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 somewhat pessimistically.
Fast forward to the next day and the coach home. As we were pulling away I glanced over at the shop across the road and the newspaper headline on the roadside news-board read "IRA Ceasefire Likely."
In those pre-internet days there was no way of finding out what this was all about, and there were no English language papers left in the airport by the time we got there.
We got home late at night and only caught up with the news the next morning, a few hours before the ceasefire was formally announced.
The rest is history.
Some well-documented.
Other bits, like much of what led up to that point, untold.
And it isn't a finished story, or a perfect peace, even 30 years on.
But as I thought about those events of 30 years ago, I always remember that
1) I am clearly not a political prophet!
2) Public history always intersects with the personal. In our case, I always think of the IRA ceasefire in relation to the subsequent birth of our older son (just as I always think of the later visit of the Dalai Lama in relation to the birth of our younger son). He was going to be born into a province stumbling its way towards peace. It meant that the later Canary Wharf bombing by the IRA had a personal sense of disappointment to it, rather than just a general political one.
And as I thought of that, the following poem emerged... I didn't have time on Friday or Saturday to post it because of other deadlines, but yesterday my 4 Corners Compadre Steve Stockman contacted me to ask if Jim Deeds and I would have anything we could read at an event to mark the 30 year anniversary of the IRA and Loyalist Ceasefires... "Its funny you should ask..."
So here it is...
Dedicated to Owain...
Parlaying in the parlour
Over gallons of tea and coffee
Finally emerges to shape stories
Echoing over the airwaves
And across troubled waters,
Saying “Peace! Be Still!”
“I’ll never see it in my lifetime!”
A false prophecy disproved
by headlines twelve hours later,
Returning from a foreign country
To a strange new land that
I had always wanted to live in;
Where our long-expected child,
recently conceived, could be born.
Scepticism reigned, still angels sang
“Peace, on this little piece of earth.”
And so at last it came to pass,
And the child grew in God’s grace.
By and by the boy became a man
Part of the peaceful generation –
But by no means untroubled.
Blue lit trips to casualty, operations,
conversations with counsellors.
Hopes raised and dashed and diverted.
The scars remain, some unseen,
Yet aching, Inherited, unatoned for.
Nature or nurture? Stories told or left untold?
But the memories are fading fast.
Soon the generation that remembers
Will only be marked on memorials.
Once a young man, the Prince of Peace
Was crucified in his early thirties,
On the intersecting spars
Of politics and religion, faith and flag,
United in fear of a new Kingdom.
When will we ever learn?
Shalom
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