Teaching the Troubles at NHA: "Where All Suffering is Honored"

Looking across the Irish Sea from Corrymeela to Scotland

Derick Wilson, a retired Professor and member of the Corrymeela Peace Community, was trying to describe what this community is all about. He and Sean Pettis (Corrymeela's Development Worker for Education) were walking us through the gardens between the buildings, which are arranged on a campus by the cliffside above the town of Ballycastle, just 17 miles of Irish Sea from Scotland. The Mull of Kintyre was a tall dark shadow above the skyline behind us.

"We are trying to create a space where there is no hierarchy of suffering," Derick explained. "A place where all people feel that their suffering is being honored."

Sean is half the age of Derick, but the two men ambled along together like high school friends, which immediately exemplified for me the easy communal and collaborative vibe of the place.

Here is a link to a short video made for the 50th anniversary of Corrymeela in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7rKlzuC8OU

Though called a Christian community, Corrymeela is nonsectarian and nondenominational and it feels more like a Buddhist ashram than anything else. Sean wears many hats here, but he seems to especially be a teacher of professional development for teachers and a documentary filmmaker with a special interest in "upstanders"--people who took the risk of standing up for moral goodness despite sectarian pressures--during the Troubles and after.

We met Sean at Dunluce Castle after a few hours of healing beauty and meditation among the magical octagonal stones of the Giants Causeway. Sean is one of the reasons we applied for the grant in the first place, so seeing him again was very special. We bought tickets to the castle and then Sean asked the ticket-taker if he could first take us into the gated pasture next door to start his unofficial tour. "You can if the bull isn't in there," he said. "He ran over the farmer just yesterday."

"We'll stay close to the gate," Sean promised, and we walked up to a place beside some grazing sheep to hear a lesson that started in the nine years war period (1594-1603) and continued through the 1600's as the castle-owning McDonnells came down from Scotland and cut sophisticated deals to always align themselves with power. It was a tale that took us through the town that once stood there and then into the castle right down to the cliffs. The story included much archaeology and history, disproven myths, sexual rumors, at least one trap door and some ostentatious displays of wealth, all along the cliffside above the Irish Sea. It also is a story that undermines some of the mythology of Irish Nationalism, as Scotland would be as close a place to here for trade or interaction as Donegal, and the rise of Nationhood had not yet occurred, so the cultures of each place intersected freely. Sean pointed to the sea. "To us, that might look like a border, but to them it was a highway."

Sean, in his tour, had an easygoing inquiry-based teaching style that would work equally well with small children or with adult learners: "Look out here and tell me what you see.... What do you suppose this stone promontory was used for.... Can you guess what this is.... Why do you suppose they did that?"

Beside Dunluce, archaeologists have unearthed Polish coins and the now buried cobblestones of a town once dominated by the McDonnell's and now buried just a few inches below the surface of the farmland here today.

Dave and I had some healing to do up here. We both loved Derry, but you can feel the sectarianism under the surface of everything in your bones and in your shoulders. The lovely, well thought out campus in Corrymeela provides a respite from such things. "Which is the idea," Sean says. "When you come up here, you get rid of all that stuff."

Corrymeela welcomes families fleeing abusive relationships or countries, faith leaders of all sorts, academics working in Peace Studies, school groups, people experiencing any kind of trauma, programs helping children with autism and dozens of other populations into a wide campus full of gardens and meditative spaces. It is a very intentional community, where everyone does their own dishes and makes their own bed for the next guest. Wifi is disabled in all the bedrooms, so that those staying here are forced out onto the couches of the common areas if they want to get on the internet.

We ate with Sean in the nearby town of Ballycastle, which was packed with summer visitors, and then returned for a quiet night around the couches.

Today's theme was the 1600's, as we went from Gleann Doherty's morning tour of the Derry walls to Sean's tour of Dunluce and the excavated village.

We met Gleann (for the second day in a row) as we checked out of our Derry Hotel and he walked us back into the walled city to begin the tour. At the top, Gleann explained that the walls were only built around the end of the Nine Years War in the early 1600's, making Derry the last walled city in Europe.

Early in the tour, an eighty-five year old man stopped us to promote his book on Christian spirituality. He first asked us facetiously if we thought he might get mugged in the city. Referring to Gleann, Dave and I, he cited the Derry expression, "You canna walk a block in this town without running across three rascals." He then asked Gleann for his family name and gently teased him about his background. Finally, he spoke of his travels in Mexico. "We had tremendous craic down there," he enthused. Then he let us go on our way up the steep walls. It was one of those random moments of human connection that come and go so easily in Ireland.

We came to an area of wall composed of soft sandstone, and wondered why this would have been used for a fortress. "They ran out of building materials," Gleann explained. "but down the hill they found a pile of rocks known as a Catholic Cathedral, so they put them to good use."

A big theme for Gleann today was the distortion of history by the British. He made the point that Wolfe Tone, the leader of the first Irish Nationalist rebellion (in 1798) was a Protestant, as were so many other important Nationalists. He also told us more about the circumstances of his father's death at Bloody Sunday (he was a steward--a Civil Rights worker who had the job of making sure people stayed on the prescribed parade route--but his signifier arm band had fallen off in the melee). He told us that the British paratrooper battalions who did the killing were only in Derry that one day; they didn't know the place. They had come down from Ballymurphy, a lesser known massacre that month whose families resent the attention heaped on Bloody Sunday, because they feel their own suffering has never been substantially recognized.

Which leads me back to Derick's words: "A place where all people feel that their suffering is recognized."

For Gleann, "the Troubles" is a hurtful phrase, in that it obscures a hard truth. "It was a conflict; it was an actual war. Troubles is understating it too much." We both hugged Gleann when we left. He had let us into his family, and into the other Bloody Sunday families of the people he introduced us to in the Bogside. Now Gleann was family to us. He left himself wide open to us, and--as he had promised in my earliest emails with him--he hadn't made it all about the suffering. As he would say, there was a bit of craic in it as well.