The only way

Our sharing of a common destination should highlight for us the absurdity as well as the injustice and underlying evil of superficial differences that so often keep us apart. Any separation based on who or what we are, or on who we appear to be, is contrary to all that Our Lord has taught, and is in direct conflict with any proclaimed attempt to work towards unity.
As St Paul said, ‘There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female - for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ (Galatians 3:28).
It is faith in Jesus that brings us together, it is our sharing of the journey that makes us companions, and it is our mutual following of His teaching and example that draws us towards life as brothers and sisters in His name. We are His, and it is in that belonging that we can find ourselves reborn.

Our external differences are frequently experienced as being of great importance in this life. Even those which lead to so much of the aggravation and conflict in the world, and which clearly engender in so many people thoughts and feelings we know to be unacceptable at the very least, can lodge, uncomfortably or otherwise, in our own awareness. We know that all men and women are equal in the eyes of God, and we like to think the same applies when the world is viewed through our eyes. But even when we do pause to consider our attitudes towards the world at large, the result is often that we do no more than bolster our belief that this is the case, and in so doing we unknowingly bury ourselves further into our failure to recognize that, one way or another, we are all part of the problem.
This does not mean that we all have clearly defined racist, sexist, ageist, and every-other-ist attitudes, but that each of us is to some extent the product of the world around us and that world is riddled with these mindsets. The effective changing of any strongly held belief, whether collective or individual, is only achieved through a combination of faith and the passage of time. The faith begins in small ways in each one of us, with our suspicion that an attitude is wrong. The time is needed because in most adults with these wrong convictions there will be no appreciable change in their lifetimes. The strength of feeling, whether of hatred, disgust, revenge, injustice or superiority, has to be allowed to die away. The death of individuals removes their influence from their families and communities, and those who follow on, though their attitudes have been coloured by such people, will - we hope - live with a less pronounced bigotry. (For those of us who remember him, without God bringing about such a change, could we imagine Alf Garnet ever really being anyone other than who he was ?) This process, continuing through the generations, will dissipate the once intense feelings upon which inhuman attitudes were constructed, though it seems there is always somewhere in the world where differences flare into brutality, leaving us wondering if any conflict ever truly comes to an end.

This is of course a simplistic view of the problem, and similarly simplistic suggestions or proposals with regard to solutions should rightly be discarded as being naїve. However, simplistic and simple should not be dismissed as being identical twins any more than naїveté should be understood as meaning the same as some of the words found as alternatives in a thesaurus: words such as innocence, immaturity and trustfulness.
These three words are worthy of a few moments thought: they are each relevant here.
Innocence is what we do not have but should long for; immaturity is what we have but should long to be without; trustfulness is the atmosphere in which we grow into a maturity, the roots of which, though firmly embedded in a lack of innocence, draw nourishment for our re-growth. Such roots are capable of separating the good from the bad, and supplying both our present and our future with the framework for God’s work within us. This allows us to turn our backs on all that has deprived us of innocence, and any concerns we may have about being simplistic, while recognizing the simplicity of the solution as conveyed through the gift of God’s Word in Jesus. It is through continuing our process of coming together as fellow travellers with Him, following Him, and learning to see others through His eyes, that we gain an opportunity to short-circuit the far too slow passage of time in the destruction of un-Christlike and separatist attitudes.

Another word to pause with for a moment: ‘Separatist’ has been used to describe various groups of people in the past as well as the present, including those who wanted Home Rule for Ireland at a time when England still imagined that Land to be hers.
The conflict over Ireland – and we need only think of the actions and words of both Nationalists and Loyalists over Northern Ireland in the last third of the twentieth century – created much that I would have included among attitudes that could have been expected to live on until a whole generation had died away, and even then to have remained at a lower level for a further fifty years or so.
Note that I say Nationalist and Loyalist, not Catholic and Protestant. The divisions were along clearly defined lines that corresponded with the perceived differences between these two bodies of Christians, but the whole destructive struggle was a political one brought to a head by social inequalities laid over centuries of history. Religious and denominational differences became a readily available means of labelling within the media and especially within the bigoted segregation and inequality of that fractured community.
But what happened ? If we know the details we can point to any number of things, and to particular people, but still, for anyone who had any idea of the depth of feeling, the question remains: - What happened ?
‘Simplistic’ is dead and buried, but the word ‘simple’, seeming so naїve in its everyday ordinariness, points to the pre-existing simplicity and truth that is manifested through our faith and the passage of time; not our slow passage of attitudes and lives into graves with individual names, but the unnoticed approach of dawn within the hearts and minds of those who long to live, and who place their lives and loves into the hands of God. There, our innocence, maturity and trust will grow, and shall prevail.

The smallest of things can begin a minor annoyance that could eventually cause major rifts. I have purposely written naїve and naїveté above instead of naive and naivety. If any reader thinks something along the lines of, ‘What on earth has he written it that way for?’, it has perhaps demonstrated that fact.


'(Without discounting) the help of other humans in helping us draw near to God, or minimising the importance of others as God's instruments in accomplishing his work in our lives, we must ... recognise that human knowledge, wisdom or teaching, even concerning the gospel, cannot replace our need to receive revelation from God himself. It is only this direct revelation of God to our spirits that can change us and bring us new life.' (The Word Among Us. October 1992)


'The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.' (Paula D'Arcy. Where The Wind Begins.)
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