Father Guy Jamieson: We can all play a part in building the cause of peace

Following the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in May, our attentions have been taken up with the nature of the public’s response to this high-profile killing.

Mosques were attacked and Muslims were intimidated. Even though tensions rose in a number of neighbourhoods, 
calm and reason prevailed thanks to the initiatives of many other groups.

It was my privilege to have been invited to one such initiative in Leicester at which faith and business communities demonstrated the strengths of collaboration aimed at nurturing the common good. The Muslim community invited me to speak at Friday prayers which were followed by moving presentations to members of Lee Rigby’s 
family.

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By stepping into the worlds of others, this showed how radically divergent starting points can be used to build meaningful purpose into the lives of our neighbourhoods.

After Lee Rigby’s killers were found guilty of murder at the Old Bailey, our attentions were once again focused on what could be considered an appropriate response in our communities.

Shortly after the verdict, I was walking through my home town of Halifax when I noticed on a military stall the words: “No soldier would ever leave a man behind.”

These words of assurance remind us of the dutiful responsibility we all have to one another and raise the question: “What has this left behind that should challenge us?”

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There are wonderful examples of goodwill, and long may they continue, and yet there are also disturbing signs of disengagement from the kinds of simple, neighbourly enquiry and human interest that would do so much to strengthen the foundations of our communities.

Reversing this disengagement is a shared priority, surely spurred on by the dreadful prospect of the Rigby killing being repeated. Building peace is the life’s work of every civilised human being. We don’t need to be Gandhi, Martin Luther King or any other prolific or charismatic figurehead; we simply need to exercise the gift of our freedom.

At the Old Bailey, the language of “justice” was heard loud and clear, but justice is made possible so that freedom can then be exercised. Because we take our freedom so much for granted, we can easily overlook the fact that the exercise of freedom is not passive but active participation in that which makes us free.

The extremism in the rhetoric of terrorists is fuelled by many things, but it isn’t enough to blame it all on somebody else.

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There are cultural factors which have a tendency to exacerbate the lack of patience and reason in the terrorist mindset, and sadly these are part and parcel of modern life, in the prevalence of apathy and disinterest in what makes us all culturally unique on the one hand, and rampant materialism on the other.

Moral and cultural disinterest can be as provocative as crazed, obsessive, partisan over-interest.

The “active participation” I refer to is peace-building by daily acknowledgement of our freedom. Those of us in the faith communities need to own the issues as being not a “Muslim problem” but something which concerns all of us who identify ourselves in religious terms, so we need to further religious literacy in our communities.

Political interest in “integration” is usually addressed at traditional Islamic communities but my experience is that this is a matter for all.

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We can all do something to “inhabit” something of another’s world. This needn’t be as a busy-body but simply carrying out a neighbourly obligation to make our neighbour somebody who doesn’t simply live next door but whose presence further afield impacts on how we think and feel. When we do this, it makes us gracious and this has a habit of extending back into the pockets 
of local communities in ways which can be surprising and enlivening.

The centenary anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War next year provides us all with a much needed vehicle to further our role, secular or religious, as builders of peace.

Anniversaries provide impetus and practical opportunity to face openly and honestly, if not actually confront, those features of life which breed conflict, separation and resentment.

Reversing disengagement is easy and enlivening with all the reason we could ever need for ourselves, our loved ones and our neighbours, wherever they may be.

*Father Guy Jamieson is a vicar for the parishes of St Anne’s and St Thomas’s in Halifax. He had presided over Lee Rigby’s wedding.