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ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE TO THE CATHOLIC INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS’ CONFERENCE

Learning how to unlearn

I was invited to address this year’s Conference some considerable time before I was privileged to be elected President of Ireland. Most conference organisers breathe a sigh of relief when they have secured their keynote speaker. They offer masses and novenas for the continued good health of their chosen speaker at least until the event is over. In my own case I imagine there may have been a certain amount of ambivalence on the part of the organisers about the desired outcome of the election just in case success for me meant having to renew the search for the next hapless victim to be the replacement keynote speaker. I think it is important that they know that I forgive any preferences they may have expressed to God our Father and Mother for one of the other four candidates. I felt deeply honoured to be asked to this conference and was determined from the outset that I would be here come what may. So, here I am.

I’m very grateful indeed for the opportunity to address you on a subject which has been at the core of my own efforts to influence the process of peace and reconciliation in my homeland for many years, a subject captured in the title of this talk -‘Learning how to Unlearn’. We who are or have been educators whether as professionals or as parents put considerable effort into the teaching of our children. There is much they need to know and much of course they will never learn but it is also of fundamental importance that we address the processes of unlearning, of stripping away the prejudices, the unhealthy passions and the skewed conditioning which have framed the minds, hardened the hearts and provoked the actions out of which emerge serious dysfunction in our society in such a way that hatred, contempt, suspicion, fear and violence constantly threaten to utterly overwhelm the impulse of love.

This elemental struggle is probably at its most unredeemed in Northern Ireland as far as these two islands are concerned but England, Scotland, Wales and the rest of Ireland are not mere spectators at this at times depressing drama. We are also players, important players for whom the issue of learning to unlearn is every bit as important as it is in Northern Ireland. Our willingness to accept responsibility for promoting profound change, to challenge our old enmities, to truly stretch ourselves in mutual comprehension so that we can celebrate in powerful, symbolic and real ways our new neighbourliness - these are goals we need to explore with urgency.

For educators, who are located as you are, foursquare in the Christian tradition, the continuing scandal of bitter sectarianism among Christian denominations whether expressed in verbal or physical violence, raises the awesome question of the efficacy of our teaching of the gospel of love. For many, it raises the even more awesome question of the credibility of the gospel of love.

These are pertinent and chastening questions as we approach the millennium and have to fight hard to remind ourselves and others precisely what it is the millennium is about - a celebration of the birth of The Child of Bethlehem, who came to change the world, to transform it, to teach us to learn new ways and unlearn the old.

I tell a story which is true, about an occasion when I was preparing to speak first on this topic some time ago, the difficulty of finding inspiration brought to mind a similar situation many years ago when I was asked to be the first woman to preach in a particular cathedral. I had accepted an invitation to speak in circumstances not unlike those which brought me to Ampleforth. I was flattered to be asked, doubtful if I had anything useful to say but totally lacked the humility to turn down the invitation. I was, therefore, experiencing real difficulty in thinking of something significant to commit to the reproachful blank sheet of paper, and eventually in desperation turned to prayer. “Look Lord, I said, I could do with a bit of help here. After all, I’m appearing in one of your branch offices tomorrow, so the least you could do, is point me towards something vaguely engaging to say. It doesn't have to be earth shatteringly original”, I said, “after all, I want my talk to have something in common with every other talk from the same pulpit - just less than totally inane and boring, would be a big improvement on the norm”.

I lifted down my New Testament, having waited a few minutes for the message to be received and understood even by a male God. The book fell open at that part of St.Paul's letter to the Corinthians, so familiar to all women and to far too many men – “Women should remain silent in church. They are not allowed to speak.........”. From which experience I decided; firstly, that the Lord has a mischievous sense of humour; and secondly, that if St.Paul accompanies him at the ‘second coming’, he’s being marched straight down to the Equal Opportunities Commission, to give an account of himself.

