A young woman – an economic migrant – arrives in a village belonging to an enemy. She is accompanied by her mother-in-law, who had grown up in the village. For the latter it is reverse migration. She had gone to the enemy country, also as an economic migrant perhaps twenty years earlier, with her husband and two sons. The men had died after a few years, leaving two daughters-in-law and no grandchildren. In desperation, one daughter-in-law goes back to her paternal home, and the other joins in the frightening and dangerous process of travel.
It is a love story. The young woman and her mother-in-law love each other. The time is a little over three thousand years ago. The region is what we now call the Holy Lands. The story is that of Ruth, a most beautiful book in the Old Testament. But it could have been today. We have economic migration, refugees, ancient hatred and wars, the travel of desperate people to places they do not know. They support each other on the way; they often die. Occasionally the ending is happy. That is the case in the case of Ruth and Naomi, where Ruth meets a man, they marry and have children.
The story is so much deeper than that, of course. It is a love story where, as in all the best love stories, the main characters cross boundaries, show courage, are imaginative and see solutions that are not visible to anyone else, and in this case everyone is kept and held in the love of God.
That is the link to two of the best-known and most overwhelming of the statements on love in the New Testament. In John’s first letter he says baldly, ‘God is love.’1 Earlier on he has made it clear that the letter is a witness and testimony to what he has experienced and seen in meeting Jesus and following him for three years. The second overwhelming statement is in John’s Gospel, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that all who believed in him should not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3.16, NRSV). These verses speak of the love of God as boundary busting, leaping over the gap between God and human beings. The leap is made by God and it is a leap of reconciling love.
The action of Jesus breaks all boundaries and dissolves the barriers that reinforce those boundaries. In John 3 Jesus is in conversation with a Jewish leader and teacher. In John 4 he engages first with a woman from an enemy people (a Samaritan) and then with the child of a senior official for the king of the region that included Galilee. In John 5 he heals a man on the Sabbath, breaking the barrier of what the leaders interpreted as work, expressed in God’s commands not to work on the Sabbath.
That is still the work of God today and the Church is at its glorious best when it seeks to demonstrate the pure and holy love of God in breaking barriers and when with courage it stands with those whose experience is of being barred from leading a full life, what Jesus calls an abundant life.
Because it is the work of God it is also the best way for the world. Reconciliation is not the exclusive possession of the Church or of the religious. Ruth is not from Israel yet God’s work of reconciliation is active in her life and character. Peacebuilding and the desire for peace is hardwired into the desire of most people. To make it happen is to act well. To make it happen well requires relationships founded on love, whatever more they also need. The reconciliation that God gives through love is more abundant than we can imagine. It is not just barely sufficient, a sort of just-about-enough love for reducing conflict, but when shared, reconciliation grows and expands and overflows. In John 6 Jesus feeds five thousand with a few loaves and fish, and twelve baskets of food are left over. In this act we see the meeting of physical need, but much more than that the super-abundance of the provision of all that is needed. So it is with reconciliation. It can never run out when it is what we aim for.
As it is presented in the Bible, love is far more than an emotion. It is something of great activity. God does not sit in heaven saying soppily, ‘I love people’; God acts, and it is through God’s action that we perceive God’s love. It was God’s love that carried Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, through the agony of bereavement back to Bethlehem, Naomi’s home. It was God’s love that brought Ruth into contact with Boaz, the landowner and cousin of Naomi. It was God’s love that opened Ruth and Boaz’s hearts to love for one another and it was God’s love that meant that the resulting child was King David’s grandfather.
In other words, God’s love broke down every barrier in order to ensure that Israel’s second – and model – king was partly Moabite, an enemy. The Book of Ruth is many beautiful things, but it is centrally a book about reconciliation.
In doing so it points forward to Jesus, the ultimate, absolute, definitive reconciler, and shows that love is not just what we feel but is true when it is what we do.
The second ‘R’ is relating, and it is founded on love.
