The Linen Memorial came out from the cupboard of its keeping in Canada and came to Newry and Mourne. It has been a remarkable voyage of reconciliation, leading on through the maelstrom of our suffering and allowing Catholics and Protestants to begin to breathe, together, the fresh air of the recognition that we were all destroyed by all that happened. Humanity faltered and together we sank further into the quagmire of pain. My personal disaster was that on every morning throughout “The Troubles” my breakfast menu of work was the list of those who perished in the overnight murders. My constant Cri de Coeur came in the manner in which I wrote the story: “Last night a 42 year old man was shot dead in Belfast. John Smith of the Ardoyne area of the city was the father of two teenage boys and had cared for an ailing mother. Mr Smith was a Catholic.” As opposed to: “Last night a 32 year old Catholic was shot ……etc” You will see the nuance of respecting the victim’s humanity before indentifying his religion. For me, the joy of being the facilitator of the visit was a prayer of thanksgiving that unnecessary and awful death had ended. Four thousand names, all victims, were stitched, lovingly, by women throughout the world onto the stark purity of four hundred white linen clothes; they mark an important stopping-off point of the journey, a time that allows reflection. Emotions ran high in Saint Catherine’s, the Dominican Church in Newry and in the Presbyterian Church in Warrenpoint when the memorial went on display. Tears were always close by. But Father Joseph Ralph in Newry and the Rev Edward McKenzie in Warrenpoint got it right and did what Jesus would assuredly have done…to place together in the one space the names of all who died, those who inflicted death, and those who had death inflicted upon them. The names without comment and owing nothing to priority or favour, other than to the chronology of the event and the exact moment of the victim falling from the tree of life. Rev Kingsley Sutton will do the same when the Memorial comes to Saint Mary’s at the end of October. It is no small thing that we accept and allow all the names to be there together. Gordon Wilson, whispered the forgiveness of his Christian heart as he held the hand of his dying daughter, the nurse, twenty year old Marie. When I stand with the Linen Memorial as I first did in Corrymeela seven years ago, I am moved by the simplicity of the message. All hurt assuaged by the unity of death, all death remembered, sacredly, within the catacomb of the white linen, wafting softly on the whispered breeze of our hurting and shared sorrow. In a world where human beings can be exterminated in an act of beheading, where children die in war, it may seem that we have lost all, that no hope exists, that no road can take us forward to peace and love, in such a world the Linen Memorial speaks its simple message, that we can begin to grow again. Trouton, the artist, steps carefully in the presentation of her work. She is highly attuned to the nuances and might well think of the poetic admonition of Yates: ‘HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’. “Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi Est” Rowan Hand
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 06:21:01 +0000
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