We Bear Witness to Our Faith

6th of February, 2018

Courage comes from the heart and we are always welcomed by God, the Croí of all being.

We bear witness to our faith, knowing that we are called to live lives of courage, love and reconciliation in the ordinary and extraordinary moments of each day.

We bear witness, too, to our failures, and our complicity in the fractures of our world.

May we be courageous today, may we learn today, may we love today. Amen.

This is Corrymeela’s prayer of courage, which heralds every single day at the centre for those who attend morning worship. Spiritually, I am deeply nourished by the daily intentionality, reflection and realignment with our shared values and highest aspirations. But Corrymeela is a place for encountering the Other, and there is one aspect in which I certainly feel challenged to courageously encounter the Other every day here, encompassed in the above in a single, small word.

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. “Has he got lost?” asked one. “Did he lose his way like a child?” asked another. “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated?” Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried, “I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us – for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

This is the Parable of the Madman, written by Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1880s, source of the famous quote ‘God is dead’. It is a tribute and lament to the Enlightenment, warning us against ourselves in our rush for religious emancipation. Dazzled by our hubris, we dealt a momentous blow that liberated us from the reign of external divine authority, ushering in secular modernity and contemporary Western science – the epistemology that dethroned Christian scripture as the source of Truth in the mainstream public sphere. The blow left us parentless children, inconceivably free to steer our own fate, but also lost and malnourished. For it may well be we killed our God prematurely, considering the deplorable mess we’ve made of playing gods ourselves. Yet to many, kill him we did. I stand on those two legs, in a split: my dual cultural heritage of Christianity (I celebrate Christmas, somehow know the words to all the songs of that season, and my very recent ancestors were practicing Christians, reverends and ministers even, a bit further back); and the Enlightenment, in whose individualistic liberty and empirical approach to reality I was raised and educated. My circles were largely the jokers in the market place, and I myself wince at some of the Christian language. As a result, my spirituality has thus far been at once an uncertain and solitary, and thoroughly liberal and empowering path. I have felt the lack of traditions to belong to, and the freedom to seek them out for myself. I have felt the ringing emptiness of the absent God without, while learning to rely on the quiet voice of grace within.

Yet here I find myself, immersed and making a home in a place where the Christian language is its mother tongue. Biblical and denominational jokes are tossed across the dinner table, and discussions about scripture and liturgy and litany and lots of other words I don’t understand fly over my head left and right. It’s like being in a room full of native speakers of another language; they’re open and welcoming and will always generously address you in English, but will forget to code-switch when you’re passing by or listening in, not to exclude but because there is an inertia in comfort.

Fair play to them. In this time when institutional religion is blamed and demonised for so many things, and many of us defensively deny any association with it, there is something refreshing about being in a place that so unapologetically owns its heritage. Corrymeela’s origins are as an open Christian community, which it continues to be. And that is appropriate here. Christianity has been in this land for sixteen centuries, brought by the celebrated Saint Patrick who came to salvage the island that had imprisoned him as a slave for six years. It has seeped deep into its sediments, has dissolved into its sacred landscape, become an inextricable part of its ancient root system. And today Northern Ireland, much more than the secularised country I am from, is still a traditional and religious corner of Europe. Corrymeela speaks the language of this country.

A language that, at the same time, has locally also been the vehicle of a divisive struggle that has lasted, in the broadest sweep, a thousand years – since the First Norman Invasion. It is Corrymeela’s strength that it does not shy away from the conversation about the religious component of sectarian conflict, acknowledging ‘our complicity in the fractures of our world’. To me, both a national and religious outsider, the Catholics, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists and whoever else, distinguish themselves from each other in a language I barely understand. What divides them amongst themselves joins them in their separation from me.

Such is the whimsical nature of the lines Language draws. It’s a treacherous gift that God gave to Adam, the power to name. Inherently simplistic inevitable divider, for in the word what is this, all else is not, while in the world, from quantum physics to intersectional politics, every day shows us that this can be this and that and nothing and everything at once. And yet where would we be without language? In a state of sleep paralysis, subconscious slumber, struggling to claw our way out of the tangled nameless mess of impressions weighing down upon us, to the lucid surface and out into the light. Bawling thrashing babes we are, without the ability to name, unsure of what we want and choking on our frustration. Yet we were tricked, or taught a lesson, with the gift of these keys to consciousness, that led us out of the Garden and into Plato’s cave. They were counterfeits, and didn’t fit the locks: every word we tried opened doors to different realities, and every next word only made a bigger mess. And here in this place with a different mother tongue, I feel the immensity of words: words that encompass entire cosmologies, words I cannot speak lest I betray my own integrity. And the master key of them all is only three letters: G O D.

To take part in the prayers and songs that fill the collective space of reflection I find so nourishing, I need to substitute some words with ones that mean something to me. But how to translate the master key? What is God?becomes the seminal question, the question that initiates one in to the wild and open plains of existence, the inner and the outer landscapes, incomprehensible in their intricate vastness. Reclaiming that key for oneself is to step onto the journey… I’m working up to it.

On a more manageable level, Corrymeela and I, in our own personal dialectic, stretch and hold each other to account. Through the prayer of courage, Corrymeela’s strength infuses my marrow, as I daily renew my partaking in its commitment: to not be afraid, approach the Other kindly, stand in my own truth with an open and inquisitive heart. In return, integrity to my truth is my test for Corrymeela – to give it the opportunity to prove that it is what it claims to be: “an open village for all people of goodwill”, “open to all faiths and none”, “a community strong enough to hold you as you are”. It is a sacred exchange, on this cliff top where we learn to stay steady in the encounter that makes us tremble.

Let Corrymeela’s strength be mine, and let my thread add its colours to Corrymeela.

As for a tradition to belong to, I can wait. My loyalty is to the emptiness, the power of not knowing that leaves space to be filled, like the sky to the dawning of sunrise, lit by the same source but brilliantly different every day. If I must choose a name for now, I will be a syncretist. A word I had the luck to encounter years ago. It is a word that describes without defining me. A support without being a signpost, that allows me to be all and nothing at once and determine my own steps forward. It’s a powerful word, and I’m bringing it here with me, while my God is in scaffolding.

All that remains of the old 14th century Culfeightrin church, a mile up the road. Culfeightrin means 'corner of the foreigner'.