My name is Jon, and I want to say ‘Yes’.

I first came to Belfast in 1991. At that time, city hall had a large banner across the dome that read ‘Belfast Says No’. I wasn’t as familiar with the details of Northern Ireland’s history, so I asked one of my hosts- who were East Belfast Presbyterians- what it meant. He said, ‘It’s about rejecting the Republic of Ireland’s interference in the running of Northern Ireland. How would you feel if a foreign country was being given a say in how your country was run?’ At the time, the answer didn’t make sense to me, as I didn’t see the Republic as a ‘foreign’ country, or not ‘foreign’ in the way that, say, France or China was foreign. Plus, I pointed out, in a globalised world most countries had some kind say into how other countries are run. I immediately got the feeling that this was the wrong answer to give…

I also wondered, was there anything to which Belfast  might say ‘yes’?

It made me think of the last bit of Ulysses, where Molly Bloom’s speech is punctuated by dozens of the word ‘yes’. The last word of that great novel is ‘yes’. Joyce felt that Ireland was filled with ‘No’. Irish Nationalism, Irish Unionism, Catholicism, Protestantism- to him, it all seemed to be saying ‘no’ to any number of things. He wanted life to be about saying ‘yes’.

I’ve worked in the field of peacemaking and conflict transformation in Belfast for over ten years now. I’ve always wanted my work to be about helping individuals and communities say ‘yes’- to examining their situation, to consciousness, to a view of life that said ‘yes’ to those that were different.

I still feel like I’m searching for ‘yes’ in Belfast. As I sat in my window last summer and watched the fires of Ardoyne, and even now as I watch the flag protests at Cambrai Street out the same window,  I still wonder:

How does Belfast say ‘yes’?

Most of us have come this far on the negative.  It has served us well.  We have used its energy to purge and winnow, decimate and destroy, break up and shut up many, many, tired, tired, double-binding, constricting and restricting systems. We gathered the ‘no’ to our hearts like armour, forged it into weapons and chanted its name on dead-end streets until the fabric of those cul-de-sacs fractured and split open into bright new mornings that shimmered with hope and possibility.  We loved the ‘no’.

But this meeting is about what is left.

With your back to the torn cul-de-sac what do you see?

Now I think I want to know if I can say ‘yes’.  I want to know if there is anything left to say yes to.

I want to know if I can say yes to the ‘lack’ inside of me that can never be filled.  To a war that can never be won.  To a desire which turns me upside down and inside out and seeks only more and more and is never enough.  A desire that is never fulfilled and eats question after question with an insatiable lust and never gives up on itself, never rests, never wanes.

I want to know if I can say yes to the strange god of the bible who sets his own decay in motion and drags into death with him the suffocating deceptions of wholeness, completion, perfection and peace and comes alive in the smile of a small child and the eyes of an enemy.

I want to know if I can say yes to the new horizon that opens up when we stand together in the aftermath of the death of meaning and find in each other pieces of a fragmented and broken puzzle which never quite fit but make new pictures that dazzle and transfigure us, that inspire us to keep trying, keep moving, keep loving.

I want to know if I can say yes to the horrible beauty of the ‘other’ that brims up inside myself and in each and every other person that I come into contact with and can never be understood or forgiven or healed or categorised but can only be heard and elaborated and moved toward.

I want to know that I can say yes to singing the song of myself in the presence of mystery and ask for nothing but questions that bind me to life which is in the end a life with others.

I want to say ‘yes’….’yes’

ikon yes

(click image for facebook event)

Here we are. Bodies with spaces between. Together and alone.  Join with me, with everyone as we say the only sentence we can about ourselves and each other:

“We do not know”

To the strange, disturbing, physical presence of others we are so close to and yet can never understand. The slow-dawning reality that others are beyond our control, our rules, our lines, our categories.  We say the only words we can about each other:

“We do not know”

We delight in the dangerously beautiful knowledge of the presence of others which makes us so fragile by pulling us apart – aching to be known, and longing to hide. We confess our confusion of the other as we whisper:

“We do not know”

And we acknowledge those moments of intimacy, where others call us out of ourselves, we delight in shattering the barriers… and then recognise the reality that other lines, and classifications will replace them. Where we can look in the eyes of those we are closest to and say lovingly:

