Suzannah said:
O, Grace just hold me in your arms
and let this moment linger...
.....
3. Andf when Ireland is finaly free
......
Ireland is not yet free sadly.
All of my life I have known that what we UK folk had caused, and were doing in Ireland, was a black stain.
My own Scottish life has always been diminished by this awareness.
The peace process has been wonderful, but so sabotaged by agenda.
There was an SDLP (a party wishing for Irish nationalist or united republic freedom, but by peaceful and political means only) man who was the engine of this peace process.
For me, it was his personal ministry, his personal comitment to redemption: which alone put the peace process show on the road; where others have simply lived of his bounty, as that process stutters and splutters in procedural gridlock.
With his retiral into the political shade, we lost much.
Ghandi also did this in India: political progress, through continuous redemption and retrieval, evry day; of what to others seemed gridlocked and hopeless.
We need Ghandis and John Humes in every setting of conflict: In Iraq, and in IsraelPalestine and elsewhere; redemption must take political expression; must be muscularly worked through the current affairs which beset us.
There is no other full Christian agenda, although not every Christian need work the political and current interface. As communion we can support a Christianity which generally redeems, and here, and now.