All reconciliation work deals with the bitterest and most powerful of human emotions, emotions very often justified by the terrible circumstances faced. A family quarrel of great bitterness has a capacity to penetrate the hardest emotional armour and hurt deeply. A church that is riven by disagreement has a toxicity that is the opposite of what its members hope for and seek. Community quarrels are hard-edged because the participants are continually with each other or seeing each other. As for violent conflict and struggle – the mixture of terror, pride, hatred and ambition is an emotional cocktail that historically has led to the greatest courage and the greatest cruelty.
The only force that can cross the boundaries is love. The role of the people and groups that facilitate reconciliation is not a functional and mechanical one characterized by technique, but a relational one characterized by love. Of course, love is not all we need (sorry, The Beatles), but any action not based in love and driven by love is, to quote St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, nothing but a sounding gong or a clanging cymbal. It is noise without substance.
One of the most effective peacebuilders I have met is Canon Andrew White, with whom I worked for almost three years when I was at Coventry Cathedral. He is a controversial figure, larger than life, physically as well as everything else. Having watched him in action, one thing that is overwhelming is his gift for relating to people, because they know he loves them.
It was that love, and the risks he took to see people, that enabled Andrew to play a key role2 in gathering those who signed the Alexandria Declaration, which sought to undermine the religious blockages in peacemaking. Many of the signatories were bitter enemies; his friendship was a common factor to them all.
For several years he had visited Jerusalem and the other parts of the Holy Lands continually. At times in places of heavy fighting, he had done the research that enabled him to see who needed to be involved. All this time the situation was deteriorating, but that did not cause unreasonable rush. Eventually he had built relationships strong enough to get permission to hold a meeting in Alexandria, supported by the UK Foreign Office, in which the traditional enemies came together to call for peace and commit themselves to work for it. The final, three-day negotiation was chaired superbly by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton as he now is.
The impact of the Declaration had the potential to open a door that had been neglected in the Oslo peace process: that of religious leaders. It illustrates the need to get the right people involved.
The Muslims included a Grand Mufti (a very senior judge) as well as a number of sheikhs and imams, religious teachers with a strong political and juridical role. The Jewish figures included an Israeli government minister and rabbis, including from a settlement in the Occupied Territories. They had already been building links across the barriers of conflict, and one of the most important parts of everyone’s research was to identify which of the apparently hard-line figures behaved in a way that opened opportunities for peacebuilding.
The meeting exhibited partnership. Apart from the Archbishop of Canterbury, there was involvement by diplomatic groups and other organizations with whom relationships had been built. All were crucial, including the ones who had done invisible preparatory work but got little or no credit in the final outcome.
The research demonstrated what could and could not be done. A declaration was possible but not a peace settlement; the latter would need a more comprehensive process. The necessary time was taken. The signatories were in a place to go on working together.
Working with Andrew demonstrated that he loved genuinely but was also realistic about those he worked with. They were not remotely all ‘good people’. A number had been involved with violence. The various regional governments that had some involvement were not all being helpful out of mere goodwill. There was a desire to instrumentalize the process for their own reasons, many of which were more about gaining advantage than making peace.
These behaviours are part of being human and part of the corrosive impact of conflict. It undermines all that is best and most selfless, and draws the mind, morals and emotions into a place where personal power seeking and advantage gaining, by any means, are not just temptations but normal ways of living. It is not a criticism of the Oslo process; the focus in Oslo was on the central, political issues. However, if the old slogan and wisdom of peacebuilding – ‘top down, middle out, bottom up – is to be the aim, then the religious actors will need to be involved in most countries in the world. Nowhere is that more important than in Jerusalem, Israel and Palestine. Religious actors will seldom bring the ‘top down’, but they may ease the way for political leadership, and they tend to be part of networks that go from grassroots to presidential mansions. Moreover, for those whose faith is more than skin deep, loyalty to God and faith will matter more than anything else and is the most powerful possible force for good, or evil.
Relating love-in-action. To return to John’s Gospel, the gospel of the holy love of God, the way that Jesus loves, shows the true nature of reconciling love.
All four Gospels tell us that on the night of his betrayal, arrest and trial, Jesus held a Passover meal, a celebration of the liberation of God’s people, the Israelites from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. According to John, chapter 13, before the meal he took off his outer clothing, wrapped a towel around himself and washed his disciples’ feet, including those of Judas, who he knew was planning to betray him. John says, ‘Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’3 The Greek word for ‘end’ can be translated in a variety of ways, but has the sense of completely, to the finish, to the limit.
