Interview with Canon David Porter

Reconciliation: my interpretation

I`m not sure I actually have a definition of reconciliation in that sense that I hold on to in every circumstance; but I tend to present my understanding of reconciliation by saying what it isn’t, rather than what it is. So reconciliation isn’t about resolving conflict; it`s about transforming it. It isn’t about eradicating differences; it`s about learning to live and inhabit the differences in a more constructive relational way. I think reconciliation is very contingent, it`s very elusive and it`s very much a long term project. It`s something that is very rare; I think when I hear people claiming that reconciliation’s happened I`m always quite sceptical, because we never quite fully get there this side of the crozier,and that`s why at one level my favourite definition of reconciliation is the one that Stanley Hauerwas gives, which is that “Reconciliation is when our enemy tells us our story in such a way that we`re able to say ‘yes that is my story’”.

I think being Canon for Reconciliation at Coventry is interesting in terms of what it means to work out reconciliation, and particularly the time that I came into the team, because a lot of the work that I did was to rebuild the infrastructure and the capacity of the organisation to see what its strategic direction was. The main reconciliation work hasnot been done by the team at Coventry - it`s done through the hundred and sixty members of the Community of the Cross of Nails who are out there in their communities throughout Europe and Africa and other parts of the world, and our job here is to resource them, support them, help them think it through.

The Irish are great story tellers, we`re known for it, it`s at the heart of our folklore,our tradition, and the sort of structures we need to move towards reconciliation are the capacity to listen to one another’s stories. It`s accepting that from one perspective, particularly in prolonged historical conflicts, no one, no one community is without sin. And that goes to the heart of the Coventry story of reconciliation: the Litany begins with ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ and that that is where the capacity to tell one`s own story in a way that rather than excludes, andis used to exclude, the person you have been at enmity with, you then re-narrate your story to include them and in that way their pain, which you may have caused / your community may have caused, becomes your pain and vice versa, and reconciliation begins to happen at that point of relationship.

What stands out from your time at Coventry Cathedral?

For me it has to be the bringing of the statue of the Choir of the Survivors into the ruins, which was presented as a gift of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, and of the FrauenkircheFoundation, to the Cathedral of Coventry to mark 50 years of the new Cathedral. Why was that? Well the first visit I made about a month after I arrived was to Hamburg to the board of the German CCN, and I made it my task to visit as many German CCN partners as I could; and I probably got around 80% of them in my time. I went to every board meeting and executive committee meeting twice a year of the German CCN, and the one place that I really reached out to was Dresden and the Frauenkirche, and started investing in a more active relationship, got the Bishop engaged in that, which is something that captured Christopher Cocksworth`s imagination which is great. There was absolutely nothing on the Coventry Cathedral site that told the German story, and therefore if my understanding of reconciliation is the capacity to both tell our story in the presence of our enemy and to hear our enemy`s story, and to enter into each other`s story, then there was something quite profoundly amiss: that there was no telling of the German story. We had the Stalingrad Madonna which told something of it, which one of my predecessors Paul Oestreicher brought here,but I wanted something that would memorialise the story of our German partners. Therefore to receive that gift from the Frauenkirche, to put the Choir of Survivors into the cathedral ruins,at last we got to the point where we memorialised the suffering of the German people in that statue; and for me, in terms of how I recognise reconciliation after war, that was the most special thing of my time here.

So the first two years we spent a lot of time discussing what should the mission statement of the CCN be, and at one level it was already there: Kenyan Wright had given us it,‘healing the wounds of history’. The Community of the Cross of Nails was his idea when he was appointed the first international canon in the early 1970s and the Community of the Cross of Nails came into being in January 1974. Trying to make sense of all these churches and groups that had received the Cross of Nails in the previous thirty years, the community was created, and it was to heal the wounds of history, the wounds of war - obvious; for him it was also the wounds between the global north and the global south;the economic exploitation of colonialism, and the wounds with the Earth. One of the first ever Christian environmental conferences was run by the Community of the Cross of Nails in Atlanta, Georgia back in the mid-1970s. So that one was already there. We added to it ‘learning to live with difference and celebrate diversity’ which recognised thefact that the world we were reconciling with, both the global north south and the war, were no longer 2000/3000 miles away, they were two yards away as our next-door neighbours, because the world had come; and that was true for most places where the Community of the Cross of Nails is. They were living now with more diverse communities, difference was on their doorstep. So how do we live with that and celebrate that?and then the third thing was ‘building a culture of peace’ - how do we help people actually be peacebuilders.