“We do not know”

Even as we look at our own reflections, we admit that we see through a glass, darkly. We marvel at the strangest other in our lives – our own selves – who we continually surprise and disgust, and delight. And we have hope for the future because we can say about ourselves:

“We do not know”

As we confront our fear of difference and our destructive desire for conformity and unity, we move towards being comfortable with the awkwardness of our division. Skins that mean we will always be separate and so life-givingly intertwined. And so we say to each other:

“We do not know”

Many of us are gathered here tonight because at one point or another, maybe yesterday, maybe today, we have been drawn to Jesus of Nazareth. We may have heard he had all the answers. We may have heard that he would make everything okay. We may have heard many things. But he asked some of his followers “who do you say that I am” and we find goodness and truth in this answer:

“We do not know”

Scene 1

One:     God is now here
Two:     Do you remember the story?
One:     I don’t know.
Two:     Shall I tell it to you?
One:     I don’t know.
Two:     Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. One—
One:     Our what?
Two:     Our Saviour. Two thieves.  One is supposed to have been saved, and the other . . .. damned.
One:     God is now here
Two:     God is nowhere
One:     Yes. God is now here.

Scene 2

One:     Ikon is now here
Two:     We came here yesterday.
One:     Ah no, there you’re mistaken.
Two:     What did we do yesterday?
One:     What did we do yesterday?!
Two:     Yes.
One:     Why . . . Nothing is certain when you’re about.
Two:     In my opinion we were here.
One:     Ikon is now here
Two:     Ikon is nowhere
One:     Yes. Ikon is now here

Scene 3

One:     We are now here
Two:     I can’t go on like this.
One:     That’s what you think.
Two:     If we parted? That might be better for us.
One:     We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless the other comes.
Two:     And if she comes?
One:     We’ll be saved.
Two:     Well? Shall we go?
One:     Yes, let’s go. We are now here
Two:     We are nowhere
One:     Yes. We are now here

Blessing

In the incarnation God was brought down to earth. And God became another kind of thing entirely. He became another. And actually, only with the invention of language did God become anything to us – god became a “he” or a “she” or a character.

And this God who is Another is always on the margins of some kind of new discovery, discovering God where God had not thought to be before. The incarnation is never ending really. Because there is always a new place to be, always a new skin to wear, always new bones to inhabit, always sweat and blood and mucus to be shed and dripped.

God is Another. And we are Another. It is probably easier to befriend the other than it is to befriend the Other you.

We will give you a little mirror. It is not to be eaten. It is small because you will only ever be able to see a bit of yourself. We are only ever a little bit of ourselves at any one time.

Hell is other people?
Hell is the other you?
Welcome to Hell.
Welcome to your limited language.
Welcome to all your other voices.
Welcome to the other.

For all our talk of learning from the other, this is only a task that can be begun, and begun and begun and begun. It never ends. It only begins.

When you say “this is what I think”  you are, at best, only speaking for one of the voices that is in you – it may be the voice that is loudest, it may be the voice that is the smartest, it may be the voice that is the clearest, or the least afraid, or the most afraid.

You are, at best, only marginally friendly with all of the others that inhabit your own body. There are bones in you that you will never befriend, rarely listen to, and regularly reduce to silence.

Once, I was walking across a road and an old priest was on the footpath. As I crossed the road, he said to me “And who are you?” Even though I gave him an answer, the truer answer is “I will give you the answer to that question when I discover who I am with you”. We are only ever a bit of ourselves in any one moment. Today I am this bit, tomorrow that bit.

And that’s not really a problem. It’s probably just fine. It’s probably just fine.

Some of you were phoned, some of you weren’t. Some of you feel special, others don’t. Some of you were always the other – not picked for the sports team, not at the top of the class.

And you’re probably okay with this. And it probably won’t last for ever.

So, here’s a call for all of us. Come forward. Take a bit of a mirror. You will never know all of your self because your self isn’t all of its self yet… if it ever will be. Take a bit of a mirror. See a bit of yourself today. See a bit of your self tomorrow.

My wife and my children are on the other side of the world. Right now, they are seven time zones to the East of me.