Together with going to be crucified, this is the central demonstration by Jesus of the nature of God’s love and of the way he wants human beings to love one another: we are to love to the limit. The Church above all should show this love. The leaders of this world should show this love. I remember a remarkable moment in the concluding service of a gathering of the senior leaders of the Anglican Communion from around the world. At the end of a very difficult meeting, full of conflict, we washed each other’s feet. It is more difficult to receive than to do, for it requires one to submit to being loved, to having something done for you by someone who you feel is at least your equal and very often your superior. Yet it is a channel for the healing of relationships when done properly.
The proper response of love is temporarily to suspend judgement but not wisdom. Judgement in this sense, the sense of Jesus’ command in the Sermon on the Mount,4 is a pretence of objective and virtuous distance. The basis of the incarnation, of God taking flesh and being fully human in Jesus, is that identification with human beings is complete. We do not have that ability, but we can be creatively imaginative.
On one occasion, in the Niger Delta I visited a remote town, at that time only accessible by boat through the creeks of the wetlands. There were three of us in the group. When we arrived, we were taken to see a gang leader. He was slightly drunk and very threatening. He declared that we should be killed – a statement that was delivered all in the local language and that he was persuaded not to carry out by our local companion. We were ‘invited’ to stay overnight in a local guest house.
The next morning, he reappeared and took us on a tour of the town. A couple of miles away was a flow-station, a centre of oil production with the local field producing more than a hundred thousand barrels per day of very high-quality crude. Its generators gave it twenty-four-hour, reliable electricity for the plant and equipment, as well as for air conditioning, light and entertainment. Its helicopters could whisk people in and out and provide easy access to medical facilities. There was clean water and good food.
By contrast the town was a place of tragedy. It sat above the oilfield, a source of enormous wealth but only to others. Sewage ran down the main street, where children played. There was no regular electricity. Food was terrible, clean water absent, education for the next generation non-existent, medical care a mere dream. Malaria was endemic. Violence was constant in order to gain control and seek income from local contractors and others. It was at the very gates of hell.
Our ‘host’ was not a good man by most standards and was probably very bad indeed in many people’s eyes. Yet he had grown up there, comfort and wealth in sight in the near distance, and filth and violence his normal life. To judge would be to say that if I were him, I would have been better. To show wisdom would be to empathize with the sheer misery of his life and prospects but not to collude with the decisions he made.
So perhaps love is all we need (spot on, The Beatles): but we need to reimagine love.
Many people know the Apostle Paul’s beautiful hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13. It is often read at weddings, which puts a sweet, fluffy coating of sugar on it. When the words are taken and applied as they are meant, it is a soaring vision of foundations in peace for the world around us.
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 13, NRSV)
Patience
Peacebuilding requires patience in love. The nature of conflict is to generate suspicion. Facing suspicion and the irrationality that comes with it requires a deep love and understanding in facilitators as they seek to untangle the belief that they are taking sides. Part of the suspicion will be born out of years of being tricked and deceived. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, ending the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, it is reported anecdotally that when the Chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire heard that the leading French representative, Talleyrand, had died (he had not, in fact), he said, ‘Now what does he mean by that?’ Talleyrand was notorious for changing sides, and for his duplicity. Conflict involves deception, and deception breeds suspicion.
Patience is seen by time given. It is represented by long-term commitment. More than that, the commitment must be organizational, not just individual. There is something deeply addictive about being seen to be indispensable, but it is only of any benefit to the person concerned, never to the cause they support. Too often in facilitating peacebuilding there is dependence on a star figure. The more of a star they are the less they are able to give time and patience to one place.
The Alexandria Declaration depended to some degree on the skill of Canon Andrew White. When he became caught up in other equally important areas momentum failed. Relationships need nurturing. No individual can manage the commitment and be sure to be available as much as required. However, it is possible to create institutional links where trust is created over time by a consistent and patient commitment through a group.
