Importance of Church Unity Week
Many years ago I was invited to be the guest speaker at the Harvest Festival in the Church of Ireland in Culdaff.
I was honoured to be asked.
As a child this ancient church was a source of curiosity and mystery.
We even had a ‘dare’ to go into the graveyard and pull back a broken slab covering a First World War sailor whose body had been washed up on the local beach.
Below we could see his skeleton!
The ivy creeps up the wall which has a sundial: there are latticed windows.
In the autumn the crisp leaves of the large beech trees would rustle.
As night fell the air was full of the ‘caws’ of crows and I would run past as fast as I could for fear of ghosts.
Sometimes if the door was open and with a mixture of dread and curiosity we would ‘juke’ inside to see what they had that was different from ours.
As I grew older wonder changed to confusion and then to sadness.
Why did my friends have to go to a different school?
I remember my mother telling me of her regret at not being allowed to be bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding.
As I may have told you before my godmother fell in love with an American sailor.
He refused to ‘turn’ and they got married outside the church as many did at the time (no mixed marriages allowed then).
She was publicly excommunicated.
There was an irony in the fact that the same church of St. Eugene where here name was ‘read off the altar’ is the one where I, her godson, several years later began my ministry as a priest!
The Church ruled with an iron fist.
Thankfully, times have changed for the better.
That sundial on the wall of that old Protestant church now tells me more than the time of day.
It tells me that it’s time to stop seeing ourselves as ‘them’ and ‘us’ and it’s time to keep moving along the road of healing, reconciliation and peace as one family in Christ.
Church Unity week began last Monday.
It concludes with the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul.
When I was parish priest of Moville I invited my good friend, the Rev. Eric Lawson, to come and speak at Mass.
He was the local Methodist minister at the time and was my next door neighbour.
When our church in Moville was closed for renovations he gave us the use of his community centre for morning Mass.
When he spoke to us he said how sad it was that the media should make such a big story of this sharing of resources.
“Christians by nature should support each other. Why the big surprise? To make a fuss of this was the same as to have headlines such as ‘Parents Love Their Children’,” he said.
This sharing of pulpits during this Unity Week is a practice I have been following for many years and so last Sunday I invited the Rev. David Latimer (pictured), from First Derry Presbyterian Church, to speak to us at Mass.
He has been bravely reaching his hand across the sectarian divide and has been an agent of reconciliation here for many years.
Quoting Martin Luther King he said:
“We have learned to fly through the sky like the birds.
We have learned how to swim in the sea like a fish,
but we still haven’t learnt how to live together in peace.”
He spoke about the work he is doing promoting understanding and peace among the children of both communities.
They were asked to write a short message on peace.
This is what one primary school child wrote:
“Hey everyone, stop fighting! Let there be peace all over the world. Don’t say ‘impossible’ because then nothing will change. We can all do better.”
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