This is based on an editorial I wrote for the first issue of a small magazine, 'Mustard Seed', that I produced. It provides some background to my emotional involvement in what was happening in Northern Ireland in 1971 as it descended into violence.
In September 1971 a sniper's bullet intended for a soldier killed little Angela Gallagher, a child not two years old. After watching on television her father bring the tiny coffin to the waiting funeral car, as some relief for my feelings I wrote the poem 'Our Buried Innocence'*.
This was one of several incidents that helped push me towards the most emotionally difficult period of my life. For although living in Scotland, I visited Ireland often and was deeply concerned about what was happening there. Especially, I despaired of the increasingly bitter attitude of even previously temperate people. My earlier poem 'The Valley' expressed my sense of frustration. The imaginary figure across the 'valley of separation' represented those who would no longer listen to moderate words, my words.
But during the emotional period that followed, this image transformed in my mind. For the figure became for me that of Jesus, and my heart he found heavy not because he did not want it but because of what I was. I came to see that the guilt of Ireland was also my guilt. Because its problem was that of the nature of our human heart**. And the verse imprinted on my mind was Ezekiel Ch36:v26, 'I will take away your stubborn heart of stone and give you an obedient heart.' For the faults we share with others are the most insidious of all. (See R.J. Sider's book 'Rich Christians in an age of hunger')
In the book of his collected letters, 'America', Alistair Cooke tells of one man who refused to be a child of his age. Though accompanying the Spanish conquistadors sent out of Mexico by King Charles in 1767 to conquer what is now California, Father Junipero Serra gave himself wholly to the barbaric Indians. Of him the letter says, 'If in the Spanish record there is one man whose life could possibly redeem the ferocity of the conquistadors, Father Serra is that man.' And today in spring-time the route of the great north-south highway is seen by thousands to be vividly marked by the blossoming mustard seeds the friar scattered as he walked.
1988
* This poem, and the other one mentioned here, are in my 'Poems of Youth and Age'.
** Of some interest regarding complicity is the experiment conducted in Stanford University in 1971.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
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Behold The Man*
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