The nature of institutions is, however, bureaucratic. A clear example is the United Nations Organization. Created in 1945 it has grown into a vast network of specialist groups within the UN family. At its centre sits the Security Council (UNSC), served by the Secretary General. Almost all who work in it know and see its faults and the inertia that develops because of the rivalries among the P5, the Permanent Five members of the UNSC, who are able to veto or otherwise block UN activities in peacebuilding.
It is easy to criticize, and there is plenty of valid criticism, but nobody has come up with anything better. The UN has built up great skill in intervening in conflicts and has both an unrivalled view of what is happening in confrontations around the world and wisdom in how to approach them. The agendas of its members may frustrate it plans, but that is not its fault. Most of all, it avoids the star system.
The single hero figure and the UN represent the two ends of a process of peacebuilding. One end struggles with patience and resilient long-term commitment and thus initiatives run out of steam. The other is prone to being unable to act in time while its members work out their interests. The first can build good relationships with an individual. The second has the methods but misses the personal approach.
Peacebuilding and reconciliation facilitation includes the necessity to hold the two together. Earlier on in this chapter we looked at John 13 and the account of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. He had been committed to them for three years or so, and the moment was approaching when he would go, and they would remain. Their capacity to take over and to live as they were called to by him was essential to the whole of God’s plan for the world. As in so much in the Bible, God’s love is shown in patience and in partnership with human beings.
Jesus has built a community and in the washing of the feet was setting a pattern for its life. It is an act that ensures that the community is people- rather than task-focused, and this is achieved through obeying his command to ‘love one another as I have loved you’.
Those who are going to be involved in facilitating reconciliation must therefore be committed to working in a team, with no stars among them and a long-term vision in which their contribution may well never be recognized. They will need love that patiently suffers setbacks and yet continues, perhaps from a different approach. They will need to see those involved in the conflict not as resources to be managed and manipulated but as human beings to be liberated from the struggles in which they find themselves.
Loving and Keeping Distance
Where are the limits in love? At what point does wisdom say, ‘Do not meet such and such a person’?
In the 1950s a Dutch Christian, using the name Brother Andrew, began to reach out to Christians behind what was called the Iron Curtain.5 He carried out this work for many years,6 but after he had stepped back he continued to visit terrorist groups in order to build relationships with their leaders and to speak to them of peace. He did all this without publicity, public funding or self-advertisement. Its impact cannot be measured yet the risks were very considerable.
First was the risk meeting the people he did. Second was the risk to his reputation. To meet people who are known to be involved in violence, or in a domestic situation, in abuse of one kind or another, is often seen as collusion. It risks being shut out from speaking to those on the other side on the grounds that if you have met the bad person you must be their friend, and my enemy’s friend is my enemy. Third, it risks losing the wisdom of seeing the reality of those you deal with (as discussed above in Chapter 2). One terrorist I met was in appearance and manner a sort of Father Christmas. He was small and round, smiled the whole time and told jokes. He also killed a lot of people, but his charm somehow seemed to overshadow the evil. Another, a former Head of State, spent an hour explaining that the rumours of the number of people he had killed were very exaggerated. So charismatic was he that I caught myself thinking, ‘Well, that’s not too bad.’ It was only later that reality sank in more clearly when I compared notes with others.
Evil is attractive in a horrible way. The villains in novels and plays are often more interesting than the heroes. Look at Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, or at Shakespeare’s Richard III, Macbeth or Coriolanus. Fiction reflects reality. Where then are the limits and how does a facilitator avoid being sucked into collusion?
Love should not be blind. Researching will have demonstrated the character and history of the main parties to a conflict. To emphasize what has been said already, humility in the facilitator, when with colleagues or a supervisor, will enable them to be aware what their motivations are. Some participants in a conflict are deeply committed to power seeking and active hatred. Recognizing who those are will seldom be the role only of one person.
There are some obvious rules. If there is a family where the breakup of a marriage is linked to abuse of children, or to substance abuse that is not admitted, or to violence where there is an attempt at self-justification, then reconciliation will almost always mean seeking to find the least damaging parting possible.
The same may well be the case with regard to racist activity or other systematic and calculated oppression of minorities or the vulnerable. One test as to limits is the possibility of one party being willing to repent and make reparations. This was the test imposed by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.7 Those who participated in acknowledging their crimes could hope to share in the amnesty only if they were willing to be honest (Truth) in front of victims and to demonstrate that they understood what they had done wrong.