I think one of the challenges the Cathedral faces -and this is not new, so this is not rocket science, this goes right back to the new Cathedral and to Bill Williams, it goes back to the city - who owns the reconciliation vision in Coventry?Who is the community that delivers it beyond the professional staff of canons and people like me who come into be the Canon for Reconciliation? I think every Canon for Reconciliation or international Canon has struggled with that one. It still remains a challenge I think, for us and that’s what we need to capture.

To see more Anglican cathedrals, Anglican dioceses around the world wide communion joining the Community of the Cross of Nails would be incredible, and actually would be a gift not only just to the [Anglican] Communion but actually to the world, because 80 percent of Anglicans across the world live in situations of conflict and post-conflict. If we were to have a hundred new Anglican churches around the world join the Community of the Cross of Nails that would be a game changer, both for the life of the Cathedral in touching conflict situations from Burundi to Sri Lanka to Malaysia; it could be a game changer internally to the life of the Communion because it would give more authenticity to the Cathedral being at the heart of a network for reconciliation for the divisions in the Communion; and I think it would be a game changer for the city because it really would help the vision spread. You know the majority of the partners of the Community of the Cross of Nails are within Europe, and yet where the world conflict isisoutside Europe at the moment - so I think that is a big challenge.

Is the only way to reconciliation through the cross?

I do think that in that focal moment of the cross, that the story that I’ve talked about in my definition of reconciliation, that is when the full story of the human predicament is unveiled, and the human predicament is our profound alienation from God,from our very selves, from one another and from the earth, and the cost of that the injustice of it, the violence of that is revealed to us on the cross and at that moment the price of that alienation is absorbed by Christ. I put all my focus on Colossians more than Corinthians because to me the Colossian passages are about the uniqueness of Christ and the reconciling of all things in Christ. The fullness of the God-head bodily dwells in Christ and the full and complete revelation of that is when reconciliation is complete. And that comes and derives its power and purpose from the power of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus. When Jesus says enough, it was enough to creation, it was enough to the nature that we see that rips itself apart with so much violence. It says that there will come a time where lion and lamb and wolf will be together, and there will be no fear in my holy mountain. It`s enough, in social relations between men and women, between slave and free, between black and white, yellow and brown, between people of all sexual orientation, so it is basically Jesus saying enough to all that alienates us.

What is the role of Coventry in reconciliation?

I think one of the things that the Cathedral needs to realise is that while it may have occupied the unique position post-1940 and in the post-war world, it is no longer unique, and to a degree it has actually been overtaken by many initiatives,and so the Cathedral needs to hold itself a little bit more modestly than maybe it has done in the past. It is a great story, it is a powerful story, it had it`s time and place, but it’s not the only one now and it s not the only powerful story out there, so it needs to ask itself what can it therefore bring to the game because its story is no longer sufficient to carry it. To me that has to be about quality, it has to be about raising our game in terms of facilities in which we host people, because I do still think there’s a powerful narrative in the building, from the ruins to the new Cathedral, and it is amazing how people bring all of their conflicts with them when they come on pilgrimage to that space and walk through; people who have now made Coventry their home come and bring their pain and their story and their narrative and their journeys of reconciliation, and they hold them there and they begin to make their story part of our story as a city.This was brought home to me by one of the first things that I did when I came here was to go to an exhibition of art by recently arrived refugees, and probably seven out of ten art pieces the Cathedral ruins appeared in, and we asked why, and people said that was where we went on our worst days when we first arrived, to be able to sit there at lunch time in a holy place and reflect. Maybe that’s how we can build peace, and we can make that message go home and I think we need to create the space for that.

Can you share with us a story from your time as Canon for Reconciliation?

