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In all sincerity and in the name of God...

About six weeks ago, reflecting on the 30 th anniversary of the IRA ceasefire I wrote a poem that embodied my feelings at the time and over the following three decades, and I subsequently read it at a service in Clonard Monastery organised to mark both the IRA and later Loyalist ceasefires… On this day which marks the 30 th anniversary of the statement by the Combined Loyalist Military Command, my reflections are somewhat longer and more prosaic. At the time Gusty Spence read the ceasefire statement my first emotion was a reinforcement of the profound sense of relief that had hit me 6 weeks earlier. The fact of the ceasefire didn’t surprise me as much as the previous one. Various sources, publicly and privately had assured me that it was coming. But the wording was interesting. The suggestion that the “permanence” of the Loyalist ceasefire   was “completely dependant upon the continued cessation of all nationalist/republican violence” maintained the myth that loyalist violence
Recent posts

Bobbing

Written today on a wonderfully relaxing holiday in Istria, and dedicated to our marvellous hosts and tour guides Nikki and Steve. Bobbing on the surface Of a sun-warmed sea, Just off a shingly shore, Buoyed by the salt water, Feeling muscles, taut For far too long, relax, I realise that I rarely permit My mind to do the same; That even now I am grasping For words to encapsulate This all too rare experience, Rather than mentally drifting Off from the shingly shore To lie back, bobbing. Selah

A Boy Born into Peace

Sally and I are gearing up to go on holiday with friends next week, in an effort to find some sun before we develop rickets. But as I was thinking about it during the week my memory drifted back to one of the first "sunshine" holidays we had together, 30 years ago, in Crete. I was just out of theological college and had got my first 6 weeks in our first appointment under my belt and we were exhausted (and broke). Sally was also expecting our first child, and an older couple from Newcastle on Tyne in the room next to us took pity on us and took us under their wing somewhat. On the last evening, the 29th August, we ended up at the same restaurant and decided to share a table. It turned out, somewhat unusually for those days, that their son was doing a PhD in Belfast, and conversation got round to their anxieties about this and the troubles in Northern Ireland. "Will there ever be peace?" the husband asked. "I'm not sure I'll see it in my day," I said

Saturday Soup

A family memory. Every Saturday until I left home, apart from a few weeks each summer when soup vegetables were unobtainable in the greengrocers, my mum made a vast vat of soup which fed all-comers, with enough leftover for Sunday lunch when it was even better. It was usually followed by freshly baked scones, which were also lovely, but unlike the soup were not so lovely the next day. Indeed by some strange process they transformed into small indigestible organic rocks.  However, on one Saturday when I was very young, excitement over my older brother's newly purchased motorbike resulted in me getting a bowl of my mum's soup pour down my neck and chest  necessitating a swift trip to the A&E in the arms of my dad, one of only two times I can remember him holding me. But s o many of my teenage Saturday lunchtimes were made up of coming home from rugby to steep in a hot bath, emerging to an equally hot bowl of soup and a house full of family. Beef bone steeped from Friday  Boil

Ekecheiria

I literally woke up this morning with an upset stomach in the wake of news stories of the knife attack in Southport, followed by shameful rioting, the consistently escalating conflict between Israel and its neighbours, with attacks that in recent days have resulted in the deaths of young people at school and play, sniping in social media over the national identity of 2 gold medal winners in a single day from Northern Ireland, and the continuing controversy and over-reaction to an ill-judged small segment of an over-long Olympic opening pageant.  But at least I'm not a triathlete who may end up with a more significantly upset stomach from swimming in the Seine today, for reasons similar to those that affected the Boat Race in London recently. There are times that I despair of humanity and our willingness to work together to address not only our differences but also the existential threats that we all face... The title is drawn from the ancient Greek tradition of a truce or "lay

Every Day...

"Every day's a school day."  That glib cliché holds within it a truth that sits at the core of who I am. I love learning things. Facts... I don't retain them like I used to but my mind pick ups useless facts like a flypaper collects dipterans. I do also pick up a few useful facts along the way too, but they're not so much fun... many of these are historical dates, characters, events, etc  Connections... partly because of how my mind works, many of these facts are woven into a web of unlikely connections and associations that cross a range of disciplines, only some of which I have any competence in...  People... I am not great in social settings with people I don't know, unless there are enough of them for me to hide in the crowd or treat as an audience, but it's great when I do encounter new people with interesting stories or inspiring skills and talents.  A sub-set of "new people" are those that I haven't encountered in person, b

There is Always (Revised)

A few months ago, at a particularly difficult time, I posted the first version of the  piece below... Frankly I'm not in a much better place at present, but given the reminder by Beverly Barbour at conference yesterday about both the certainty and the timeframe of the hope we profess, I have revised it and added a closing verse.  70 years of exile is not long in eternal terms, but for a 58 year old it is chastening. With that in mind the "transformation of the world" for which we work, may not be to our immediate benefit, and unlike Moses, or Martin Luther King Jnr., we may not even see the Promised Land that we ourselves will not enter. But that is why it is not just a matter of hope but also of ‬faith, "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" ‭(Hebrews 11:1) and the steadfast love of God on which that hope depends. (Psalm 33: 18 & 22; 130: 7; 147:11). "Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul." Emily