Years ago now I heard John Paul Lederach speak at Corrymeela about the four dynamics of reconciliation. Each of them plays their part in building peace and bringing about the longed for reconciliation. Those four dynamics move in and out of the front of stage, they work together and interweave, they correct and temper each other until something begins to take shape and that something is a process of reconciliation. The four are: Trust Mercy Justice Peace The difficulty is that for these four to begin to play their part and for a process of reconciliation to begin to take shape there has to first of all be relationship. For Lederach that relationship begins in the context of apology and forgiveness and the new relationship that emerges because of apology and forgiveness. Perhaps one of the difficulties with talk about reconciliation is the tendency to mix up the different levels at which reconciliation can happen and sometimes we talk past each other by meaning different things. So for some people the personal and individual matters most of all. That would be true for some of the victims and survivors. For them their personal experience of hurt and the devastation of their lives always comes to the top and when they talk about reconciliation or when they resist reconciliation they are doing so out of their personal experience. For other people reconciliation sparks off thoughts about the experience of their community locally. That could be at one of Northern Ireland’s interfaces or so-called peace walls or it could be along some border areas where there is a strong feeling that a Republican campaign was waged. For still others it is about remembering a time when their community was moved on, bombed or burnt out or when their community felt the weight of being at the bottom of the pile when it came to jobs or prospects or access to power. When reconciliation processes are spoken of in a post-conflict context what is ideally meant is some kind of process which takes account of personal and local stories but which is essentially society wide and is political in the sense that it will enable the construction of new leadership relationships and new community relationships. It will have to be palatable to enough people to make it work but it doesn’t have to be accepted by everyone or even totally accepted by the majority. What does have to be agreed that it is needed and the bitter pill has to be of a size that most people can swallow even if it isn’t honey to their tastebuds! In an earlier post I wondered about the role of truth, justice and dealing with the past in the process of reconciliation. That too is an interweaving process because different people make different emphases in line with their needs. For those who seek truth more than anything else there are some who want detailed forensic truth and there are those who want the acknowledgement that the truth they think they have is broadly true e.g. that there was collusion rather than all the details of what collusion took place. For those who want justice there are different levels of justice sought. So some are content to let the judicial system run its course and if there is never enough evidence to convict then let it be so because they will not compromise justice as they understand it even for some lesser kind of justice, lesser in their minds. But for others some other kind of justice is enough – a justice procedure which allows acknowledgment and/or apology rather than courts and evidence and convictions. It is already possible to see that some would prefer not to deal with the past unless it can be dealt with by traditional means while there are others who want to deal with the past and are willing to construct something different for the purposes of that and in recognition of the fact that we lived through abnormal times and so abnormal means may be needed to put those times behind us as a society. Interweaving, interplaying, constructing for the time – all this suggests to some a lowering of the bar which is to give in to those who terrorized in the past. I prefer to think of it as an opening of the doors so that something new and more hopeful can emerge and out of which something more moral, more inspiringly upright can be born. In this way reconciliation: … brings people together, enabling them to grow beyond the past to re-establish a normalized, peaceful, and trusting relationship in the present. (http://www.colorado.edu/conflict/peace/treatment/recocil.htm) For me coming to this from the perspective of the Christian faith it is good to be reminded not only of apology and forgiveness which are words in usage every day of the Christian life lived in the sight and presence of a perfect God, but also of mercy. Apology and forgiveness mean nothing if it were not for the mercy of God and that is a lesson as we walk out through our doors – a lesson and a challenge and a humbling reminder. Reconciliation clearly takes times. It is hard to trust a good friend who lets you down and so much harder to trust one who once trained their gun sights on you or your loved ones. It is sometimes well nigh impossible to offer anything even remotely like mercy to people who insulted you or tarnished your name never mind someone who typified you as a monster without eyes for the weak or for your humanity. Justice is a good thing – most of us wouldn’t argue with that. But sometimes the justice that we seek slips over into a desire for retribution. Allowing the reconstruction of justice is an awesome challenge. Peace is hard to accept when hurt continues to run deep and refuses to heal. Hurt takes its own time and sometimes it never heals so to let things ‘be at peace’ can be an almost intolerable request. Reconciliation cannot happen over night but equally it cannot happen unless people are prepared to risk relationships with each other. Uncomfortable, prickly, judgmental, suspicious relationships they may be, but without that basic commitment there is no hope. In his book The Journey Toward Reconciliation Lederach returns to the story of jacob and Esau – two brothers who were thrown into disarray and conflict and who walked away from each other. For a long time they lived apart and for a long time they wondered each about the other and then steps were taken for them to meet again. There was preparation to be done. The separation had been for a very long time. All of this is to point to the fact that reconciliation cannot be rushed and there are some things about which people simply cannot meet. So Lederach writes: … we must be cautious about quick formulas of “forgiveness’ and being “nice” to each other. Well-intentioned people may advise estranged parties to quickly forgive and forget. Yet those parties may need a long time and geographical separation for healing to occur. (p133) For Jacob and Esau the separation lasted for decades. In the process of reconciliation mercy, trust, justice and peace matter and must work together in the relationships being woven through experiences of apology and forgiveness. None of it is linear, not even the beginning in apology and forgiveness. Sometimes the trust of friendship despite backgrounds comes first. But always in the process thought must be given to the spaces people need to part, to separate, to wonder among ones own or on ones own about what is going on and to wander away from the process for a time and then to find the way back. That is natural in human experience and human experience cannot be written out of the reconciliation process and the hope it brings.

