11.09.2016
Sacred, Secular, Civilisation, Culture – Where Next? – Archbishop’s Sermon at the British–Irish Association Conference
The annual conference of the British–Irish Association (BIA) is meeting in Pembroke College, Oxford this weekend (9–11 September 2016). The BIA annual conference brings together a wide range of people – senior politicians and government officials, businessmen and women, academics, faith leaders, writers, former paramilitaries and community workers – to discuss matters of mutual concern. Both the Archbishop of Armagh and the Archbishop of Dublin are in attendance.
Archbishop Michael Jackson preached during a service at the conference this morning (Sunday September 11).
Focusing on the murder of Father Jacques Hamel as he celebrated the Eucharist at St–Etienne–du–Rouvray near Rouen on July 26th 2016, the Archbishop examined the sacred and the secular.
The full text of the Archbishop follows:
British Irish Association Oxford: sacred, secular, civilization, culture – where next?
THE CONTEXT OF FAITH AND FRAGILITY
I am not sure that I myself might have made the connection, but I am very glad that someone else did it for me. The words from Deuteronomy, from the depths of The Law in the Hebrew Scriptures, chapter seven: ‘It was not because you were the greatest … but the fewest that I set my heart upon you’ stuck with me. They were connected with, were made part of and were woven into an appreciation of the witness of the community of St–Etienne–du–Rouvray near Rouen on July 26th 2016. This is the extremely small gathering, the ecclesia, in which Father Jacques Hamel was the celebrant of the Eucharist. In this specific context he lost his life at the premeditated and brutal hands of a young man almost a quarter of his age and undoubtedly much stronger than he. Our instinct is rightly to think of the priest and celebrant and primary victim, Father Hamel, whose age seemed to change a little with every News Bulletin, oscillating in a rather macabre way (considering the fact that he was now dead) across the range of 84, 85, 86 years of age. But we need also to recall the gathered community who represented and still represent something that runs deep in the Judaeo–Christian Scriptures, the anawim, the poor in spirit, the inconsequential in the world then as now and undoubtedly also tomorrow. They are those in whose possession, and therefore in whose gift, is the Kingdom of God according to Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount as articulated by St Matthew.
THE EUCHARIST AND ITS RANGE
President and Celebrant of The Eucharist on the Feast of Joachim and Anna, earthly parents of earthly Mary, Father Hamel’s excruciating experience and mind–numbing murder rightly expand and extend instinctively to include those who had gathered in small numbers in that little–known Temple, not in Jerusalem of old, but just outside twenty–first century Rouen, to do what some people do: remember liturgically the person of Jesus Christ in the cycle of the Christian Year filtered and refracted through the lives of those who anticipate and those who respond to The Christ: ‘Blessed are those waiting for the consolation of God.’ He looked frail when in life, already slightly of the world to come. The transition did not take long. In other circumstances the community would have been unnoticed, unworthy perhaps of notice; they were doing the sort of odd sort of thing that odd sorts of people do on weekdays when they go to church, when they make celebration of the Eucharist to mark lives of saints, exemplary and often unspectacular.
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY CELEBRITY AND MARTYRDOM?
And in a world where Selfie–celebrity–status has not only skewed our concentration on things beyond ourselves but has also enhanced our over–concentration on our own banalities, brilliances and self–importance, this is perhaps an early morning wake up call for those who feel the Fast Lane is made for them and they for it. On one argument, the people in church had nothing else to do, nothing better to do. On another argument, they were praising God and praying for those who were not present, praying for the world, as an act of worship, however small but, in their terms, not insignificant. It was an act of altruism to a world that might have been just as happy not to know that they had been worshipping at all. But once the unthinkable happened, everybody became interested in the Church of Saint–Etienne–du–Rouvray as an ‘event.’ In specifically Christian terms, it shattered a particular sense of security. In our own time, those of us who are interested in Christianity had probably become accustomed to the idea of white martyrdom, the sort of ascetic withdrawal and counter–culturalism we associate with the Desert Fathers and Mothers and their latter–day institutionalized successors, nuns and monks, however faltering their fortunes; harmlessly irritating, slightly dotty, no longer significant players in a globalized world. July 26th brought us face to face once again with red martyrdom in humanist Europe. It was not, of course, new to Christians worldwide but we had been able to shield ourselves from it and keep it, by and large, in the televisual side of our brain. It was back; and the death of one priest like this meant it was out of control in a very specific way. It is not that Christianity deserves immunity. It is that it happened.
LAICITE, RELIGIOSITE – CAN THEY MEET?
