KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO DUBLIN AND GLENDALOUGH DIOCESAN FORUM
BY PROFESSOR PATRICIA BARKER
ALL HALLOWS - 24 NOVEMBER 2001

A cathaoriligh, is a chairde Gael idir Chleir agus tsua. Go raibh mile maith agaibh as ucht an chuireadh bheith anseo libh ar maidine. Is mor an chuis onora domsa. Ladies and gentlemen, many thanks indeed for the invitation to speak to you this morning on this significant occasion. I have this rather modest vision of the organisers sitting around and contemplating on the speakers. They want someone to wake everyone up early on a Saturday morning and introduce a certain pizzazz and sparkle to the proceedings. Then someone comes up with the brilliant idea: 'I know - why don't we get a Chartered Accountant?'

What I would like to reflect on this morning is what would I like the CoI to be for me and my family and the focus I believe the Church should be concentrating on.

The locus of attention for any Church will clearly be different for all of us - my reflections this morning are drawn from my experience and my needs. I wholeheartedly accept that you may not agree with much of what I say and indeed, you may violently disagree with me. But to-day's forum is important because so many people are coming together who will, statistically at least, represent a myriad of views, bring their individual perceptions of the fundamental objectives of the Church. So what I have to say is a personal reflection. It is not intended to be a topic of debate as to whether you agree with me or not, but maybe to spark you into articulating your challenges and your deeply held convictions and feeding them into today's process.

I will just address a principle. The structures necessary to achieve principles and the mechanisms necessary to implement them are secondary to the identification of and the prioritisation of the agreed principles. You have, in the dreadful commercial jargon, got to agree the mission first. Then you can put in place the aims, strategies, structures to achieve that mission. So I won't worry too much about the implementation this morning.

My mission would be to re-focus on the fundamental principle that Christ gave us. It is such simple principle and yet, it is extraordinarily difficult to live out. My life should be bedded in my love of God and I should love my neighbour as I love myself. This is a notion of me as part of a community and it is a notion of balance. To a simple accountant like myself it has a certain mathematical elegance. (love my neighbour as I love myself). So what I am striving for and what I want my Church to help me to live out is an achievement of a balance between caring for myself and, in caring for myself, caring for others. Somehow I have to strike that balance between total self-sacrifice to the interests of others (the kind which I saw growing up in many Irish mothers) and total dedication to and absorption in my own interests. I have to admit that I am sorely tempted to gravitate towards the latter. In the society in which I live, I perceive a move towards individualism and self-interest which is very often fired by lack of time to even consider the interests of others. To give you a very simple example, it is hard to persuade the young members in the yacht club to join a work party to clean up the boat yard of their club. They will, of course, work, but they expect to be paid. They don't consider themselves as part of a community. To give another example, I see young families where the over-stressed parents spend all year pounding the workplace treadmill. They get up at the crack of dawn, packing up sleepy children. They crawl through the traffic to the child minder then on to work where they gaze for hours on end at computer screens, fighting for promotion and bonus shares. Then back into the traffic again in the evening to apologise yet again to the childminder for being late picking up the children. They occasionally have a holiday if they can get away. Often they are so exhausted they have their holiday without their children so that they can rest. But on holiday, they spend most of the time on their mobiles to the office and the childminder worrying about what they have left behind.

Yet another example of imbalance I have observed is what I would describe as parental paranoia. This is where parents over-protect their children in order to protect themselves from criticism and guilt in case the children occasionally come to grief by making their own mistakes. In my observation, there is a huge increase in time spent by people with counsellors because they feel they must unpack their entire childhood second by second to discover why they feel anxious. Many people seem obsessed with making space, knowing themselves, finding time for themselves, raising their self-esteem and reducing their stress levels. The balance is wrong - my balance is wrong. Too much of my attention is devoted to loving myself and not enough to loving my neighbour. Sure, I feel distressed that women are badly treated in the promotion stakes, that multinational companies are ravaging our environment and that children are sleeping rough in Dublin. But I don't have time, because of my busy life to do anything other than putting a cheque into an envelope or complaining that the government should provide more housing. I am not cut out to be like Peter McVerry, but I recognise that I have got the balance wrong in my life. I do need the support of a Church that understands my dilemma. A church that can offer me moral and philosophical guidance and can help me to get perspective and balance and a better sense of me as a member of a community.

I came home on Thursday from a stint in Kosova. I saw Churches in action in a war zone. The principles of the ten commandments and of loving your neighbour were very real, very stark and very clearly spelt out by those churches. Somehow it seemed easier to proclaim the pathway of Christ or of Mohammed because society in Kosova is living life on the edge. Men openly hate and are physically killing each other because of their ethnic origin. Whole families are driven from their homes. Men in that society openly rape, steal, blaspheme and lie.