The crucial message of the story is of course that St. Paul strides across two thousand years of Christendom as the man who most famously changed his mind. He showed that whatever about the learning curve, the unlearning curve can be as rapid as we ourselves decide to make it. What is remarkable about Paul’s conversion is the enormous space he opened up in his own life, the new room for manoeuvre he created, the opportunities for friendships where previously there was enmity.

I should I think put my own baggage on the table for inspection or at least as much of it as I am aware of; I am conscious that as I speak here this morning we are in a very special week, a phase of nervous but nonetheless bubbling hope, in the tortuous road to political consensus in Northern Ireland. As one newspaper put it - At last we have reached the beginning. We all dare to hope and pray that we have. It is imperative at this time that we affirm and acknowledge the vision and tenacity of all those politicians who are actively engaged in this process and on whose efforts the future wellbeing of so many people rests.

I was raised in Belfast, my physical landscape dominated by the Passionist Monastery in which God was male, Irish and Catholic, his mother having presumably emigrated to Nazareth from Ireland after the Famine. My Protestant friends who lived in the same street but went different ways on Sunday and practised their music in the Orange Hall understood God to be male also but of course Protestant and British. I believed the Pope was Peter’s God ordained successor, they believed the Pope was an antiChrist. Reared between these two parochial Gods who carried their crosses like lances in a jousting tournament we were both introduced to the Ya-boo school of theology, the my-God- is- bigger- than -your–God school of theological bully boys.

Ours was a devout Catholic home; a prayerful home pervaded by an ethos of faith it was also the home in which I learnt that I was Irish not British, that I had a language, an identity, a history and a culture which was quite different from that of many of the Protestant friends with whom I played, for the streets I grew up in were predominantly Protestant.

In those streets there were mixed religion friendships which remained strong and intact no matter what came or went. In those same streets there is and continues to be an appalling catalogue of sectarian violence. They are in many ways a cockpit, a place in which much of the dark brooding passion which lurks beneath the surface bursts through and frightens us with its ferocity. They are also places in which people daily struggle to deal with the bitterness, the hurt, the pain, often engaging in heroic efforts to forgive and to seek accommodation. It is also a place where fond, affectionate relationships manage to form even across the chasms exposed by this raw conflict. A chaos of contradictions.

The poet Tom Paulin who was born into Northern Ireland’s Protestant tradition writes, “I was nurtured in a puritan anti-aesthetic, told to be suspicious of what's rhetorical or ornate....”. I, by contrast, was nurtured with the rhetoric of the doctrine of transubstantiation; the smell of incense; the plaster statues.

Side by side, cheek by jowl, these two worlds have inhabited Northern Ireland, but without ‘cohabiting’, in the modern sense. We live in separate neighbourhoods, go to separate schools, play different sports, socialise in separate clubs, and, until recent times, often worked in separate workplaces. Two separate identities shored up by conflicting versions of history, conflicting political ambitions and conflicting religious beliefs. Two separate sets of knowledge wrapping people up, hermetically sealing them into systems of certainties and beliefs which seem immune to the contamination of self doubt, revision or updating. Inside one package, resides all that is right and good. Inside the other, lies all that is wrong and bad. The problem is, of course, that even if you and I occupy opposite packages, we both believe we’re in the one which monopolises good and righteousness. Worse still, our separate histories have taught us not only what to think, but also, crucially and much more intractably, how to think. Two cultures, two identities, inhabiting the same spot but travelling, in their hearts, towards different destinations.

Today’s and tomorrow's work, is to change the destination, to one on which all are focused, without emasculating either culture, or obliterating either identity. The creation of a workable partnership out of difference will demand that we make a new space in our thinking to accommodate the “otherness” of the other, that we look at that “otherness” in ways that are more generous than in the past. It involves an acceptance that we are all to one extent or another imprisoned in knowledge, perceptions and beliefs some of which are long past their sell-by date. To be thus imprisoned is to be only partly alive.

