What is it to observe a moment of silence? After a bomb blast, at the funeral of a murdered school boy, or on a march calling for an end to poverty, to cite three examples. Again, how do we respond when we are told that our silence in the face of the suffering of others makes us complicit in the prolongation of their suffering? So many silences of late. Observed and ignored, celebrated and suspect. What are we learning?
It was in Ballycastle that my wife Sarah and I first heard the news that bombs had gone off in London earlier that morning, on July 7. We had spent the night in a farmhouse and gone on to visit the Corrymeela Community after breakfast. We heard the news on the radio on our way into the town. We found a pub that had just opened and watched the coverage, feeling that same mixture of shock and horror, outrage and compassion that I’m sure you did as the news reached you. All of a sudden we felt farther away than the road and the ferry had taken us. It was good to have the Corrymeela folk to go back to for lunch, where we observed a moment of silence, the first of many, in memory of the victims.
When, a week after the bombings, on July 14, the nation observed a two-minute silence in memory of the victims, Sarah and I found ourselves in County Galway, on the way to Thoor Ballylee, the medieval tower that was W.B. Yeats’ summer home and muse for much of the 1920s. As noon approached we climbed the winding stone steps to the top of the tower, where we observed the silence.
A curious turn of phrase: to observe silence. What does one see? Treetops blown about in a graceful, almost hypnotic dance. Dark water streaming by below. A man and a child, the child sitting on the stonewall of the bridge over the River Cloon, the man taking a photograph. Up above, the stones of the parapet like broken teeth, edging up and down around us.
From his time in Thoor Ballylee comes some of Yeats’ most powerful poetry. The Tower (1928), to cite an obvious example, where in Part VII is an eerie reminder of the silence we observed on July 14:
I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist
sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.
By the end of July it had become difficult to remember how the month had begun. On July 2, on the eve of the G8 summit, over 225,000 people marched in the streets of Edinburgh, calling for an end to poverty, for more and wiser aid, fair trade and the cancellation of odious debt. While the need to withhold financial assistance from corrupt rulers was acknowledged, and the need to contain those who sought forcibly to hijack the day with violence was successfully met, it was the “click message,” telling us that every three seconds a child dies from extreme poverty, that focused the hearts and minds of the marchers. It was a call to give such children a chance to live. A call that could be heard as much in the silences between the clicks, as one waited for the next snap of a finger, signalling yet another death, as in the clicks themselves.
Those of us marching with the Linlithgow banner were on the George IV Bridge when, at 3 p.m., the march stopped and fell silent. Completely silent. For sixty seconds. I remember being surprised by that silence. By its purity in the heart of the city. A Make Poverty History flag was flying from a flagpole on top of one of the buildings in front of us. Then I began to hear a sound, like rushing water, coming towards us. A crescendo of cheering voices in a wave rolling over us as the silence was broken along the march. It was exhilarating. And yet, what were we celebrating? Ourselves? That we had done it? Got ourselves and our voices out? For Gleneagles to see and hear? We marched on. It was not until we had crossed the High Street and were heading down the Mound that I thought again of the silence between the clicks. The silence of the newly dead, audible only when listened for.
And then, on a late August afternoon in the Main Theatre at the Edinburgh Book Festival, I was accused, together with the rest of the world, of silence, a complicit silence, in the face of the genocide in Rwanda in April 1994. Our accuser was General Romeo Dallaire, force commander of the UN mission to Rwanda, who, fighting his own inner demons, had managed at length and heroically to produce the devastating indictment that is Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
As I listened to Dallaire I was struck by the sharp contrast between the death story in Rwanda and the birth story in South Africa in the same month in 1994. The silence regarding Rwanda, I realized, was made far easier for millions of people around the world by South Africa, which went to the polls after decades of struggle against apartheid in the historic election that brought Nelson Mandela to the office of State President. It was hard to hear the outcry of the victims in Rwanda when our ears were filled, and gladly, with the birth cry of a new South Africa.
I had not, before that August afternoon, held the birth cry and the death cry in the same moment. Felt the joy and been accused of the silence at the same time. I thought of Paul’s call to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. (Romans 12:15) Do we have the capacity to do both, and be true to both, at the same time? A question for our relationships here at home, as well as abroad.
