Letter from our Minister
My holiday in Northern Ireland this summer has given me much food for thought. A word I don’t use much in everyday language kept cropping up in a jarring sort of way.
‘Interface’ is the word used to describe the boundaries between the Protestant and Catholic or loyalist and nationalist areas, especially in Belfast. The physical interface is often a ‘peace wall’, which can be green link fencing like you see round schools, or a brick wall, or both with a steel panel for good measure. Sometimes it is two sets of green link fencing with a path in between.
A strange word to our ears to describe a boundary fence or path! Of course, one definition of an interface is that it’s a common physical boundary of two spaces or organisations.
However, a further definition describes an interface as an interconnection between concepts or human beings. And it involves communication or interaction. I think that the use of the word in this regard represents hope rather than reality.
Hope or a deeply held vision is certainly needed for a further definition of an interface as “a thing or circumstance that enables separate and sometimes incompatible elements to coordinate effectively”. I couldn’t see this happening in Belfast.
Of course, there are all sorts of community groups which are helping this vision bit by bit to become reality. One researcher includes the following accounts on her blog Gladys Ganiel, Building a Church without walls:
“A worker in West Belfast describes how youngsters living on either side of the peace wall live in almost total ignorance of each other’s lives:
[They are] very curious [about the other side]. … They would see me walking from one side to the other and think that I was not very intelligent [to do that] … so they would ask me, who are the people on the other side? What do they believe? What do they look like? Do they eat the same food even? … [They are] extremely curious but not always willing to meet.
Some women’s groups from across the divide gradually came together over several years. The women discovered:
When we looked back on it, we played the same games in schools, we ate the same food, we watched the same stuff at Christmas … we were made to go to church. … We were all doing the same.”
Yet another definition of ‘interface’ is “a thing or circumstance that enables separate and sometimes incompatible elements to coordinate effectively”. Maybe it’s these sort of interfaces that we should hope to see rather than inanimate walls.
So, where are the interfaces in our part of the world? Where are the boundaries that separate some people off from other people? And how can there be interaction or communication between them? Think about this as part of a church community seeking to make connections with the wider community around us. Maybe if we can identify some of the interfaces here we’ll be able to meet up and relate to people in the Wisewood, Wadsley and Loxley communities more effectively.
May you feel connected to God and to each other in Christian love.
Love Judith