But the need to unlearn, is by no means confined to Northern Ireland. It’s a lesson for all of us involved in the sacred trust that is the education of the next generation.

An essential task of educators is to help equip our young people with the intellectual confidence and skills to deconstruct and reconstruct knowledge in a never ending pursuit of truth throughout their lives.

Minds, like houses, gather dust, and minds, like houses, need to be ‘spring cleaned’ from time to time. As partners with parents, with the wider community of nation and world, and with each other, you as educators have an obligation to those you teach, to begin the process of developing the life-skills which they’ll need to see them through adolescence and adulthood. Good exam results, and access to good universities are their rites of passage, their conduits for access to the adult world of work. But they’re not, in themselves, the whole measure of a person's worth or substance. By comparison, life-skills ideally are developed and honed, refined by experience, tested empirically, reviewed, updated, and brought - to some degree - to perfection, over a lifetime. But, there’s a sense in which some of those skills can be just cosmetic - in which they can fail to reach into the heart, the soul and intellect.

So, if this talk is about anything, it’s about how you, as educators, in partnership with all other educators, assist both yourselves, and those in your charge, to develop the analytical and critical skills, to save them from the kind of mental, emotional and spiritual fossilisation, which imposes straitjackets on development, which inhibits understanding, and insight into the world around them, and which disfigures human relationships, sometimes with tragic consequences. But how do we stop ourselves and those we educate from becoming locked into intellectual bunkers of our own making? How do we do that and, at the same time, remain passionate about, and committed to, fundamental value systems, which underpin our lives as teachers and parents, and as citizens.

This isn’t an argument in favour of individualised morality, or individualised versions of history. But, it’s rather a plea for an approach to the things we believe in, which says we can admit the things we did wrong; we can candidly acknowledge our failures; that we don’t have to bury the dark leprous side of our world and its past. We can prepare young people for a world in which human beings stumble, fall, pick themselves up and try again. We can equip them with an understanding of the, essentially courageous, humanity we possess, but also the essentially ‘flawed’ humanity. We can teach them that we don’t possess a monopoly on right, and that the greatest gift they can possess, is a childlike curiosity, about those from whom we are separated by class, history, race, politics or whatever the mark of demarcation.

Some time ago, I received a letter from a Catholic woman in England, in reply to an article I had written in “The Universe”, suggesting that there should be scope for a debate on priestly celibacy, without rancour and recrimination. My correspondent minced no words. She accused me of heresy, devilishness - and that’s a far cry from devilment - of responsibility for Auswicz, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the French nuclear test on Murroroa and, worst of all, of being a Protestant in disguise. The letter quoted liberally from the bible, in support of all contentions. The same post, brought an anonymous letter from someone who claimed to be of the Protestant persuasion, and who had seen me on television. It started well enough- "you seem a nice person" etc. – and yes, you’ve guessed it, next came the "but” – “but your church has a lot to answer for. In the Inquisition, millions of people were tortured and murdered at the instigation of your church but you only remember the potato famine". Curiously enough, I had made no reference, direct or oblique, to the famine. "You are a lover of the Virgin Mary but she was no virgin". I hadn't mentioned her either. More quotes from the same scripture. So, in the same week I was too Catholic for some, not Catholic enough for others, but either way, I was swatted by the bible on both sides.

I tell the story, not to gain sympathy or to confuse you about my real beliefs, but rather to pose a question about how we can achieve equilibrium, between a tenacity of belief, that is laudable and admirable, and a ferocity of view, which spills over into hatred, contempt and, in extreme versions, violence. It would be too easy to dismiss my two letterwriters as archetypes of the lunatic fringe, which every religion, political party or faction has, the kind of people who make the rest of us cringe with embarrassment.