Perhaps it is because of a long refined and substantially unchallenged understanding of laicite since 1906 that France today seems to have almost no comprehension of religiosite. This has come to the fore with almost every public articulation around Paris, Nice, Rouen. The vocabulary and the grammar simply are not there. There seems to be no official capacity or appetite to ‘get’ the narrative of any Faith or Religion as having an integrity or foothold. And yet nobody is asking officialdom to agree with it or to practise it, just to understand it and protect it. And the same instinctive reaction was manifest in ‘the burkini ban.’ It seemed acceptable to the French authorities locally in Villeneuve–Loubet near Nice and elsewhere; yet internationally it caused much outrage; it exposed political divisions over Islam and secularism in France; it highlighted a sense of entitlement to dismantle a deeply held and required cultural decorum around that great unresolved ancient and modern conundrum: the body. A French Court had to rule that such cultural and ethnic bulldozing was an infringement of fundamental rights.
LIBERALISM
We in these islands pride ourselves on a true liberalism and yet most people wallow in a laissez–liberalism of popular indifferentism and touchiness over any invasion of ‘our space’. From time to time we may need to ask ourselves if we are moving quite far down the track of un–generous liberalism and, if we decide that we are, we need to ask if this is where we want to be. In a multi–cultural world, people will not stop witnessing to their faith, however irritating and embarrassing they might be, or living their emotional culture of primary identity. Martyrdom is a word too readily invoked. Yet it is part of the rhetoric and the reality of Rouen 2016. The word, after all, means witness to the point of ultimate extremity of involuntary or imposed death for a religious cause. All the trappings of the fundamentalism of contemporary technology were part of this latter–day martyrdom and nothing should have gone wrong: an electronic tagging system that was on and off as a result of assessment, agreement, decision by trained professionals; an honourable attempt to retain community–based incarceration and excarceration all at once. Add to this the now regular voices and faces of uncomprehending, linguistically–disadvantaged middle–aged parents seeing that their one–time–infant is now a murderer, a martyr, a corpse and a statistic – another ‘jihadist.’ There are in this story competing martyrdoms with no agreed framework of what constitutes martyrdom; so the Faiths themselves are in deep confusion as well as the politicians who regulate our lives and manipulate our values.
CONGREGATIONG AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURES
The focus of the world media during the ISIL campaign to date has had to keep changing in a way that is bewildering yet entirely predictable. There has been a steady focus on attacking things in the modern world that are an affront to ISIL and its pre–modern expectations of human congregating, convenience transport, public behaviour and personal ethics. And so we have the now coherent thread of: a Friday night in Paris with a highly orchestrated assault on people doing what they do in cities on Friday nights – going out for the evening; we have people gunned down in an airport as they somehow disturb the thirst on the part of ISIL for enforced separated–ness as people again do what people do – travel for pleasure or for business, either alone or in their family; we have the almost Bond–style massacre of families and individuals in Nice on Bastille Day – again colourful national pride is clearly out of bounds; we have the assault on the gay night club in Orlando – again these are people who clearly, the argument runs, should not congregate and really should not exist at all. But alongside this there has been the destruction of heritage, cultural capital (what we call archaeology) and yet it points us to something manifestly majestic and sacred whether it be Palmyra or Timbuktu; there has been the murder of the Rabbi leaving children to school in Southern France and the attack on the Jewish Supermarket in the same fell swoop; there has also now been the community of the vulnerable in Saint–Etienne–du–Rouvray and the murder of its priest. Destruction of secular and sacred gathering by those who affront ISIL has become the order of the day. There can only be more of it and in more and more venues. Nobody wants to hear this.
WE RETURN TO THE VULNERABLE
What of the vulnerable gathering outside Rouen, commemorating the vulnerable gathering in the Jerusalem Temple? Both manifest an absence of triumphalism. In St Luke we learn that this group of people: Joachim and Ann, Anna and Simeon, Joseph, Mary and Jesus are not given a message of hope for a military messiah unleashed to overcome the Romans, matching violence with violence; they are given a message of sadness and realism combined: ‘This child is destined to be a sign that will be rejected …’ (St Luke 2.34). Perhaps the message – and it is beginning to seep out – is that sooner or later everybody will have to talk with everybody: and, as they say: That’s just that! Irish history still asks this of us gathered here: Constant vigilance! Others have had to do it and continue to have to do it. Within the architecture of the Christian story of salvation and of redemption, told with its own narrative and often too violently, but embraced through history by many the world over, the anawim are the people who lie at the base of justice and righteousness as the Christian community has sought to offer both, imperfectly, generation after generation to the world. Salvation and redemption, justice and righteousness lead us into words like reconciliation and restoration, dignity and compassion. Those who travel in The Fast Lane are going nowhere without those On The Outside and those At The Bottom of the Heap.
The small community of 26th July may help us to ask the questions at very least.