How to tell our stories

A talk given to the Probus Club in Enniskillen on 3rd January 2018

It’s something of a commonplace to say on these occasions that it’s a privilege to speak to you. This time it’s true for all the usual reasons, but also because, after a year that’s been a bit bruising for most of us, it’s given me the opportunity to gather up my thoughts and try to arrange them in some sort of coherence for 2018. It’s not exactly a New Year bouquet, but maybe a bunch of occasionally cheerful wild flowers.

Iain invited me here today with my Fermanagh Churches Forum hat on, so that’s the starting point for what I’d like to say. I’ve been involved with the Forum for around ten years now, as alternately secretary and chair, and amidst all the different groups and campaigns, it’s one that continues to feel vitally important to me. Why is that, how do I know that its work is of quiet benefit to Fermanagh and why do I believe that it is a model we all might follow as we act in the wider world?

Thinking about it, it seemed to me that there were three strands to what the Fermanagh Churches Forum is and does. The first is faith. The second is a vision of a transformed society. And the third is the telling of stories.

Each of those strands is also central to my own life. I’ve been a Christian for as long as I can remember, which is perhaps a little odd, as neither of my parents are. My faith journey, I have to warn you, has covered quite a bit of the denominational spectrum. I was baptised at the age of seventeen by total immersion at an Elim Pentecostal church, and confirmed a few years later, as a student, at the Cambridge Catholic chaplaincy. These days I don’t really identify with any particular denomination, but I belong to the Fermanagh Quaker worship group, and it is there that my faith feels most rooted and at home.

The vision of social transformation, and the activism that seeks to realise it, has become a larger part of my life since I came to Ireland nearly fourteen years ago. It’s always been there – my parents were politically aware, and my dad was a Labour councillor for a while when I was little. As a teenager I found causes that spoke to me – campaigns against racism and what we now call homophobia, for peace and nuclear disarmament, against the arms trade and for justice for what we then called the Third World. But it was only really when we lived in Italy, at the beginning of the Iraq War, that I felt the urge to be more directly politically involved, and realised that the Partita Verde represented the vision that I shared.

My Italian was barely up to parent-teacher meetings at the children’s schools, so the idea of trying to keep up with a room full of politically excited Italians was always going to be a non-starter. But as soon as we moved to Ennis in County Clare, I joined the local Green Party branch and found myself, as one does, appointed as secretary.

When we moved up to Fermanagh in 2006, there was no local Green Party group, so I spent a few years as a quiet ordinary member. Then in 2011 came the fracking threat, which you’ll all remember, and I threw myself into the awareness campaign, editing the website and using my slightly rusty legal skills (I’d been a solicitor back in England) to research the law around the issue.

The campaign was hard work, at times very difficult, and although the threat has been averted for now, it’s still on the back burner and we can’t be too complacent. It was in some ways a wonderful experience: I learned a lot, made some great friends and became part of a worldwide network of people working to make our energy clean and sustainable. I attended the first ever global anti-fracking summit in Paris while the climate change talks were on there, and last summer went to the fracking site in Lancashire to talk to activists there about our experiences. And of course it was encouraging to see most of the mainstream parties gradually come round to our point of view.

But to be honest, we were lucky. If things had been a little different, we, like my friends in northern England, could be facing the destructive power of actual fracking in our beautiful county. Single issue campaigns are important, vital in many cases, but too often they are only firefighting, struggling against one immediate threat while others pop up out of sight. During the frackfree campaign we spent a family holiday in the southwest German city of Freiburg. Freiburg is unusual, even within Germany, in having had a Green-led local council for fifteen years. It has the obvious characteristics of an ‘eco city’: lots of bicycles, few cars, energy efficient buildings and a thriving sustainable technology business sector. But I sensed something deeper than that too: a real sense of wellbeing, of its being a place where ‘standards of living’ weren’t just about how much money you had, but about living and working in real communities that would go on nurturing its inhabitants and welcoming newcomers for generations to come.

I spent an afternoon sitting on a rock in the middle of the river there, thinking about the place, and its difference from anywhere else I’d been. By the time I walked back to the campsite something had shifted in me. I knew that, though I’d continue to campaign on fracking and other issues, the focus of my activism had changed. I had seen what could happen when people in the structures of government shared a vision of a fairer and cleaner future, and that was what I wanted for Northern Ireland. That afternoon is what led me to stand in the 2015 election (and, which I hadn’t bargained for, in the three others that followed close on its heels) and, ultimately, to being elected as deputy leader of the party last October.