But we all know, that there is a sense in which we have all told, and retold, versions of history, versions of past, and interpretations of the present, which have created barriers of mistrust and fear, between individuals, groups and countries. The at times, fraught, relationships between these two neighbouring, but sometimes not so neighbourly, islands is a case in point. How do we explain each other to our children? How careful are we to achieve balance, to open up a joyful curious heart in the growing child?

I grew up on a diet of church history, which dealt in lives of the saints, and world history, which dealt in the epic stories of largely European statesmen. For the most part, these were syrupy hagiographies, which gave “birds eye” views of unreal lives - those birds travelled fast and at a very high altitude. History, and it was largely his-story, was taught as a series of heavily edited highlights - the stories nuanced, to create a sense of awe, about the greatness of the men who dominated the pages. The stories were partisan. They knew who the enemy was, and who the friend was. The enemy’s flaws were well rehearsed. His foibles analysed and parsed. Our friends, however, were all great men. If they had flaws, I knew nothing of them. So flawless, so great were they, that it seemed inevitable that neither I, nor anyone I knew, could ever hope to emulate such greatness. From St. Thomas Aquinas to the Duke of Marlborough, from Shakespeare to Yeats, the dark side of greatness was a story untold, a story buried.

I was twenty years away from school, when I read Aquinas in full for the first time, and realised, to what extent, he was unknown to me. Woman was “defective and misbegotten”, I read. The intellectual colossus started to list ever so slightly. By the time I had finished hearing that I had been created as a helper for man, solely in the realm of childbearing, since I was not much use for anything else, I began to realise that there was a lot less to this business of being a saint, than a life of unreproachable saintliness. Today that great Dominican saint whom I love dearly, would probably be accompanying St. Paul along the Damascus road to the Equal Opportunities Commission. I don’t wish to knock either saint from their saintly pedestal for each is a spiritual Colossus in his own right but somehow I find it much easier to cope with saints of human dimensions, capable of human failure, than those wrapped in a shell of greatness, which balks at criticism, and resents anything less than mawkish adoration. And I’m more than conscious that feminism, in deconstructing patriarchy, has also tried to create its own untouchable saints, and to suppress its own dark side – “the more things change. . . . . . .”.

What’s true about the saints, is also true of many of the great figures who dominate our comprehension of history, literature, music and art. I don’t entirely subscribe to the view of the P.C. lobby that DWEMS - that is Dead White European Males - have a virtual monopoly on the core educational curriculum, out of which they fashioned a dominant patriarchal industrial and social order, but there are serious questions for educators about the political, social and historical context in which they teach and whether their first priority is to accept and transmit their version of that context, or to leave some of the answers blank, to be filled by students equipped with skills of conscientious, painstaking critical analysis.

In my study I have a collection of fifty-four books, bought several years ago, entitled “The Great Ideas”. They cover the hierarchy of contributors to Western thought, from Sophocles to Kepler, from Montaigne to Freud. Not a single one among them was written by a woman. Since I bought them, six new volumes have been added. But you have to get to volume fifty-nine, before a tentative reference is made to the 20th century American writer, Willa Cather, who’s hardly a household name. Not until volume sixty, is a substantial female contribution to any ideas, let alone great ones, acknowledged. Virginia Woolf shares her volume with ten other writers, including Lawrence, Eliot and Beckett. Aquinas, by contrast, gets two volumes to himself.

Had I been introduced to a world of flawed genius; a world where the great also made great mistakes; where even the finest intellectual garden grew the odd weed; I would have been prepared for a world of messes, mistakes and calamitous failures - a world living with the downstream consequences of failing to acknowledge its mistakes - of being in denial about its past and its present - a world which could cope with, perhaps even celebrate, its changing self.