Talal Asad,8 in a very powerful examination of the sociology of suicide bombing, saw this most extreme and irreconcilable of violent acts as requiring a violent response from law enforcement that says ‘some humans have to be treated violently in order that humanity can be redeemed’. Love is not infallible but must be held in a moral framework so that ‘being loving’ cannot become an excuse for behaving wrongly or ignoring injustice. Temporarily suspending judgement must not become the toleration of injustice. Love wrongly expressed may lead to great evil and require violence to be faced. There are some people who, in police terms, need to be removed from a conflict if there is to be hope of reconciliation. That removal is a demonstration of a love for the majority whom they may influence by fear or favour. To bring them into reconciliation the worst of the spoilers may have to be faced and not included in the process.
Summary
• Love is of the very nature of God, and it is in love for human beings that God opens the way to reconciliation with God and also with each other.
• Reconciliation is a fruit of abundant love and is itself abundant.
• Relationships of love-in-action are the foundation of reconciliation. The love must be genuine.
• However, love-in-action is characterized by the words used by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, above all patience. Reconciliation takes time.
• Love in reconciliation will often need to suspend judgement, but never to lose wisdom. It must discern where evil lies in individuals and structures and avoid being drawn into collusive and co-dependent behaviour.
Points to Ponder
• Think of the best examples you know of love-in-action. It may be family, or community, or more widely. What are its characteristics, compare them with 1 Corinthians 13.
• How do you avoid being taken in by charming villains or fascinating structures of evil? What would be examples you have seen, perhaps just in one person, or in history?
• Where have you seen the best examples of care that are emotionally committed but still wise and discerning?
Exercise
Your local primary school, St Thomas, in the Diocese of Barchester, is on the edge of town, between a series of small villages and an outer estate. It is a Church of England school, where the vicar chairs the school governors. The estate has high unemployment and considerable deprivation, made worse by the closure of a local shoe factory about three years ago. The local church, St Thomas the Pompous (a lesser-known Barchester saint of the sixth century), has a very strong tradition of involvement with the community. It runs a food bank in partnership with other churches and a mosque, has a debt-counselling centre and a job club. It also is part of a group with churches in all four of the local villages, which are traditional country settings, with strong communities and ancient buildings. The town church was built in the 1960s.
Two major social changes are going on. First, a large number of asylum seekers are being sent to the estate and housed there. The town has one part with a significant, mainly South Indian population. Community relationships have been very good. However, the asylum seekers are from numerous other places, especially Syria, parts of Africa caught in war, and Afghanistan. School places for unaccompanied children are stretching the facilities of the school, food bank, social care and local doctors’ practice. Funding cuts have meant the council is very short of money. Waiting lists for housing are growing, affecting the children of people on the estate. There is ethnic tension that has shown itself in the church feeling less welcoming and some comments that ‘they should go somewhere else’.
In order to raise money, the council is selling some land it owns between the town and the nearest village. It is doing this in partnership with the Diocese of Barchester, which also owns land in the same area. The bigger development is attracting a lot of bids from developers to build executive housing for commuters at a new railway station connecting to Barchester itself, a financial services hub.
The vicar is caught. Interfaith relations are beginning to struggle. The villages are up in arms at being ‘joined’ to the town by the new housing. The school has gone down an OFSTED (quality assessment) grade, which is felt by the staff to be very unfair considering the pressure they are under. The vicar and her colleagues want to see the village churches rise to the new challenge. The churches are very keen not to.
The staff team have asked you, as the Diocesan Reconciler, to help.
Can you start by mapping a little of the various conflicts? In a group of three or so, look at the research you want to do, and invent the answers (keep it relatively short!). Second, who do you need to build relationships with? How will you overcome the problem that you are from the diocese that is contributing to the issues?
Warning: this story is going to extend through Part II. Feel free to adjust the jargon for a non-Anglican situation or reimagine the case in terms of your own circumstances, but with the similar challenge of large-scale change in a conservative area with a religious institution that seeks to serve the population.