In our society, breach of the commandments and failure to love one's neighbour are not so obvious. It gave me cause for reflection that for our church to be able to proclaim the principles of the Ten Commandments and of loving your neighbour we must be able to centre our message in the society we live in. Our society is an affluent, selfish, work-centred, stressed and complex society. Men and women in Ireland today are just as much in breach of the Ten Commandments and the principle of loving their neighbours as they are in Kosova. But it is more subtle, more difficult to define and detect than it is in Kosova. Much of the breach is in the workplace. We have virtually full employment. People are at work for long hours. This is particularly true of younger people. Friendships are often based around workplace relationships. Social life is based around the workplace especially for young single workers. In this community of the workplace, people are stabbed in the back - but in Ireland the weapon is not a bayonet, but bullying. Both the bayonet and bullying are equally effective in destroying life. Theft takes place in Ireland too, but the victim is often not as clear as when an Albanian Kosovar steals the home from a Serb Kosovar. Sometimes our victims do not attract the same sympathy. Personal telephone calls are made on the employers phone. Time is stolen using the Internet for personal use during office hours. £100 can easily be added to the expenses claim against an employer with net profits of millions. These are not such stark manifestations of stealing. But they are, nonetheless, stealing. It demonstrates a failure to understand self as a member of a community with a duty to other members of the community.

Breaches of the commandments and failure to love your neighbour are often much more subtle in Ireland than they are in Kosova. Employees face ethical dilemmas in the workplace every day. To give a simple example, should I speak out against my manager for unfair treatment of another when my manager is the person who must recommend me for a bonus?

I have seen the churches working in the Kosovan situation working with the people where they are. Irish people are in the workplace. Where is the Church of Ireland in the workplace community? The villages and towns of Ireland are nearly empty during the day and yet that is where the Church is based. Soon the Church will only minister to those on the margins who are left in the villages and towns - the sick, the retired the unemployed. We do have a presence in all the schools and colleges. Those chaplains are aware of and trained in the specific, complex and subtle life dilemmas that effect their client communities. I can only recall one recent example of the Church in the workplace community. That was when the Church moved into the IFSC to provide a framework for analysis of the grief, terror, guilt, anger and sin following the terrorist attacks of the 11th September. I feel that the Church is noticeably absent from this difficult environment of the workplace.

In this arena, the Church could provide a framework for analysis of daily life and its complex difficulties in applying the deceptively simple principles of Christianity. This would be neither comfortable nor easy. Indeed, it may even prove to be a hostile environment. However, if action is not taken, I believe we could lose the game. We would be ousted by yoga classes, Joe Duffy, personal counsellors, reflexology, internet chat rooms, business ethics trainers and, God help us, the Little Book of Calm. However, I believe it is not too late and the Church could provide an analytical framework to assess and reflect on daily life with all its complex decisions and dilemmas.

Speaking personally, I would like this to be an interactive process. I would like communal worship to include, from time to time, a process of interactive exploration of the implementation of the word of God. I would like to hear, for example, how the Christian framework could guide me in the very real ethical dilemmas that I bang up against every day. What I do not like is having the rector choose every Sunday what he or she feels is the appropriate message to deliver whilst I sit passively by trying to fit it into my life. What I would prefer is engagement in the process of applying the Christian analytical framework. I would favour some form of consultation on the issues which are pertinent and hot. I would like to be part of the process of applying the Christian framework. I would sometimes favour a seminar format instead of a lecture format. I believe that people today are better educated and more articulate than they were when the form of worship was designed. They are anxious to participate in the analysis and exploration of problem solving. I also believe that such reflective worship should not be confined to Sundays. I have always believed that every day is the Lord's Day.

So, in conclusion, I would suggest that today's discussion should focus on direction rather than on the mode of transport. I would counsel against the temptation to come up with a list of ten things to do and try to be clear on fundamentals. Concentrate on being rather than on doing. The 'how' will follow naturally.

I wish you well for your deliberations today. Go mbeannaidh Dia dibh go leir agus go raibh maith agaibh as ucht an gcuireadh agus as ucht bhur eisteacht liom. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to address you. Go raibh mile maith agaibh go leir.

-ENDS-

With the compliments of the Diocesan Communications Officer 30/11/01

THE CHURCH OF IRELAND
DIOCESES OF DUBLIN & GLENDALOUGH
DIOCESAN COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER VALERIE JONES
TEL: 01-4935 405/087-2356 472 (H) 01-4946 202 FAX: 01-4944 720
E-mail:dco@dublin.anglican.org