God then,
encompassing all things, is
defenseless? Omnipotence
has been tossed away, reduced
to a wisp of damp wool?
And we
frightened, bored, wanting
only to sleep till catastrophe
has raged, lashed, seethed and gone by without us,
wanting then
to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony,
we who in shamefaced private hope
had looked to be plucked from fire and given
a bliss we deserved for having imagined it,
is it implied that we
must protect this perversely weak
animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings
suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold to our icy hearts
a shivering God?1
The woman circles the baby in a shawl, enveloping them both. Both faces are barely visible. Her arms and body are the circling not of fear and despair but of love and faith. Were it not for the arms of the mother, the child would be exposed, vulnerable, condemned to die by weather and cruelty. She puts her body between him and the world.
Outside the dug-out where the picture – an ikon of Mary and Jesus – is pinned to a mud wall, the reality is of a frozen hell. It is December 1942, Stalingrad. The German advance of the previous eighteen months had taken them to the edge of the Volga. Here they were stopped and for months the fighting swayed to and fro, until the German forces were turned by Russian advances from besiegers to besieged. The conditions were appalling, the loss of life enormous, the suffering of soldiers and civilians immense, made worse by the callousness of the supreme commanders of both sides.
Yet, amid this frozen killing ground there were some places of hope. Lieutenant Kurt Reuber, pastor and physician with the encircled German army, having drawn the ikon, used it as a place for soldiers to pray and meditate, to find something of the love of family, of their mothers’ care. He died in 1944, a prisoner in Russia, together with two-thirds of his companions captured in January 1943 at Stalingrad. The ikon escaped on virtually the last flight out. The original is displayed in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin, while copies now hang in the cathedrals of Berlin, Coventry and Kazan, Volgograd, as a sign of the reconciliation between Germany and its enemies: the United Kingdom and Russia.
Around the margin are included three words, ‘Licht, Leben, Liebe’, light, life, love. The light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it (John 1.5). The butchery of the Russian front, with its tens of millions of deaths, was seen clearly at Stalingrad. In films and books, it is described2 with scenes of horror that are numbing. The ikon tells of hope, of peace, of God’s abundance in Jesus Christ and of human partnership in the ancient dream of swords into ploughshares. It calls for peace.
There is something very remarkable about the ikon. It seems to create a dream of peace in a world of war. It calls from another world, one full of suffering, but one in which a woman and her child could conceivably survive. Its marginal words tell of warmth from light and love and of hope of life. It calls out for help and also reassures because the child is the Christ-child, the baby of Bethlehem, whose existence was menaced from his birth until his death and who yet rose from the dead and decisively changes the world. For me the ikon calls out, ‘Have mercy, we want peace’ on the one hand, and on the other, ‘Have hope, here is peace.’
Is this infant fragility really God’s answer to the power of war and hatred, to the darkness of sin? Surely God may as well have lit a candle in a hurricane.
The human eye sees a mother in thin peasant clothes cradling a baby who would die so quickly if abandoned, perhaps in minutes: St John tells us this is the Word through whom all things were made.
Yet in the world busy human eyes are too preoccupied and overlook the mother, doubtless walked past each day in every great city on earth, on every battlefield and in every refugee camp. We who are safe avert our gaze from such sadness and suspect a trick: St John says this is an inextinguishable light that reveals the face of God.
That contrast remains true. I ring a bishop in Mozambique after a bitter and bloody attack from ISIS. I speak to another in South Sudan as the refugee camp in which he lives is shelled by rebel forces. I get a message from the wife of a close friend engaging in peacebuilding, Ebola resisting and COVID care in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), to say he has died from the virus.
I sit by someone weeping at the breakup of a relationship, or the estrangement of a child. I pray by the bed of a woman dying of COVID-19. A letter comes blaming the Church, blaming me, for failing to prevent the abuse of young people.