If you open Google Earth and go to West Mayo, zoom in to 33,000 ft., point yourself toward the western horizon and click the button to head in that direction, it takes 40 minutes to reach Bigfork MT. You fly until you see land then keep going until you see mountains, turn north until you see the Canadian border, then fly west again until you see mountains, then south until you see Flathead Lake. How do I know? I’ve done it. Why? I was sitting on my bed one night and I was bored and I was lonely.

The actual travel takes from very early morning to very late at night. How do I know? I’ve done it. Last December. And I will do it again this December.

We have been separated from each other for over a year now. I won’t be able to live with them until next April, when I complete my academic studies.  It’s been a hard time for all of us. For this time in our family’s life, we have communicated with each other just like this: by skype. I see Iain and Eilís for ten minutes a day before they go to school. They have breakfast and I have lunch. My wife Amy and I skype once a week, on Saturday, for an hour or so. We also have email and Facebook throughout the day as well. But our face time is on Saturdays.

As challenging as it has been, I am not complaining. It’s a hundred times better than what a husband in Ireland and a wife and children in America a century ago would have had. When my grandmother emigrated from rural Roscommon to America in 1914, she never saw her parents or her five brothers ever again, ever. The 5000 miles that separated America from Connaught was as permanent as the grave.

But, for a time, my family’s life together has been devoid of much of its intimacy. We don’t touch each other. We don’t breathe each other. A one-second delay gives conversation its own special challenges. And yet the technology, which every so often feels so deficient, allows us an intimacy that was impossible for the generations before us. So, the intimacy of technology is intimacy nonetheless. It is intimacy with those far away, as I finally complete my research and writing on the estrangement of people who are very close to each other.

Belfast exists in the intimacy of estrangement. For four years I have concerned myself with those whose intimacy is that their back gardens share a nine-metre high barrier or their neighbourhoods share a locked gate. Much of their interaction is only negative, when a bottle or a stone is hurled from the other side.

I am not unaware of the irony that my life right now is a tension. It is a tension between one technology that invites those far away to intimacy and another technology that allows those very close to never meet.

In one sense, my family that I adore and long after are, for now, the ‘others’. In another sense, the people who made my family so unwelcome that they had to flee are, for now, intimate companions.

I am far away.
I am so close.
I am the other.
The other is me.

Hell is other people. Other people are mind-bendingly beautiful. They twist and turn our words and gestures into their own. They colonise our desires and bring us to our knees. They take pleasure from our pleasure and pain from our pain. They don’t know when to say yes or no or stop or start or touch or refrain or speak or hush. They arrive unasked and too early or too late. They touch something deep in us with no permission and draw our deepest longings up from our insides like moths to a flame. They leave us gasping for more and aching for more. They are puzzles that we did not ask for and can never solve. And on the day that we come across the answer – finally a way to understand, to make better contact, to know, to hold to possess – it is not enough. We stand helpless as the answer turns to dust in the face of the ‘thing’ that is THEM. The labels wash out. Categories won’t extend. Classifications buckle.

Nothing works. The other is other is other is other is other. They will not submit.

And then a voice. Listen to it. It rises from somewhere you do not understand. But you do not have to struggle. You do not have to strain.  You do not have to understand, to translate, to transpose, to negotiate, to contextualise, to apply logic, to display serious interdisciplinary concern, to squeeze between dialectical tension, to synthesise, to apologise, to undertake hermeneutical analysis or to smile through gritted teeth.

The voice speaks a word and the word is…..

Sssshhhh…..don’t say it. Watch it work….watch it bind your neighbor to his enemy; watch it open like a prayer on your white,  white bedroom sheets; watch it walk through this world in way you never can or will.

Watch how they are separated by skin. A skin you cannot get inside and to feel the deepest confession they utter. What a magnificent, terrible gift that separation is.

The word is…the word is many words…delight, dignify, celebrate, welcome, befriend, uphold, remember, embrace, bless, create, … listen.

And when you have submitted, when you have given up your secrets, your claims, your voices….then it will be cacophonous.

This is how to be here. When you hear you will be here.

Look around…they are among you….the others. They are a terrible & beautiful gift to us, the others.

Do not let them get away.