Finally, storytelling, or, to be more precise in my case, writing. It’s something I’ve done for longer than I can remember, certainly long before I started school. I always imagined that, as an adult, I would write terribly serious literary novels, but I always had trouble getting them going. Then, while I was serving my articles as a trainee solicitor, a plot, a distinctly farcical plot, was insidiously coming together at the back of my mind. When the articles were over, and I was at home with Rory, our second baby, I began to write the fantastical story down. It became Ophelia O and the Mortgage Bandits, the first of a trilogy published by Hodder Headline. Since then I’ve written more novels and also some non-fiction, a couple of books about chess – our eldest son Gawain is a grandmaster – and the blog greenlassie.com which began as an election diary. This talk will appear on it when I get home.

I’m currently writing a crime novel set in Fermanagh, and no, no one will lurk in it in disguise, though one or two local characters might make guest appearances in person.

So that’s me. Back to the Fermanagh Churches Forum. I was a bit confused by the name, at first, otherwise I would have joined as soon as John Phillips, our first next-door neighbour in Enniskillen, mentioned it to me. It’s actually a group of individuals, not church representatives or delegates. Many, probably most, belong to congregations in or near Fermanagh, but they don’t have to. Neither is there any kind of doctrinal requirement. It’s a group where we can share our ideas and experiences, not one where we will be told whether or not they are ideologically correct.

I can’t do better, in trying to describe the Forum, than to read to you our brief aims and objectives.

The aims of the Fermanagh Churches Forum are:

• To foster co-operation towards community building, through a process of active listening, sharing and reflection.
• To improve mutual understanding through education by creating space and opportunity to explore who we are, where we have come from and where we want to journey together.
• To promote recognition of and respect for a diversity of faith traditions and multiple cultures.
• To honour our need for and commitment to healing, reconciliation and forgiveness.

To further these aims, we have set ourselves the following objectives:

• To offer a safe space, promoting an atmosphere that is respectful and non-judgmental and in which each person is valued
• To provide opportunities for interactive encounters, including small group activities, where all can share their experience of life as it relates to their sense of identity, culture and tradition.
• To promote understanding by organizing conferences, lectures and workshops.
• To provide opportunities for reflection aimed at facilitating dialogue, the development of new insights and a spirit of co-operation in the community and among the churches.
• To share knowledge of our various Christian traditions and our different cultures through the medium of church trails, exchange visits and courses.
• To search for and implement ways in which the Christian vision and gospel of Jesus can shed light on our ongoing experience of hurt and pain.

I can unashamedly extol these, because I had nothing to do with writing them; they were drawn up by the very wise and far-sighted people who first set up the Forum, many of whom are still actively involved. As you’ll see, we don’t ‘do politics’ in a party sense, but that strand of imagining and enacting a transformed society, which is what politics at its best ought to do, is at the heart of much of our activity.

And the way in which we explore both our faith and the action which it inspires, is often by way of stories. It is by telling our own stories, and listening to those of others, that we make those connections which together constitute community. Time and time again, individuals hear one another speak; about a childhood memory, a religious experience, a moment of revelation, an interpretation of history, and although the two may be from what they thought were diametrically opposed traditions, there is a spark of mutual understanding that can never be put out.

That is why, though we are small in numbers, and make no noisy claims, the quiet influence of the Forum, rooted in faith, holding a vision of transformation and telling and listening to stories, has, I believe, played its part in bringing healing and peace to Fermanagh. And now it is needed as much as ever before.

And that’s why I also see it as a model for each of us in the way we act in the wider world, whether we are speaking as people of faith, as political citizens or as tellers of tales. In difficult times, within Northern Ireland, the UK, Europe and the world, each of those discourses can be a way of making things better, but can also be a part of the problem.

We can all, heartbreakingly easily, think of examples of the toxic influence of religious faith, motivating, or least least acting as the stated motivation for terrible acts of violence and oppression. But there are subtler temptations too.

At its simplest, faith is made up of two linked dimensions: the individual’s relationships with God and with other people. And we each have a choice of what to believe and how to believe it. That choice may be compromised by internal conditioning or membership of a strict community but for most of us the available spectrum is quite wide. We can accept the form of faith or non-faith that we were brought up with; we can reject it or we can do something inbetween.

We may have spiritual experiences which provoke us to move towards or away from a particular tradition or way of expressing faith. Those experiences can be deeply significant, both to us and to others to whom we communicate them. But I think we do have to acknowledge that they are experienced subjectively and do not necessarily directly correlate with what we can call objective truth.

When it comes to ourselves, it probably doesn’t matter much whether we describe that experience as God telling me something or my conscious mind recognising something that my unconscious needs to convey. Or in any other language that makes sense to us. But it does matter if we give religious revelation, whether individual or collective, a status which privileges it over the faith choices of others, over the real moral principles of our own tradition or over the shared understanding of what constitutes the common good.

