Well there’s plenty of challenge still in the news from the Holy Land and the talks in coming weeks will have some hard business to transact, but I hope that they don’t forget brave people like these and others who belong to the Families Forum ”“ that’s a network for those who have been bereaved through violence in Israel and Palestine and who are committed to joining together to work for peace. There are several such groups ”“ as indeed there were in Northern Ireland in the darkest days there: people who are able to say, ”˜I know the worst that war can do, and I am turning my back on revenge’.
Few statements could be more powerful. What my visitors were saying was that grief and desperate loneliness aren’t political things but human things. It’s that only when we can get to the humanity can we begin to get beyond the sterility of historic racial and religious conflicts. Facing the abiding realities of the human condition, facing death; your own, or that of someone you love, is something that puts everything else into perspective.
Change, real change, happens when we’re ready just to be human ”“ not to use our suffering as another weapon against each other, not to argue about whose sufferings are worse, but just to recognise the same love and the same loss. Which is why my Jewish and Muslim visitors have been for me this year’s most important preparation for Christmas.
There’s much in this for Episcopalians and Anglicans in the US and Canada to take to heart. It is so easy for us in the midst of conflict when we have been hurt or deprived to seek revenge under the guise of holiness rather than seeking for godly union and compact as we seek to wear the cloak of our redeemed humanity.
My wive is RC and some times I watch with her the mass from St Peter’s in the EWTN, As a member of the CofE I feel ashamed of talking about the CofE and its leadership with her or other Catholics and Evangelical Christians. Williams message is all about left wing politics. As a member of the FiF, I, my parish priest and my Bishop are not in full communion with Him, we in our Parish Church would not receive the Eucharist from his hand. If he continues to preach this kind of stuff, the thing in the CofE will just get worse.
I particularly dislike and distrust expressions like “ready to be human,” as if its very use is a conclusive argument in favor of something or other that the speaker feels good about. The expression is in fact virtually meaningless since there can be no agreement about what “human” means. Touch-feely phrases like this always rub me the wrong way, and this example is no different. What actually is he talking about? Christianity, presumably, and the connection to “ready to be human ” is what? Please, someone rid us of this mediocrity. LM