A recent newspaper article claimed that King Charles and the Princess of Wales, who are both suffering from cancer, have found “strength in spirituality” in dealing with their illnesses. It is a sentiment which will be appreciated by people from all political and cultural backgrounds in these islands and further afield who would describe themselves as religious or spiritual, though these are not necessarily the same thing.
Many people nowadays would claim that “religion” is merely the structure of maintaining a Christian faith but that “spirituality” is the essence of faith itself, and not necessarily confined to Christianity alone.
On the other hand, many others who cannot accept these concepts may regard them as merely otherworldly escapism in our modern secular society where individuals seek their own “god” in other ways totally removed from what we would have once referred to as traditional religion.
In my recent book, Keeping the Faith, I set out to reflect on these and other issues which have helped to shape my values and career, during which I have spent more than 60 years as an author and journalist, and nearly 25 of those as the religion correspondent of the Belfast Telegraph.
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Looking back to my childhood as a Presbyterian by accident of birth, I realise yet again how churchgoing was obligatory in the small model village of Bessbrook where I was brought up. Sunday worship was an important social occasion, and the Presbyterian Church was also known as the Meeting House because it gave everyone, including local farmers, an opportunity to meet one another and to catch up on local news and gossip. The same applied no doubt to the Anglican and Catholic Churches in our village, and smaller groups like the Quakers and Plymouth Brethren, but significantly each denomination kept strictly to its own beliefs and religious cultural practices.
The Rev Ian Paisley was regarded by many of us as one of the people most responsible for the Troubles
The only inter-church service of the year was held in the local Methodist Church early on Christmas morning after we villagers walked around the dark streets with flash lamps while we awakened people with our medley of Christmas carols.
There was also a kind of cultural apartheid in death. People from the main denominations would express condolences to the bereaved but very few would dare to cross the threshold of a church belonging to “the other side”. Quite often it was regarded as respectful enough to stand silently outside the walls of the church, while the funeral service took place inside.
This, of course, was not exclusive to the “Black North”. That picture is mirrored in my colleague Patsy McGarry’s excellent new book, Well, Holy God, in which he forensically skewers the Catholic Church for its many sins of the flesh and spirit while prolonging the religious divisions in society. He and I were brought up as young country boys maybe 150-200 miles apart across the Border as the crow flies, but our experiences were uncannily similar.
There is no doubt the churches of all the main denominations singularly and collectively failed to lead their congregations across the man-made barriers and rules which were regarded at the time as the teachings of the Gospel – which they certainly were not – and which inevitably led to future scepticism and criticism when people felt free to make up their own minds about such important issues.
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That said, I refer in my book to a number of individuals whose deep Christian faith made a difference to those around them. They included the Rev Dr Ray Davey, a former Presbyterian padre during the second World War who spent years in Italian and German prisoner-of-war camps, and returned to his native Ulster to establish the seminal inter-church Corrymeela Community.
I was also in awe of my first Belfast Telegraph editor, John E Sayers, a dedicated member of the Methodist Church who survived a Royal Navy shipwreck and worked in Churchill’s map room during the second World War. He then returned to Northern Ireland to try to drag stiff-necked unionism into the 20th century, thus incurring the baleful hostility of the Rev Ian Paisley, who was regarded by many of us as one of the people most responsible for the Troubles.
Sadly, Sayers and his supporters lost and Paisley won, and look what happened in the North over the next 40 years or so. Part of my motive in writing my book was to pay tribute to people such as Sayers and Davey and many, many other liberal and courageous bridge-builders who are now part of the forgotten undergrowth of Irish history. If they, and the thousands of others like them, had been successful, how much death, injury and heartache would have been avoided from 1968 onwards.
Today, there is talk of a possible Border poll which looks as if it will not come any time soon, and much less some kind of Irish unity on a very long finger. However the stark reality remains that you cannot successfully unite the island properly until you unite the people in the North.
Meanwhile, the churches still have their huge crosses to carry as they try to move on from the terrible mistakes of the past and strive to remain relevant in the face of advancing secularism. Perhaps GK Chesterton was right after all when he claimed that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”
Alf McCreary is an author and journalist. His book Keeping the Faith is published by Messenger, at €14.95 and £12.95, and is available from local bookshops and on Amazon
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