Sometimes when we talk about reconciliation we mean a particular time or moment when something changes and with it a relationship changes too. That relationship can be at its beginning or it can be one put back together after a fracture, a fracture that can be deep and hard to heal. Sometimes when we speak about reconciliation we are talking more about what will need to be done to achieve it than we are about reconciliation itself So we may resist the steps that need to be taken, in our view, to be reconciled and in so doing we resist reconciliation itself in any shape or form. For example it is the case that some from within the broad unionist family do not wish to change their view of why they were involved in the security services and while they are prepared to admit that there are a few bad apples everywhere and that things may have gone wrong they are not prepared to admit anything more or to be open in any way to the possibility of more going on within the British establishment in terms of collusion etc. If pushed they may concede that there could have been things going on but only, they would qualify it, because there was no alternative. It would be their view that the State would have acted with as much integrity as  was possible in the circumstances. Being already unwilling to get into discussion about such matters it is sometimes the case that those who hold this view will not get involved in any process of reconciliation as they understand this to be the intended goal of ‘the other’s sides’ process of reconciliation.

So the question arises about what reconciliation is and how it happens. Is it a goal or a process and if it is a goal can that goal be forced or decided upon before a process begins? When a society begins the move from a divided past to a future in which old enemies lay down their weapons and begin to tolerate one another, co-operate with one another and one day value one another, then reconciliation has become a reality. It is not, though, complete. A society knows it is making progress when it is more defined by how it is reconciling than by its divided past. Whether or not society has reached that point in Northern Ireland is open for debate but clearly there remain matters from the past that still have to be dealt with even though it may be said that some aspects of reconciliation have been achieved, for example in sharing government no matter how far short of the ideal that may fall. So reconciliation is both a goal and a process and in the process of being reconciled there will be goals along the way. It is important that the reached goals are marked and not forgotten but it is also important that the process retains momentum until such times as society is defined more by how it is reconciling than by its divided past. Reconciliation has, therefore, to be committed to both as a goal and as a process, or perhaps more pertinently as a way of life. Without reconciliation the pull of the past is strong enough to overwhelm. This has to be resisted and the reconciliation process resourced so that a better future is not only imagined but also achieved.

The processes of reconciliation are many and various and all are needed at all levels of society if an ultimate reconciliation is to be achieved and the process to remain energized. The processes can be as local as local neighbourhoods working together on some common issues such as community safety or what to do about drugs in the locality or even on issues such as local areas for children to play together. When people decide it is possible to work together locally in ways that they wouldn’t have in the past then reconciliation processes are under way. In interface localities the working together faces the challenges of reaching out across old divides and transforming the space that was once a place for violent encounter to become spaces of creative engagement and growing interest in and understanding of each other. Considerable work goes on in this way and often the stories are not told or not heard. In rural communities new ways of meeting where there is real engagement one with another in ways that wouldn’t have happened in the past are also possible but in some cases that means stepping outside of self-sufficient rural communities to cross over into other self-sufficient rural communities. Then there are more political processes that are needed if reconciliation to occur at a more middle level. That will involve public story-telling, art work that takes up the issues in plays or music or photographic exhibitions or the like. Some of the institutions of society will be involved in this middle level peace-building and reconciliation work – schools meeting with other schools, churches stepping out beyond their own walls etc. Then finally there are government led processes which in the context of Northern Ireland have been about the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement the St Andrew’s Agreement etc. At all levels of society there are processes of reconciliation under way.

At this point in our history, knowing that reconciliation is a process and that it has goals and understanding that reconciliation needs to be embedded as a way of life we face the question about what needs to be done to take the processes on to the next stage There are some issues that remain unresolved and as trade-off politics continues I would suspect that soon we will run out of things to trade in. The big issues will finally have to be faced and there will have to be decisions made about information sharing, about what to do in order to get more information to victims and their families. Something will have to be done about the justice that is never going to be achieved in the usual way but there may yet be justice for families and loved ones as they have their questions answered. Something still needs to be done about the stories that haven’t been told, about the hurts that haven’t been healed and about those who believe the peace has no dividend for them. Something still needs to be done about sectarianism lest it comes back to haunt, or worse comes back strong and violent. Something still needs to be done about the sectarianism we tolerate so that services are dispersed and improperly resourced – education provision, health provision, local community cohesion and development – all of these are still addressed in a sectarianised way which divides resources and results in failing to achieve all that could have been achieved. Something still needs to be done about the re-integration of prisoners and about how prison officers and ex-UDR personnel feel about how things have played out for them. Something still needs to be done about the way in which people can openly demean each other or put each other down. I hesitate to propose any form of commission but something needs to be pulled together so that the past doesn’t hover with ghostly presence over everything that is done so that decisions are always made in the shadow of that ghostly past. New processes are still needed if the goal of a better place, a place which is more defined by how it is building better relationships and a society in which people can flourish is to be achieved. Reconciliation happens when there are good processes in place at every level of society and sometimes reconciliation processes have to be formed out of leaps of faith that the brace take because they believe that they have come along way but also that things can so still be so much better.

Reconciliation doesn’t happen quickly and it doesn’t always happen easily and it certainly isn’t a linear process with only one goal in view. In all of it it is important to note that Lederach argues, and he has been involved in more peace-building and reconciliation processes than more, that resolving or finding a way out of the conflict can take as long as the conflict itself.