In all these places it is futile and uncaring – at that moment – to speak of reconciliation. Can there be change amid such suffering? Surely the tide of history will wash away any sandcastles of peace? Surely the darkness will win?
Yet for one very simple reason I turn back to the ikon. For this child and his obedient and self-giving mother, who endured so much more than can be imagined, is truly light, life, love. In him God is revealed in all his forceless glory and power. This is the God who draws worship not by compulsion but by fragility that is real and deathless.
The shivering child Jesus – he certainly shivered – and his sheltering mother are God’s call to us that he speaks as an adult, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God’ (Matthew 5.9). God has set the pattern and the means. The pattern is vulnerability. The means is sacrifice. This baby will live some thirty-three years and die on a cross with this mother unable to hold more than his dead, tortured body. This baby will be the cornerstone of stories of peace, the foundation of a community that is more diverse than any other on earth. It will be a community that rejoices in the abundance of diversity and seeks, because of this child, to learn to love one another and the whole world. It will be an example of failure too often, but sometimes the light of life and hope. That community will be filled with the Spirit of this child so that, at its best, no sacrifice is too great to ensure that God’s choice of abundance is poured into the world.
This fragility is reconciliation incarnate, made flesh. Reconciliation must be made flesh if it is going to be real. It must transform the lives of the weak, it must protect and it must go on trying even when it fails again and again. To give up is to accept, as though through scientific experiment, that the will to power of so many people is an undeniable absolute of being human. The will to power, the formation of identity through defining ourselves as what we are not, or by targeting another group as enemies, has become acceptable since the early twentieth century as being what makes for success, satisfaction, virtue.
With the will to power, coming from within ourselves, from pride and desire, there is no space for the ordinarily human, for the good community. Power hates weakness, and boasts that it never explains, never apologizes. It cannot abide reconciliation, which requires listening to another view, even putting oneself or one’s group in the shoes of the other. Power will neither offer nor receive forgiveness. As a result, the enemy must be cancelled, perhaps physically, but certainly emotionally and if possible in public esteem.
Sometimes we see the light shine, the life flourish and the love shared. Sometimes enemies destroy each other not through violence but by becoming friends. When that is visible, so is the power and presence of the God of love, revealed in the Stalingrad Madonna.
Peace as the Unimaginable Strategy
There is something a bit clichéd about wanting peace. One thinks of actor Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality playing an undercover FBI agent in a beauty contest where the only possible answer to the question about your greatest desire is ‘world peace’. Yet any account of war makes it obvious that this is indeed what is needed. War can be at any scale, from bullying in the playground, the wars of words and sometime violence in families disintegrating, the vendettas in communities, riots, civil war and insurgency, or the great geopolitical conflicts. In all of them the side effect is destruction of the human spirit, ruination of lives, mental, physical and emotional harm on a vast scale, and a dark cloud of despair and anger, even among the ‘winners’, if any.
Among what are often called the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam (those that in one way or another trace their history back to the Jewish Patriarch Abraham) – each has a sense of war as normally evil but a sometimes justifiable necessity, even a good. The accounts of Just War theory, or of what makes violence righteous, apply at many levels, including judicial execution and even revenge killing in family disputes. There are also accounts of what justifies the extreme action of going to war and accounts of what constitutes proper conduct in war.
I shall not discuss in detail Just War in this book. However, two things strike me. First, that there is no comparable need to justify peace, a Just Peace theory. Second, that so much effort has gone into defining the ethics of going to war and of conduct in war. International treaties such as the Geneva Conventions have been built on work originating in the Jewish scriptures (the Christian Old Testament), the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and subsequent interpretations, and the works of many great thinkers, especially St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and St Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). In ancient and modern times, women have been both prominent and essential to peace and as advocates for peaceful ways forward, yet on the whole they are forgotten. More will be said of that later.
There is a communal conscience, a voice within that says that war and killing and violent or destructive disagreement is not good. For it to become good requires justification. Peace, on the other hand, speaks for itself. Reconciliation enables harmonious difference in a way that enables all parties to flourish: reconciliation is the activity that leads towards peace, concord, the common good and well-being.
