Copio ed incollo x chi è interessato qs scritto relativo ad un cross community project, a dimostrazione di come le metodologie x avvicinare le due comunità non siano scontate:
Colin will speak about the Corrymeela Community's work within this theme in Northern Ireland, and will reflect with us on how to create the space where pain of hurt, injustice and division can be explored in a way that can move us beyond false peace, rivalry and scapegoating. He will look at forgiveness within a cultural system based on retribution rather than restoration, and explore a model, TIDES, which locates forgiveness within relational commitment to one another and the Creation around us.
A personal account of Craig's presentation
In a divided Northern Ireland the Corrymeela community is an experiment in creating a space for people where ‘no side can claim it as their own’. Colin Craig is the director of the project and his deep understanding of the Catholic / Protestant divide is delivered with a humility befitting to a man working for peace in a country synonymous with violence and bloodshed, bigotry and sectarianism.
It is possible claims Colin, to determine whether a person is a Catholic or a Protestant within 25 seconds, as he recounted a childhood game that he and his peers would play. Behind this lighthearted anecdote lies a pathology that Colin and his community are seeking to explore and re-programme at an individual level. Corrymeela is a place where members from all walks of life, from both sides of the sectarian divide can be encouraged to reveal their humanity to each other. But Colin Craig’s own journey in learning how to help people to engage in such meaningful processes is predicated upon his aversion to the ‘tyranny of niceness’ that pervades many of the healing and peace making discourses.
Based upon experience of what works, Colin has learnt to be realistic in his expectations and is emphatic of the need to acknowledge the difficulty that we all have in letting go of our identity. The challenge is to facilitate ways in which people can begin to see beyond the messages and the ‘story’ that automatically comes into play as soon as the ‘other’ is labelled as a Catholic or Protestant. Previous experiments with keeping the two groups together at an early stage were counter-productive. Colin and his team discovered that greater value was to be gained from allowing the groups to work amongst themselves as an important phase in the reconciliation process. Meeting alone, each group would be encouraged to discuss between them: ‘What is the question that you have always wanted to ask the other?’. Being within the setting of one’s own group allowed a freeing up to occur and a sense of safety to be established from which this question could be explored at a deeper level.
Experiential learning takes precedence over the ‘talking-space’ model which Colin associates with the middle-class ethic. Sitting down and sharing stories in an attempt to achieve empathy is perhaps understandably naive in the context of a country which has experienced so much bloodshed and partisanship. Moving people out of dialogue and into direct experience seems to be more effective. “I have to be where people are”, explains Colin whose adaptive approach to group work is enriched by his rigorous enquiry into the question: ‘What is reconciliation?’. He showed a model which embraces the four integral aspects of ‘Individual’, ‘Creation’, ‘Social’ and ‘Spiritual’; a model which he later discovered to be the Native American medicine wheel. The T-I-D-E-S model portrays a ‘relational commitment to one another and the Creation around us’ and stands for: Transcending, Transition and Transformation, Interdependence, Diversity, Equality and Sustainability.
“Celebrating diversity is too cosy’ warns Colin. “It’s tough, but also living without diversity is not life enhancing”. The cultural model created by our market economy is that we know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. We seek individual freedom that translates into rivalry; a fear that if the other becomes free then ‘I’ cannot. So we seek to eradicate the ‘other’, to stamp out diversity. As an RAF plane flew overhead Colin posed the question as to why we need these planes. At some level he claims, “We want them, we want people to fight for us”. To escape this way of thinking we have to engage with our fears in order to find freedom in a paradigm shift. We have to learn how to embrace the enemy. “After all it is”, he points out, “the gunmen who are leading the peace-process now”.
By Simon Bowen. The Forgiveness Conference, 18th October 1999 , The Findhorn Foundation