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What's THAT got to do with it?


One of the week-long events at this year's 4 Corner's Festival is "Never in my Wildest Dreams", a photo exhibition at the Artcetera Centre in Rosemary Street. It is an exploration of homelessness in our city and beyond by Westcourt Centre's Camera Club. A few weeks ago, someone, who sees 4 Corners as primarily a peace and reconciliation festival, asked, "What has homelessness got to do with reconciliation?" 
On one level the answer is that homelessness is something that affects people from all corners, and indeed sectors of our city, and whilst its most obvious form is most evident in the increasing numbers of rough sleepers of the city centre, "hidden homelessness" is a feature across every postcode.
But it is more than that. If we are to talk about a city really at peace with itself, then it should be real peace... Biblical shalom, which as Martin Luther King Jnr. repeatedly stated, is not just absence of violence (and those who are homeless are sometimes there because of domestic violence and breakdown, and sadly experience a higher degree of violence than others in our society), but the presence of justice. Today is Martin Luther King Day, and the theme of this year's festival, "Dreams", is, in part, inspired by the 60th anniversary of his "I have a Dream" speech. As King continued his work he increasingly got involved in issues other than purely black civil rights and race relations, including protests against the war in Vietnam.
A few years ago we ran an event looking at building a sustainable city, and again, someone asked what this had to do with peace and reconciliation. But peace also requires hope, and currently that has economic and environmental implications, hence we return to the issue of the environment in another event at the festival, a showing of the film "The Letter" on Monday evening at the Ulster Museum. This explores an initiative that flowed from Pope Francis' encyclical "Laudato Si" calling us to take better care of our common home, a theme he returns to repeatedly in his short book "Let us Dream" that is another inspiration for our festival following a short message from the Pope at last year's festival before his biographer and the co-writer of "Let Us Dreram", Austen Ivereigh spoke to us.
What dreams do you have for our city? Come along and let's explore them together...

Shalom

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