ascension.
Communion and community
Church of Ireland churches, in addition to being places of Eucharist, are also places of memorial and memory. Their function is both communion and community, and sometimes extends to myth, to the sense of identity based on half-understood realities and half-forgotten truths. The essence of such myth is, of course, not actually what happened, but the perception of what happened, and the importance of that myth is its role in binding together those who hold it in common.
People in peril cling to community-binding myth. It is not the confident inheritors of the earth who hold fast to myth, but those clinging to the remnants of their patrimony. The more uncertain they are, the more threatened they feel, the louder they will bawl the anthems of their myth, just as children scare away spooks in the darker watches of the right, their fingers in their ears and their voices raised.
This weekend we will again be observing the myths of the Church of the Ascension; for that is the name by which the church at Drumcree is also known. Its role tomorrow will not be the sacramental role of communion, but it will perform the duties of a secular sacrament: it will serve as a reassurance to the members of a frightened community that the bindings of identity hold tight. It is not the God of the Mount of Olives whom the Orangemen of Drumcree will have in mind tomorrow, but that another deity referred to in Kipling's Recessional: "God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far flung battle line."
First World War
People often ask me why I write so much about the first World War. I write about it because it is the most important event in world history since Calvary. There is nothing that we are that was not changed and shaped by the events of that time. The tribal differences between planter and native around the crossing of the Bann at Port an Dunain of course predate the first war. The struggle has been so deeply felt that secret societies have flourished in that place of contest for over two centuries; but the resonances of that contest were enriched and deepened by the events of 1914- 18.
The loyalist myths from that time as we all know - remain powerful, and find their focus in the Church of the Ascension, where each July 1st Orangemen remember their dead from July 1st, 1916. More specifically, the Orangeman of the Portadown march (though they probably do not know it) remember the 300 men of the 9th Royal Irish Fusiliers (Armagh and Monaghan UVF) who were killed on the first day of the Somme - most of them by a single machine-gun mounted at the opening to a mineshaft which had survived the opening British bombardment.
The British Legion came into existence after the Golgotha of the Great War to mind the maimed and to remember the dead. In Northern Ireland, the Legion acquired largely localised characteristics. It became more intensely loyal, more partisan, more inclined to partial memory and partial memorial. As did too those of the nationalist side. They too chose from history that which bound them together and made them different; and they were happy to exclude the memory of the Great War, though so many had served in it.
An agreed fiction. Is it surprising that a danse macabre should now gather around the memorial to the Orange dead of the Somme? The man who leads the nationalists on the Garvaghy Road, Breandan Mac Cionnaith, is a convicted terrorist, who blew up the very British Legion Hall erected to honour the loyalist dead of the Somme. To have such a man leading negotiations over the route of a march to commemorate men whose memory he has already forcibly expressed his opinion of with high explosive suggests the possibilities for compromise are limited.
Tortured place
I do not rush to condemn because the dynamics of that place are beyond me. I have seen Orangemen swaggering through Obins Street, with the native Catholics penned in their homes, and it was obscene. We are told that Brendan Mac Cionnaith was offered a deal which involved only local Orangemen and bands playing religious music only, which he turned down.
That seems unreasonable; but we are not dealing with reason here. He is not free, nor is anyone in that tortured place in the heart of Ulster, of the history, the myths and the emotions which made him. Outsiders such as Bertie Ahern should offer opinions on that fulcrum where memories and myths compete with extreme caution, and most of all take a lead from no-one at that fulcrum.
For on each side on that fulcrum, they could appositely quote those other words from Recessional. "The tumult and the shouting dies; The Captains and the Kings depart; Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget!"
They will not, of course, forget.