BBC Radio 4 2016-10-17

On Friday last I found myself as a Catholic in a part of Belfast that was both geographically and culturally new to me. I had been invited to speak to the topic of identity and complexity. Not easy in Northern Ireland or to an audience with quite a different background and context from my own.

As a teenager and a student growing up in area closer to the border with Ireland, I had engaged in politics, but then in my early 20s I gave up. I didn’t want my faith and nationality to conflate and collide and I couldn’t figure out then how to stop it. I wanted both, but I wanted to separate them because they spoke to, and about, different parts of my identity. But in Northern Ireland, like what had been the case in many parts of Europe in previous centuries, religion followed nationality like night followed day. Back then I had felt that political engagement was all a bit worthless. I found myself thinking this situation won’t change. It is as it always has been with killing and violence being the norm. Little did I know.

Friday evening showed what had changed. Former paramilitaries from opposing sides who had spent most of the Troubles fighting each other, were seated at a table not only talking about their own past, with a refreshing honesty, but they were talking about other international conflict zones where they now helped people who might not be able to see a way out, to think about their options for peace.

The former paramilitaries are now showing others how they started to talk rather than to kill and how to make peace, not war. They’ve shown that the words to love your enemies are not an idealized aspiration, but can be made a political reality. So what once seemed impossible had become possible and what seemed to be inevitable had changed.

I needed a reminder that what might seem as the inevitable can change because there are times when we look out on the world with perhaps a growing pessimism about what is going on. We see the scourge of violence and terrorism, from Iraq and Syria to Nigeria. We see the poverty, fear and destitution it causes and a growing tide of democratic populism which offers simple solutions to complex problems.

And yet examples like what I saw on Friday evening are there in our midst even if at times they might get lost. One can think of the rapprochement between the United States and Cuba and also, despite the setback of the referendum, the peace in Colombia between the FARC and government.

Friday evening was for me something that I could never have imagined a generation ago. It was a much needed personal reminder that faith and humanity can surprise and change that which at times seems hopeless. It won’t come easily and will require decades of perseverance and the building of trust. But in the end, it can happen if we retain hope that even the hardest of hearts, including ours, can be transformed.