By Ann Marie Foley - 15 March, 2018
Archbishop Michael Jackson of Dublin
Our society can too easily allow itself to become self-polarising, enabling the majority to exclude, confine and restrict ‘The Other’, according to the Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Revd Dr Michael Jackson.
Speaking on Wednesday evening (14 March 2018) at the launch of Generous Love in Multi-Faith Ireland by Suzanne Cousins, in the Church of Ireland Theological Institute in Dublin, the Archbishop made a plea to avoid caricature and its violence.
“It has become all too easy to move from excitable incomprehension to entitled ignorance. It is not the Way of the Cross. It is wrong to consider all Muslims as terrorists. It is wrong to turn our face away from all Muslims simply because we are content to fall into the first trap of Inter Faith encounter: comparing the best of ourselves with the worst of The Other,” he said
The Archbishop said that Inter Faith understanding and engagement in Ireland had a long way to go. However, he said there were many examples around the country of Inter Faith engagement. He added that the book he was launching invites the Church of Ireland to have a look at is Anglican self and asks questions about the relationship between mission and Inter Faith encounter.
Suzanne Cousins’ book is published by Church of Ireland Press and is the eighth in CITI’s ‘Braemor Studies’ series. The aim of the book, the author said is “to identify hindrances to Christian-Muslim engagement in Church of Ireland parishes and dioceses, with a view to stimulating the future development of a contextualised teaching resource on Christian-Muslim engagement for use by clergy and laity in the Church’s changing mission context.”
She said it is a practical, Bible-based resource, in which all members of the Church can be confident and which will enable the Church to have generous engagement, witness and service towards its Muslim neighbours. She added that faith, hope and love can be set against cynicism, scepticism and fear with the hope that the outcome will be healing, wholeness and salvation.
Archbishop Jackson said there are many reasons why people should be engaged in Inter Faith understanding, and there are many reasons why people resist it. Quoting the Director of the Church of Ireland Centre in DCU, Professor Anne Lodge, he said diversity in Ireland is bedevilled by ‘the containment of contamination’.
“Those who hold power at any given time tend to use that power not to expand the open pasture of inclusion but to exclude and to confine and to restrict The Other. Such restriction means that the very voice and contribution of The Other to civic life and civic values begins to look irrelevant and in turn becomes impossible,” he said. He added that the “wilful exclusion” of information about The Other may give us that feeling of not being contaminated, but it also pushes our backs into a wall.
“It is a wall built of the bricks of self-imposed limitation that truncates our development of understanding and freezes our experience of generosity. And generosity is a two-way street,” he explained.
Archbishop Jackson said that Suzanne Cousins makes the point that incomprehension breeds insecurity, and that our fallacy is that we can use ignorance to copperfasten certainty. He highlighted her invitation to engage in partnerships of difference and her assertion that dialogue is not an end in itself.
Generous Love in Multi–faith Ireland will be available through the Church of Ireland’s online bookstore at https://store.ireland.anglican.org/store/product/142/generous-love-in-multifaith-ireland and through the Book Well in Belfast for €6/£5.