In that same world, I learnt of the Plantation, the Reformation, the Penal Laws, the famine and the occasional rebellion against the Crown, including the rebellion of 1916. The versions I learnt were intended to and indeed succeeded in reflecting little credit on the Crown. The terms in which my ancestors had been brutally oppressed, burnt into my consciousness, and cried out for vindication. It seemed to me, that every right-thinking person knowing these facts, would be on our side. But of course, on the other side - to quote the late Scottish author David Thompson, who understood Ireland so well - English school books glossed over the atrocities of the Penal Laws, the famine was played down, the retaliation visited upon the Protestants of Ulster by Catholics in 1641, rounded up, so that, in the twentieth century, when both sides faced each other over barricades, it was with a certainty that both were victims and martyrs, both were in the right, and both had God exclusively on their side.

We lived, not just in ignorance of each others pain, but with an inherited gaping wound, inflicted, we believed, by the other side. We each waited in vain for the other to apologise, and to acknowledge the pain they had inflicted.

Cinemascope versions of history, unredeemed by critical minds, anxious to poke about in the alleged facts and rewrite the truth. Anyone attempting to disturb the accepted version of truth, would quickly find him or herself ostracised. Yet there have been a small number of noble attempts in very recent years to acknowledge the dark side of the past, to offer sorrow for it, to draw a line in the sand which helps us to move on. Such gestures particularly from those in positions of leadership can have surprisingly profound significance in a world where centuries old subterranean hurts still fester, infecting each new generation, handing on the baton of bitterness from one century to the next. They have the capacity to soften hearts grown cold with cynicism. If we want to face the next millennium with as clean a sheet as possible we need to use the present moment, the only one we are ever sure of, well, to infuse it with the possibilities of the gospel of love, so that we can say with Jean Pierre de Caussade that we are truly making a sacrament of the present moment.

What is the role of educators in a world of competing truth and versions of the truth? Is it to recruit as many converts to their version of the truth, to grow an army of believers to support our world view? Is it to claim God as their own exclusive friend, a God who takes their side and theirs alone?

Some time ago, walking past the Presbyterian church in my village, my son, then aged five or six, asked me – “Mammy do you know Catholics and Protestants - which ones are we, I forget”. Yet, it seems essential to remember. We aren’t permitted to forget.

As Miroslav Wolf, the contemporary Croatian theologian has said -“In situations of ethnic conflict churches often find themselves accomplices in war rather than agents of peace. We find it difficult to distance ourselves from our own culture and so we echo its reigning opinions and mimic its practices.”

He warns that while Group identities are important places which offer us belonging, recognition and a place to be truly ourselves they can also become “fortresses into which we retreat, surrounding ourselves by impenetrable walls dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’ In situations of conflict they become encampments from which to undertake raids into enemy territory. Group identities are profoundly ambivalent; they are havens of belonging as well as repositories of aggression, suffocating enclosures as well as bases of liberating power.”

They say that what is learnt in childhood, is engraved on stone. And so it is in Ireland, in England and elsewhere, the crucible of tolerance is the home. The crib of hatred is the home. If Mammy and Daddy are passionate about or hostile to prods, fenians, Irish, Brits, snobs, cornerboys, you can be sure that little Johnny will become passionate about them or hostile to them too. He loves his Mum and Dad. He wants to be like his Mum and Dad. They laugh and pat him on the head when he repeats their words, their phrases, their passions and prejudices.

To what extent, are educators partners with parents, but also the ballast, the redemptive force in young lives already conscripted into narrow visions, tunneled world views?

To what extent are we called upon to prepare this, and the next generation, for a world in which new and great ideas, will be written by those who in past generations were illiterate, voiceless and silent, people from cultures we do not know, writing from perspectives we cannot comprehend? Do we prepare them to resist, to batten down the hatches and prepare the trenches, or do we prepare them for a courageous and equal engagement, perhaps even a comfortable partnership, with the voices that are just now finding their voice?

In what ways do teachers add to, or take from, that magnificent that awe-inspiring uniqueness, which is met in every child, and which uniforms and uniformity can never fully obliterate! In what ways are we preparing ourselves, for a world unafraid of diversity - a world ready to share intellectual space with a new flood of thinkers and actors!

