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Words at a Peace Vigil
Thursday 19th November 2015 @ 5:52 pm
Well done to Conor in the Students Union of Trinity College – who sensed the desire and need for students to have a say in the horrific escalating violence in our world. Over 500 of them turned up to light a candle and push back the darkness … Here are my few words to them …
When I was 16, I should have been killed in a car bomb in Bangor. But I was too lazy to be walking our dog. That was my teenage years, and that was the world I grew up in.
Living in Northern Ireland & growing up during the 1970’s and 80’s leaves certain marks on people …
It was a world where almost every day, there was a news item connected to terrorism – to death – to shootings – bombings – to the fear and fracture within a society that took decades to deal with its divisions … and still is dealing with them.
What did that upbringing teach me?
Violence breeds violence … the more we in this western world engage in war, plan for war, bomb, shoot and terrorize any group of people … the wider the spiral of suffering and pain develops.
You do not beat violence, with violence.
The second thing, is that what you do now, tonight, makes a difference … you are lighting a candle into the darkness …
American writer Arthur Gordon tells a tale of a pet cemetery in London, created during the second world war – a memory of the destruction and devastation visited upon such a great city … he writes about wondering through the tiny gravestones, thinking about the often inexplicable bonds between people and their animals … when he notices one inscription “There is not enough darkness in the world to put out the light of one small candle”
People having been lighting candles for days – in Paris, in Beiruit, in Baghdad, in Africa, in London, in Dublin, in places all over the world, in memory of those who have died in senseless acts of violence around this globe.
You do that now. You light a candle. And you push back the darkness. Don’t ever stop.
Around three thousand years ago, God spoke to the Jewish prophet Isaiah, telling him the kind of religious behaviour he desired … this is what is written in the Hebrew Scriptures concerning that question …
Isaiah 58 … The Message: selected verses 1–11
They ask me … (the Lord your God) Why do we humble ourselves and you don’t even notice?’ “Well, here’s why:
“The bottom line on your ‘fast days’ is profit. You drive your employees much too hard. You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight. You fast, but you swing a fist. The kind of fasting you do won’t get your prayers off the ground. ……
“This is the kind of fast day I’m after: to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation, free the oppressed, cancel debts.
What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill–clad, being available to your own families.
Do this and the lights will turn on …
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