RECONCILIATION WHEN EVERYTHING IS BROKEN?

We have seen a level of violence and warfare over the last couple of years which has shattered hearts and minds, and shaken our belief in a world where people can live with one another in harmony. Yet, I can’t quite give up. One of the factors that changed my outlook on life as a young adult was seeing people from opposite camps of conflict getting reconciled. Two experiences specifically made a deep impression on me.

It was summer 1971 at a conference of Initiatives of Change (IofC) at Caux in Switzerland. A group of black and white people spoke of their friendship and respect for one another, and how they were learning to overcome anger, prejudice, and fear. They were from South Africa. A documentary about the apartheid regime had shocked me deeply some months earlier. Liberation from the oppressive system of apartheid was still a distant future. I was in the audience watching and listening attentively. I could hardly believe what I saw and heard.

Just over six months later, I was listening to a group of Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland at an IofC conference at Tirley Garth, Cheshire, in England. It was the weekend after Bloody Sunday, 30th January 1972. British soldiers had opened fire on a demonstration of Catholic civil rights supporters in Derry/Londonderry. They killed 13 unarmed protesters and injured 14, one of them dying later. Tensions were at boiling point. Months and years of violent clashes and killings were to follow. I tried to grasp how the Catholics and Protestants I met that weekend had the courage to build bridges with people of the opposite camp.

Provocative Title

In the middle of the 1990s, I read a book entitled “Whose Side is God on?” by Peter Hannon from Northern Ireland. The title is provocative, and still highly relevant given the present tragedies in the Middle East and elsewhere. It was written in a context of conflicts between people within a Christian culture, but the questions raised apply in any part of the world. Even when the main cause of a conflict is not religion, why do we use religions, which contain the message of love for one another, to fuel so much hatred against those with a different faith? Whose side is God on? Peter Hannon writes: “If God loves the other person to whom I am totally opposed as much as He loves me, then how should that affect my attitude?”

Peter offers deep insight into the human factors that spark conflicts and keep them burning. He belonged to the privileged Protestants who had discriminated against the Catholics, not least in the job market, and treated them as second-class citizens. Once asking a Catholic friend what the real facts behind the conflict were, his friend answered: “Facts? Facts only confuse the issue. Each side has its own set of facts, mostly accurate, but selected to prove its own case. Each ignores the real facts which is what the other side feels. Feelings are the real facts.”

“In Ireland,” Peter writes, “the power of our remembered grievances, often justified, is world famous… I need the sensitivity as to the reality of what others remember.”

He went to South Africa to work with IofC there. Amongst the many people he got to know were some who had defended apartheid but were coming around to question their beliefs and work for change. Some of the leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, for many years a bastion of apartheid, found the courage to speak out against that injustice in public and thereby contribute to the fall of the system. One was Professor Jonker. After Jonker spoke at a gathering of 250 delegates from 80 South African churches in 1990, Archbishop Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, spontaneously went up to embrace the professor. The Guardian in England carried the headline, Churchmen Atone for Apartheid Sins.

Although far from perfect, Northern Ireland and South Africa turned important pages in their history and were set free from the shackles of conflict and oppression. The new South Africa’s first President, Nelson Mandela, got a place in world history.

In these two cases, recognition of the injustice that the victims suffered was and continues to be important. Progress in processes of reconciliation often requires reparation. Many peace agreements just patch things up. Grievances are kept simmering, only to explode later.

Slammed Shut forever?

At this present moment in history, looking at the heaps of rubble which were people’s homes in Gaza and imagining the children who were trapped underneath, I wonder whether the cruelty of hate and revenge is being taken so far that the doors to any kind of peaceful relationship are being slammed shut forever. What about Ukraine, and the atrocities in the civil war in Sudan? Deep wounds are inflicted which will be very hard to heal.

I am casting doubt on the possibility and viability of reconciliation. But, in doing so, have I forgotten on which page of history my own generation in Europe appeared? I was born in 1952 in Oslo, Norway, only seven years after the Second World War. Parents and grandparents of my generation had witnessed terrible destruction, and many had lost close relatives and friends. The continent was in ruins, millions had been killed, there were terrible concentration camps. We heard the story of the deliberate extermination of people.

Yet, the nations of Europe, especially France and Germany, were reconciled in the years following the war by farsighted leaders who did not want a repeat of what had happened after the First World War. People on all levels of society were engaged in this process. Europe needed to get on its feet materially and economically, but there were equally the ruins of people’s souls, emotions and mindsets. At a conference of IofC at Caux in Switzerland, Irene Laure from France spoke words which have been quoted lots of times. “I have so hated Germany that I wanted her erased from the map of Europe. But I have seen here that my hatred is wrong. I am sorry and I wish to ask the forgiveness of all Germans present.” That opened the hearts of Germans to come forward and express their deep regret for what their nation had caused, and German authorities invited Irene Laure and hundreds of others for campaigns to restore Europe’s relationship with a nation that had terrorized the continent.

Irene Laure had suffered under German occupation and oppression. Yet she asked the Germans present for forgiveness. Not for her resistance, but for her hatred, which she realized, if multiplied, would create fertile ground for new wars. Is that realization of what our own poisoned emotions and mindsets may sometimes cause a key to healing and the beginning of reconciliation?

Our history affects us, and many present-day conflicts are stuck in muddy history. This brings me to two women, Christine and Orna, Palestinian and Israeli. They had met each other through a docuseries, Couples Therapy, in 2022. In their pain and sorrow after 7th October 2023, they decided to engage in a dialogue on the unfolding tragedy. Extracts of that dialogue were published in an article in The Guardian on 13th September last year. It tells of a sincere but stumbling walk through the wreckage of history, their very different perceptions of that history, and the chaos of their own emotions and hurts. Take the wall which the Israelis built. Orna says, “The wall was erected to try to stop the suicide bombers.” Christine: “To you it’s a security wall. To us it’s an apartheid wall.”

They Keep At IT

They are tempted to give up, and yet they keep at it. Orna: “We continue talking even when we disagree about fundamental questions, when we feel deeply hurt, afraid, angry, victimised, murderous.” Christine says: “This is one of the most draining things I have ever done.” Eight months after the recording of the dialogue, she writes: “When continually engaging with empathy and kindness, something started to shift. My so-called ‘enemy’ became a person with her own fears, dreams and histories.”

Their dialogue conveys a commitment to walk through the darker periods of history together and not separated in fortresses of closed mindsets. Reconciliation is a never-ending process.

Let me end with a sentence from the book The Forgiveness Factor by Michael Henderson: Asking the question, “Can one love one’s enemies?” Henderson quotes Donald Shriver (1927–2021), who served as president and professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. Said Shriver: “The most sober – and most hopeful – form of international remembrance, is forgiveness, that long, many-sided, seldom completed process of rehabilitating broken human relationships.”