I have left out the greatest conflict, between human beings and the natural world. Here there is no obvious enemy apart from ourselves. No negotiations are possible except among ourselves. We are the worst enemies to ourselves. It is a newly identified sort of war; with the future, the young and those yet unborn, with each other, with the creation and with God. But, if this conflict is going to end and we are not going to destroy ourselves, we must find a way of living, a means of reconciliation that does not continually diminish what is around us. Climate change and loss of biodiversity constitute long-term mutually assured destruction: the launch button has long since been pushed, and the war is raging.
I’ve written this book as a practitioner in the area of reconciliation for many years. I do not attempt to hide two things in particular. First, that I write as a Christian and thus the content draws heavily on the Christian Bible. Second, I do not hide my ignorance, the difficulties, setbacks and failures that are both the most common experience and the greatest frustration of any work involving reconciliation. Both my ignorance and the complexity of the subject mean that no one writer or book can complete the whole subject.
The frustration is one of the reasons for writing. It seems so obvious that it would be a better world in which diversity is a treasure, not a threat, and radically different views could be freely expressed without destructive behaviours. Competition among human beings is good, a gift to drive us onwards and give the desire to excel. Yet to seek not only to do better than a rival but to destroy them is foolishness, for in such a world all lose.
Frustration is true at all levels, from the squabbling families to the peoples at war, where the women and children flee in long, sorrowful procession and the young men and women die in agony, loneliness and fear. At its root is the sin of human pride, which affects all, including those seeking to reconcile. There is even much conflict among reconcilers and much competition for the glory of being peacemakers!
The book is in three parts that relate to each other but can be taken alone.
Part I is a meditation about definitions and difficulties. Here I look at what reconciliation is and why it is so rare. One of the mysteries of human existence is our lack of collaboration. Competition comes naturally to us. There are many reasons, but the way they show themselves in practice is bewildering and often counterproductive for all involved.
Within Part I, Chapter 1 argues that diversity and sin make conflict inevitable. Chapter 2 contrasts the reality of conflict with the age-old desire for peace, drawing above all on biblical themes. Chapter 3 looks at the resources and origins of ideas about reconciliation.
Part II is about juggling the processes of reconciliation. It draws heavily on the story of Coventry Cathedral in England,3 and particularly on the implicit and explicit approach to reconciliation developed there. I do not argue for a moment that this is the only approach, or even the best one, but it is the best I know and is deeply rooted in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.
There are six chapters in this part, each of them based around an action of reconciliation and reflecting especially on John’s Gospel, deeply influenced by Professor David Ford’s commentary.4
Part III moves on to the habits of reconciliation. It uses the pattern of a course for groups of people that was developed by the reconciliation team at Lambeth Palace and published in 2020, the Difference Course.5 The course is held over six evenings, seeking to introduce the habits necessary for reconciliation within a group. Originally written for churches and Christian groups, it is now being piloted among mixed-faith and other faith groups, as well as secular ones, seeking to provide a means for people to start on the very long journey of reconciliation.
At the end of each chapter there is a section for reflection and discussion. It may well be best to do that with others, preferably with refreshments (food and hospitality make a huge difference in reconciliation).
The aim of this book is to encourage peacebuilding at all levels, recognizing the difficulties but turning the abstract idea of reconciliation into something that can be done throughout life, enabling the flourishing of robust diversity and disagreement without hatred. A society and a world that renews the idea of peace gives a basis for hope of differences being the seed of growth, and not of automatic rejection of all that we disagree with and of hostility towards those who disagree.
Safety for our future is not found by seeking it, but by engaging with those who challenge us. Identity is not made by defining ourselves against others in hatred and by seeking domination: the habits of reconciliation and peacebuilding liberate our identities, preserve our autonomy, increase our safety and show us the common good.