Making tea

Guest post by Emily Provance

This comes from a Quaker Friend of mine who wrote this on her trip to Northern Ireland. You can learn more about Emily at: https://goodnewsassociates.org/associates/emily-provance/

Dear Friends,

I was not expecting my tour guide to be a former member of the IRA. But then again, those who were part of the paramilitaries are only in their sixties and seventies, and where would they be but living ordinary lives in ordinary places?

(There are, for the record, still paramilitaries in Northern Ireland and still active members to this day, but it's different in many ways.)

I liked him. He was personable. He had a sense of humor. He'd clearly told his story many times. He bears a visible injury from his encounters with violence. He spent many years in prison. He was honest and vulnerable and shared details that I'm not going to repeat, but suffice it to say his story became intensely human as it unfolded throughout the tour. He told us about a favorite uncle he grew up with. We learned his sister's name.

At one point, he took us to a garden with a monument that had names inscribed. I'd actually passed this garden before, and I had a basic idea what it was, but to hear him talk about it felt different. First he read several of the names and told their stories. They were people he knew personally. He said, "To me, this is a place where I honor the friends I loved. From my point of view, they were killed for who they were, killed fighting for our rights...but I want you to understand, if you lived one street over, you would see this as a monument to terrorism. And I know that, too."

Later, someone asked whether there was a Protestant equivalent of the Catholic-perspective tour we were receiving. He said, "Oh, yes, and let me tell you about the man who guides it. You see, years back, his father threw a petrol bomb into a cafe. That bomb, it killed my grandfather. My grandfather was seventy-three years old and having his breakfast. When I grew up, I joined the IRA. When he grew up, he joined up on his side. And now I run the tour on my side the gates, and he runs the tour on other side the gates. And you call me __________, and you call him __________. We share the same first name, isn't that something? Sometimes, on a tour, I'll take my group to the gates and we'll shake hands, him and I. We won't meet him today. His knee's gone bad. He'll need surgery. But when I can, I go, and I shake his hand. Because we know, both of us, that's important. It can't be allowed to happen again."

His worry is for the young people. They don't understand, he explained. They get angry, especially around certain holidays, because each side has those who deliberately provoke the other. And, he says, he will often put his body between the angry boys on his side and the angry boys on the other side. And there will be another man doing the same, a Protestant man, because they know. They know it can't be allowed to happen.

Halfway through the tour or so, I found myself walking beside this man, and he asked me who I was and what brought me to Belfast. I explained that I am a Quaker traveling minister. He stopped in his tracks to shake my hand.

"After the hunger strikes, and after I was let out of prison," he said, "I was invited to Quaker House. You know Quaker House? With the blue door?"

(I told him I did, though it no longer functions the same way it used to.)

"Well, anyway, I was invited to Quaker House to sit down in a circle with other men just released from prison. Men from my side and the other side. There was a rule there--I always loved this--when you went in the door, first you took off your coat and you hung it on a hook, and then you took off all your weapons and put them on a shelf. Couldn't carry a weapon into Quaker House. We all did the same.

"First time I met those men on the other side. There was a man there from London facilitating, and I think we scared him, at least at first. Because he asked us all to introduce ourselves, and we all did, and we'd all been in prison for blowing things up.

"The Quakers had us talking many years before the politicians got round to having a peace process. We knew by the time we were released from prison, there had to be a better way. We all did. But the politicians weren't ready to make peace. We were. Well, we wanted to go about things another way. The Quakers gave us a place to talk about that.

"But we went to Quaker House because it was quite natural to do that. You see, the Quakers had been outside the prison every day for a long time, serving tea to the families, families on both sides. We all knew the Quakers. So when they said 'come round and have another cup of tea at Quaker House,' we did that without a second thought. Perfectly natural.

"Well. And we knew our families would be safe with them. They would never hurt our families."

I've been thinking about that ever since. The Quakers were trusted because they'd been serving tea for many years and because they had left no doubt in anyone's mind that they would never hurt anybody's families. The Quakers were trusted because they had built a reputation. Not based on distant history, although that helped, but based on what they were known to do every day in the modern times.

These days, for whom are we making tea?

With love,

Emily

If you want to know more, she is doing a hybrid presentation on communities and political violence on May 31st at 2pm in Barnegat NJ.

To learn more and register, click below

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tBs4emA1RjCoh7EYZdMarQ#/registration