I think of the genius of Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s most recent Nobel laureate, and of his poem “From the Canton of Expectation”. He describes the changes wrought in Northern Ireland, when education became available to those whose destiny had been, to be second best, and to make a virtue of stoically even pathetically putting up with it.

“... suddenly this change of mood.

Books open in the newly wired kitchens.

Young heads that might have dozed a life away against the flanks of milking cows were busy

paving and pencilling their first causeways

across the prescribed texts. The paving stones

of quadrangles came next and a grammar

of imperatives, the new age of demands.

They would banish the conditional for ever

this generation born impervious to

the triumph in our cries of de profundis.

Our faith in winning by enduring most,

they made anathema, intelligences

brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.

 

What looks the strongest has outlived its term.

The future lies with what's affirmed from under."

 

Those last words, perhaps, have an ominous ring for those of you who have watched the institution of the church which you love and work for, come under a variety of crippling pressures. I’m not here to pronounce upon those pressures and where they may be leading. Rather, I’m here to suggest that there’s an exciting and rugged challenge as well as a duty, for all of us, to teach our children to be incessantly curious about 'the otherness' of others.

There is a sense in which aspects of your world may seem to be, to quote Heaney again, "A disappearing island".

Sometimes, when we feel the ground beneath us shifting, we cling ever tighter to it, fearful of where the uncontrollable surging forces will take us, afraid they may overwhelm us entirely. Our energies go into defensiveness. Yet there’s a liberation in acknowledging our flawedness, our striving for, but sometimes falling short of, perfection. It’s a disarming and comfortable thing, to listen, with hostility suppressed, to those who would oppose or appear to want to crush us. Until we listen with open hearts, and open minds, we cannot truly hear them, nor can we truly comprehend, how they see and understand us. Partnership with those who love, admire, trust and agree with us, places no particular Everests in our path. Forging partnerships with those from whom we are estranged by history, tradition, class, religion, culture upbringing or politics, calls for vision and energy, for confidence in what we do, and faith in the integrity of our contribution. For those who believe in the gospel of love there should be a common homeland, a common language robust enough to see over the walls of difference to the common brotherhood and sisterhood which lies beyond them.

I think of the words of the most loved Pope of my lifetime, Pope John 23rd - "I’m not here to guard a museum, but rather to cultivate a garden."

Which are you to be, quaint museums, as some would have it, or gardens. And, if it is to be gardens, how deep will you dig the soil, how imaginative in the plants you introduce, how watchful for the weeds that choke. What partnerships will you forge, comfortable or uncomfortable with the new generation of movers, shakers, ideas generators?

There are extraordinary new opportunities for partnerships in particular an as yet, unscripted new set of relationships between Ireland, North and South, and Great Britain.

One of the particular joys of being here today is to be in the place so closely associated with the late great Benedictine teacher of meditative prayer Dom John Main who was like me a lawyer and who like me taught in the Law School at Trinity College, Dublin though to my regret, not at the same time. I know his very colourful personality added some spice to life here at Ampleforth. In a book I wrote recently based on lectures which I gave at the 1997 John Main Seminar I said this of him.

“(He) is a sign of hope for a world struggling towards reconciliation. He is a special sign of hope for Ireland. He was a quintessential Irishman born in England and a quintessential Englishman who lived in Ireland. He reconciled love for many cultures and religions without ever abandoning his own faith or culture. He opened his own church up to the prayer experience of eastern religions and in so doing discovered the contemplative riches of his own tradition….. His inner journey…led him…. to a vision of loving embrace for all of humanity.”

What is learnt in childhood is engraved on stone. You are engravers, crafters shaping posterity, even as you shape the present. May you teach your pupils wonder curiosity and awe-filled respect for the great gift of God-given diversity. If you teach them that they will have no difficulty in following the commandment which is the greatest commandment of all to love one another.