The stories that have most affected me have been about how Germany has dealt with its past and its pain.In the Olympics of how to deal with the past they have the gold medal!The president by constitutional right make a speech each year about the past and how they continue to deal with it, and two stories have deeply touched me from that. One is right[back] to the Nazi past, presenting the Cross of Nails to the chaplaincy at the Dachau Concentration Camp; once staying at the convent at the border of the camp overnight for two nights, and I was in the guest house on my own for one of them. It was really quite a deeply deeply profound experience, and scary is a too silly a word to use, it was just haunting to be at the edge of that place and then to hear of a Catholic priest who was in the camp for being a Catholic priest, who got ill-treated and tortured like others - solitary confinement. When they were liberated he chose to stay on to be the priest to the SS guards that were kept there in prison, and then when the camp was used to house refugees from Eastern Germany and what is now Poland, who were coming to the West, he stayed on to be their priest and was the main advocate for the opening of the camp as a place of memorial, which was opposed by the Bavarian government and so on and it took a lot of lobbying and advocacy. I need to be careful with this story because given where I come from I can see it could be a bit of an anti-Catholic story but effectively the Bavarian state government put pressure on the Archbishop of Munich to silence him and he wouldn’t be silenced, so the rumour was spread that he was in the camp not because he was a Catholic priest but because he was gay, because Dachau was the big camp where the LGB community were held,and on the day that Dachau was declared it would be a memorial site he went up into the mountains and hung himself. And that just blew me away that story.

What are your thoughts on the role of religion in reconciliation?

I think our capacity to understand the role of religion in conflict has diminished in the western part of the world. Partly because so many policy makers and people who are responding to conflict struggle to have a visceral understanding of how religion impacts people`s lives, that it`s not just a hobby, that it`s not just on Sunday, it`s not just a private belief system, but it is how you view life, it is a world view, and we forget that not that long ago the dominant world view for most people was religious within which political and economic and other cultural factors in their world view fitted. Has religion been the cause of conflict? Most of the conflicts that we look at the primary cause has been political, has been about territory, has been about resources, and it’s been about cultural tribal animosity but because religion was the lens through which we saw so many of those things, religion then gives a language for the conflicts. That’s why religion gets a bad time but I do believe that in the core of faith communities is the resource for building peace in our world ,the sense of accountability in faith communities beyond this life; it`s not just mumbo-jumbo ‘big man with a beard in the sky’, it`s actually saying that there is a point to final accountability. People sometimes push back against religion and say ‘so that lets you off the hook’; well actually it doesn’t - it`s quite terrifying to think that beyond the bounds of life and death there`s another place of account where everything will be open and justice will be completed. You can put it in the way that Martin Luther King did, “The arc of the universe bends towards justice” and I believe that very strongly, that the place of reconciliation which is represented by the cross which we talked about earlier in the cross of nails is that place where in the words of John Paul Lederach truth and mercy, peace and justice embrace, kiss one another, you know the cross brings all of those four things together and creates the space that we call reconciliation; and I think there will come a time when the truth will be unveiled for all to see that justice will be declared, but that both will be tempered by mercy and by the peace of God overruling all things. The challenge for us now as a religious community is to live in the light of that, and how we engage with the world of conflict around us, and therefore to be a resource for peace.

How important is World War Two in Coventry’s work in reconciliation today?

For the British people World War Two is the defining myth of the modern nation, particularly the Blitz - you see it in popular culture, we keep going back to it partially because as some commentators have observed the last big war was the last good war when it looked very clear, and there’s truth in that. There was a clear moral as well as mortal danger, and a political danger, to our liberties and it needed to be resisted; that narrative around World War Two has also blinded the British people to the true nature as to what was going on in that war.If our empire hadn’t fallen with us fighting a more open resistance to liberation movements then we might have been more aware of our sins in relation to colonialism. That the empire fell on the back of a war where we were fighting a good cause against a tyrannical regime it somehow covered over the sin, and therefore we`ve allowed the defeat of Hitler to almost define the war in a European context without seeing it in a global context, which was the collapse of European colonialism.