Something of that sort has happened, I think, to some of those evangelical Christians in America who chose to vote for Donald Trump and who continue to support him. They know that his words and actions are in conflict with the basic Gospel values of compassion, justice and nonviolence. But they have received a special revelation, mediated through the prophets of Fox News, that tells them essentially that the Democrats are demons and that Donald is the Anointed One, chosen, like a Old Testament hero, despite his manifest faults, and regardless of the damage inflicted upon their country and the world.

Religious faith has inspired and motivated many of our great leaders and reformers. But the messages which they bring have to make sense in secular terms as well. I don’t mean that they can’t be radical and challenging – often they need to be. They won’t, they shouldn’t, rest easily on a backdrop of growing inequality, worsening climate change and conscience-numbing consumerism. But they need to be compatible with the basic moral tenets of the speaker’s faith. In the case of Christianity, that means the priorities which Jesus showed, towards the poor, the sick, the disabled and the socially ostracised. In a diverse and inclusive society, they also need to be compatible with our common principles of freedom, justice and compassion. And at a time when we know more than we ever have before about the physical structure of the world and its inhabitants, and when our actions have an unprecedented effect upon that world, our fellow creatures and our human future, the messages brought by people of faith also need to be compatible with a mature scientific consensus.

Transforming society is of course something that we are all involved in, whether we are aware of it or not, as individuals and as participants in organisations, groups and campaigns. If we choose not to take part in any of these, not to vote, not to speak, not to act, we are not neutral, but passive supporters of whatever forces and interests are currently dominant. And, of course, we play our part in change, for good or ill, in the decisions that we make about what we buy, where we work and live, how we travel and how our children are taught and prepared for the future.

For some of us, the vision that we have for a different future leads to our involvement in electoral politics, an area that, to be honest, feels at the moment like a bit of a wasteland. The past two years in particular have demonstrated the limitations of dominant political discourses, whether here in Northern Ireland or further afield. Our thinking seems to be perpetually constrained by incredibly narrow and short term thinking. The world faces unprecedented crises, inflicting indescribable suffering on the wholly innocent, and yet our elections again and again ask us to define ourselves by relatively tiny distinctions and to vote according to those identities. If we’re too close to see it at home, maybe we could look to Barcelona, where so much energy, time, passion and resources are being expended on the question of whether the people there should live in the prosperous nation state of Spain or a new prosperous nation state of Catalonia. However much or little we are invested in one political tradition or another, I think we have a duty to keep asking the big questions, especially the really big question, ‘What of the poorest children?’, and to call upon our representatives to answer them.

Stories are central to both faith and politics. It’s a basic human impulse to put our beliefs into narrative form. Indeed, as George Monbiot points out in his new book, Out of the Wreckage, if we do not tell a good enough tale, we cannot expect others to listen. Our stories compete with one another for dominance, overlap, sometimes contradict, sometimes reinforce one another. All of that is fine. What matters is that we should tell our stories honestly, and listen to one another’s with respect.

A proper story needs content as well as form. It needs details, including the odd little ones that don’t really seem to belong. It needs characters who echo its theme, and also those who contradict it, those awkward, dissenting, essential voices like a fifteen-year-old at a family Christmas. If a story is only an outline, a bare assertion, it offers nothing to the soul. And when it comes in conflict with another bare narrative, there will be no common ground where the two can mingle.

That is what sometimes happens, I think, with very dogmatic forms of faith. When the mechanics of salvation can be represented by a formula, there is no space for real human experience, the humanity that Jesus himself showed in such abundance. And I wonder whether that is part of the impasse at Stormont throughout the whole of last year. Each of the two big parties has a story about why the talks have failed, but neither of those stories has any of the detail which could begin a new conversation.

Coming towards the end, I’m gathering up my clumsy bunch of thoughts and hoping that not too many of them are weeds. This will be a challenging year for us all, but especially for the younger generations. Many of the benefits which we might have taken for granted: free university education, well-paid and secure jobs, affordable housing, the right to live and work across Europe, are closed or closing to them now. They will have to deal with the worse effects of climate change, the loss of resources, the polluted degradation of our waterways, soil and air, and with the associated escalation in conflict and migration. We owe it to them, I think, to do what we can in the time that remains to us. And, as the Churches Forum has shown, there is much that we over-50s can do, quietly and without arrogance, to draw attention to what lies behind the headlines and slogans. Our mutual friend John Phillips does us all a great service with his timely letters to the local papers, gently reminding us of where our true priorities ought to lie.

So, whatever we believe in, I hope we can speak with humility this year, remembering that we may be wrong, and resolving not to make the lives of others the collateral damage of our stubbornness. Whatever our politics, I hope that we can act with compassion, remembering that our concerns, huge as they may loom to us, are small in comparison to the suffering of millions. And whatever stories we enjoy, I hope that we can tell them with integrity, and listen more than we speak. And on that note, I should surely finish.

Originally published on greenlassie.com