Opinion Articles

*Painting peace, walking heroically into the unknown
By Jonathan Inkpin
Reverend Dr Jonathan Inkpin visited the Hunter on Sunday night 30th May as a guest speaker for the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity Service. This is an edited version of his address. Jonathan is the National Council of Churches in Australia Co-ordinator for the Decade to Overcome Violence, a world-wide initiative of the churches to promote peace and reconciliation.

Father Paolo Turturro, a parish priest in Palermo (Italy), once launched a children's competition for a peace poem or painting. The winning entry ran:

"I had a box of colours.
There was no red for the blood of my wounds.
There was no black to paint
The mourning of my loved ones.
I didn't have yellow
For the world's jealousies.
I had blue:
I sat
And painted peace."

Father Turturro used the title Painting Peace for an organisation he founded to help Palermo youths and keep them out of the Mafia's hands: a wonderfully practical way of overcoming violence. But whilst we may admire and seek to emulate his work, that poem will not really do. We need all the colours to paint our peace, not just a pastel or even deep bright blue. We need red, for the blood that is spilt; black, for the world's sorrow and despair; and yellow, for our own sins and jealousies.

Unless we face up to these things, then our hopes can bear no fruit. And of course, red and black and yellow are precisely the colours of the Aboriginal flag: a vivid reminder that there is no reconciliation without mourning, or saying sorry, no peace without justice and respect, no rainbow without all the colours of our life.

This brings us to the heart of Christian faith, which does not paint the world a simple blue. The Cross faces up to the realities of peace and the cost of reconciliation. For the peace which Jesus gives is not the peace the world gives. Jesus offers us deliverance from fear, but also calls on us to act. Indeed, one vital aspect of the Cross is that it comes when we try to change things. As those who struggle for causes of new life have always understood: "first they ignore us, then they ridicule us, then they oppose us (sometimes with violence) … and then we win". For like the rainbow and the dove, the Cross is present when the times are changing. They are not a sanctification of suffering, but an inspiration to transform it.

Lowitja O'Donoghue, one of our patrons, expressed this powerfully at the national launch of the Decade to Overcome Violence: "It seems to me", she said, "that there is little point in talking about peace as an abstract ideal, in a world such as this, unless we actively respond to the values that support and maintain violence as the norm. Given what we are up against, this cannot be achieved simply with an assurance that at a higher level everyone is loved. I believe that the church in order to fulfil its mission, must, in its actions and teachings, show a different way. It was John Dewey who said, and I quote: 'The only way to abolish war is to make peace heroic'."

This is the spiritual challenge behind our churches' call for us to break down the walls that divide people today: the horrendous divisions caused by poverty and debt amongst the world's poor; the barbed-wire fences of suspicion towards refugees; the walls of deep misunderstanding and hostility between people of different faiths and cultures; and, above all, in our own land, the continuing barriers to Indigenous health, respect and self-determination.

Peace then is firstly a gift of God, but also a goal towards which we must actively work. Yet for Christians, peace is also mystery, in the continuing life of the Holy Spirit. No wonder Pentecost speaks in terms of tongues of fire and rushing wind. This is peace as transformation, profound change and movement. Not for nothing therefore is the Decade to Overcome Violence known simply as DOVe. For just as the dove takes flight and cannot be contained, so genuine peacemaking continually transgresses the bounds of comfort and security, with which we are too easily content.

John Brewer from Northern Ireland puts this movingly. "In the context of our thirty years of troubles", he says, "violence, fear and division are known. Peace is the mystery! People are frightened of peace. It is simultaneously exciting and fearful. This is mystery. Peace asks a lot of you. Peace asks you to share memory. It asks you to share space, territory, specific concrete places. It asks you to share a future. And all of this you are asked to do with and in the presence of your enemy. Peace is mystery. It is walking into the unknown."