I was brought up in Belfast immediately after the war in a time of austerity. Mine was a very happy existence but, looking back, there was a down side. There were about thirty houses in our street. Twenty-nine of them held families who were a variety of Protestant. The thirtieth, a very large house at the opposite end of the street, was the home of the Campbells. And the difference was the Campbells were Catholics. I played with every child of my age within a radius of about half a mile, except the Campbells. I remember a sense that they were different, that they went to a different place of worship, that they worshipped a different God.
And our Festivals forced us apart. We enjoyed the Orange processions, specifically on the 12th July. There was a lead-up time of about three weeks and you could hear the sound of marching bands, echoing across the city. For me they were a joyful occasion. My whole family went to watch them. As they went along they played songs that were familiarly called ‘Kick the Pope’ songs. During this period the Campbell children did not come out at night. They certainly didn’t go to the Orange processions. I have to say that there may have been a degree of prejudice in my upbringing but mine was a pretty tolerant family. However the Campbells were the Other. If I had been asked, I would probably have said that they worshipped a different God from me.
I was brought up in a monochrome religious environment. When I went to university, the situation changed but only to a limited extent. I met Catholics; we attended the same classes. I even met a couple of Jews. But even in university there was little sense of real friendship. Catholics even played different sports. We played rugby, hockey and cricket. They played hurling and Gaelic football.
But what I discovered in my university years was that our society was full of injustice. There was discrimination in employment. The prime minister of Northern Ireland had once spoken of a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people and advised Protestants only to employ Protestants. The city of Derry had a large Catholic majority, but there was a degree of gerrymandering. As we became aware of that and discontent began to grow, the Civil Rights movement got underway. Some Protestants joined in. We joined the marches, we felt sympathy with what was going on. We felt the situation was entirely unjust and needed to be addressed.
But within months things began to turn nasty. Violence broke out, especially in the major cities of Belfast and Derry. My friends and I quickly disengaged. This was not for us.
When I had finished at Queen’s University, I had a vocation to the ministry. I applied to the Presbyterian church. I was accepted and went for a three-year course of study. I found that there was a religious divide within our college. There were those like me, who were of a liberal bent, who welcomed the discovery of biblical criticism, who rejoiced in the fact that we were able to treat Biblical stories as myths. Then there were the others, who were intent on interpreting the Bible in a fundamentalist way.
The great turning point in my life came at the end of my second year when my spiritual advisor assigned me to Woodvale Presbyterian. It was situated at the top of the Shankill Road, which was the most ardently Protestant, Loyalist area in the whole of Belfast. My specific job was to run a youth club. In the three years that I was there I conducted the funerals of 13 people who were murdered in the Troubles. One of them was a very beautiful sixteen-year-old girl from my youth club, who was out walking with her boyfriend. An IRA car pulled out in front of them, a gun was produced, a shot was fired, missed him but hit her in the head.
There were regular bombs and shootings throughout the area. Terrible things would happen. There is something truly appalling about the idea that one of the best-loved prayers in the Christian tradition could be used to decide which side you were on, and your fate if you chose wrong.
After the Shankill Road I spent five years in a rural town called Banbridge, where I was the minister and they were very happy years. But after the Shankill Road, it was a bit of an anti-climax. At the end of the five years I was approached by the BBC offering me a job. For the next five years I was working in Broadcasting House in Belfast and they were the most exciting and exhilarating years of my life, because religion was central to what was going on. Religion did not cause the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The Troubles were caused by a mixture of circumstances, historical and contemporary, by culture and by the struggle for land and by power and identity. But when you throw religion into that mix, so that people began to say God is on our side, then you have a very dangerous situation indeed.
In our studio in Broadcasting House in Belfast we could bring together Catholics and Protestants, Nationalists and Loyalists, who could talk in a safe environment. Many Protestants heard their first ever Catholic Mass on Radio Ulster. Many Catholics heard their first ever Anglican Matins on Radio Ulster. One of the great moments of my life was Easter Sunday 1981 when I went to produce Morning Service for Easter Sunday from a Catholic Church in the Republican Bogside area of Derry. We did the rehearsal on the Saturday night. My friend the priest said he had to celebrate the Easter Vigil with his congregation in the Bogside. We went into this huge Church in the middle of the Bogside. There must have been at least a thousand people. He welcomed me, he said who I was, I got a round of applause. Everybody in that church went to receive communion except for me. Protestants were not allowed to receive communion in a Catholic church. I sat there, lonely, isolated and sad. I waited till everybody went up and everybody came back. My friend the priest waited till they all sat down. Then he walked the length of the church to offer me communion. This was a man who recognised that division and partisanship struck at the heart of what the Christian religion was all about.
Then in 1989 I was appointed Head of Religious Broadcasting for the BBC. I was working with a wide spectrum of the great and the good. I became part of a wide inter-faith network. So I became friends with Jews and Muslims and Hindus.
One of them was Rabbi Hugo Gryn. Hugo was born in the city of Berehova, which was then part of Czechoslovakia. In 1944 he was taken to Auschwitz. He became part of the panel on Radio 4’s the Moral Maze. There was an electric moment in the Moral Maze when the British National Party won a seat in the Isle of Dogs in a by-election and a BNP councillor came onto the programme and denied the Holocaust. And suddenly Hugo’s voice rang out: ‘Look me in the eye! And tell me there was no Holocaust. I lost relatives in Auschwitz. Why can’t you look me in the eye?’ There is a CD that the BBC issued of the Greatest Moments in the history of BBC radio and that was one of them.
It’s been a fascinating journey. Where do I stand now? Here I part company with what I perceive to be the general stance of SOF members, although I know you are a broad church. I believe in God. And by that I mean that I believe that there is a transcendent reality, which exists beyond the realm of this world. Without that sense of ‘The Other’ I’m not sure that our much loved religious traditions have any meaning. However at the heart of God is mystery; and I am absolutely convinced that all the great religions are seeking and worshipping the same reality. Had I been born in Saudi Arabia or in Pakistan I would be a Muslim. Would my experience of the Ultimate Reality be invalid? I think not. I believe in a God who not only tolerates diversity but loves and embraces it.
My experience is Christian. That is who I am. Therefore I am convinced that we must hold on to those stories which we find in the Bible, and which are the bedrock of our traditions, even as we interpret many of them in a non-literalist way. We should be willing to share those stories in a non-proselytising way with those whose experience is different. And we need to listen to their stories too.
And we need to listen to those stories in Community. I am doubtful of the testimony of those who say that their faith is entirely individualistic, that they need no church or fellowship. We need the wisdom and experience of others to correct our judgements. So I believe in God; I affirm our stories while being open to the stories of others. And I rejoice in my Faith Community. It has been an interesting journey.
Ernie Rea is the presenter of the BBC programme Beyond Belief and former BBC Head of Religious Broadcasting. This is an edited transcription of a recording of the talk given by Ernie Rea to the SOF Annual Conference.