Talks About Talks

People ask me to share lessons from northern Ireland for the US - I don’t take that request lightly, but one of the ways that manifests is that I find it as difficult to start a response as to finish one. I’ve already written a piece about this topic, and the one you’re reading right now won’t be the last. I’m convinced that the story of northern Ireland has some gift, inspiration, provocation, even treasure in it for anyone wanting to be woven into being with a better world (and people from my homeland need to be reminded of the astonishing thing we have co-created), so I want to keep writing and thinking and sharing and learning the lessons of the place I’m from.

Today what I want to focus on is the necessity, and the danger, of talks about talks.

Before there were THE TALKS there were THE TALKS ABOUT TALKS. The peace process in and about northern Ireland was preceded by mediated conversations about what the process itself could look like - that makes sense, because decades (or even centuries, depending on how you look at it) of enmity weren’t going to be solved overnight. The process of conflict transformation needed to be designed, and designed by people who knew what they were doing. Such a mysterious thing as a peace process in and about northern Ireland was still fairly new, so “knowing what they were doing” was sometimes limited to knowing that they didn’t know what they were doing, but doing it anyway, evaluating as they went; which is much better than pretending you know what you’re doing, doing it, and refusing any feedback.

At any rate, The Talks about Talks eventually gave way to The Talks, and The Talks resulted in an agreement whose radical creativity still serves the common good nearly thirty years later.

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There are at least three risks in offering some solace, encouragement, inspiration, challenge, pitfalls, red flags and learning from one place to another.

The first is that of course no two situations are the same; but then I remember that doesn’t mean people with headaches can’t empathize with people who suffer migraines.

The second is that no-one can have a comprehensive outlook on what happened in a society divided on religio-ethnic grounds for 850 years, and which has been most strongly emerging from that conflict for only the past thirty; but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to own our biases, and share the portion of light that has come our way.

The third is the sense of who am I to tell you anything about something so massive; but I was born into the most intense decade of the recent violent conflict, the violence came to my loved ones who have been bereaved from all directions, and I was recruited into and mentored through the active movement for peace and reconciliation. So I’ve got something to say.

And so do you, wherever you’re from - that’s part of the point of how storytelling shapes our lives, the limits of what we believe to be possible. The tragedy is that most of us are unconscious of this, most of the time. Our culture does not teach us fluency in storytelling, and while that is a life-long journey, it depends on three astonishingly simple questions:

1: What story am I telling? What story am I living? What story is telling me?

2: Is it true - or at least is it the truest version of the story I can discern?

3: Am I telling it in the most helpful way?

There are as many answers to those questions as there are stories, but there are also ways in which the universe is decidedly simple.

I could invoke Jalaluddin Rumi’s The Guest House, or Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front, or Mary Oliver’s The Wild Geese, or Langston Hughes’ I, Too, or Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise, or Joy Harjo’s Perhaps the World Ends Here but the risk of reading those extraordinary poems is the same with the risk of all extraordinary poems: that we put the poet on a pedestal, that we only read their words, we don’t actually listen to them, never mind let them becomes seeds of practice. These poems about life can be experienced as ear candy or mood music, but unless the reader is activated into asking how might the spiritual gift of this poem be made real in my life, such poetry is the equivalent of having endless talks about talks that never lead to the talks themselves.

The point of the question at the end of Mary’s poem is to actually ask ourselves what we will do with our one wild and precious life.

She meant the question for all of us. She believed we were all worthy of asking it of ourselves.

So in sharing these words about what I think we might learn from northern Ireland’s conflict and peace, I want to encourage you to ask yourself not only what you can do and be in service of a safer, more compassionate, more beautiful world, but to notice what you might already be doing and being. What good story is already telling you, which you might just need to tell more loudly?

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If I were to talk about peacemaking in and about northern Ireland, I’d certainly want to tell you about John Hume who said we don’t have a divided land but a divided people, because where the border lies on the island of Ireland is not the heart of the problem; and you can’t eat a flag, because nationalism - whether Irish, British, “Christian” or otherwise - doesn’t meet real human needs.

I’d be glad to share one of my personal encounters with David Ervine, a man who was once willing to kill people to achieve political ends, but who evolved into a commitment to nonviolence, telling me that tribalism is like piss down the inside leg - at first it gives a nice warm glow, but after a while, you don’t want to sit in it.

And I’d tell you, to be sure, about the ceasefires of 1994, and the ensuing peace talks, and the Agreement of 1998 which created structures in which we agree to share power for the sake of the common good, rather than have one community dominate the other.

But I would also invite you to listen to Sinead O’Connor and The Gloaming, and read Gail McConnell and Paul Durcan, to watch I Am Belfast and Good Vibrations, to visit the Ulster Museum’s Silent Testimony gallery of portraits of survivors of terror, to learn about the history of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, and the Corrymeela Community, and the Peace People, and the New Ireland Group, and the Integrated Education Movement, and ECONI, and the Mornington Community Project, and the Irish School of Ecumenics, and zero28, and the One Small Step Campaign, and Borderlands.

I’d want to introduce you to the stories of May Blood and Glenn Jordan, of Lesley Carroll and John Dunlop, of Alec Reid and Gerry Reynolds, of Clonard and Fitzroy and the Larder.

I’d want you to know about the thousands of people who rejected violence in both its physical and rhetorical forms, and chose to live by a different story: one in which the truth found in all wisdom traditions, all true religion, all life-giving politics is not just a nice set of poetic words, but the essential, indivisible, bottom-line and utterly supreme rule of life:

Love with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.

It has an easy echo in Do unto others as you would have them do unto you or Don’t do to others as you wouldn’t want them to do to you.

These may well be clichés, but they are not lies.

They roll off the tongue, but they are not supposed to be merely recited - like announcing the astonishing phrase what will you do with your one wild and precious life, and then immediately ignoring it.

These words are dynamite to the foundations of ways of being that turn us into machines, bots whose purpose is no more than to be an economically productive unit on a conveyor belt toward a couch potato retirement, with experience reduced to the junk food consumption of trivia. I would call it psychological masturbation, but it’s not that pleasurable. It’s a living death.

These words are dynamite to the foundations of the stories that aim to make us prioritize bigoted sectarianism at the cost not only of taking things from others, but denying ourselves the gift of inter-being.

Don’t get me wrong - I absolutely believe in tribalism. You could call me a tribalist-absolutist, actually. I just happen to think that the only group whose membership boundaries we should elevate over others is the human race. I am absolutely, completely, one hundred percent fiercely protective of my membership of one tribe only: that is the tribe of every human being who has ever lived, every human being who ever will live, and every human being who is alive today. I also think that the conscious experience of union with all humans - literally made of stardust, poetically made in the image of God - will inevitably lead to union with all living things.

It is not a smooth path, to say the least.

The sorrow of generations is enormous.

The risk of further suffering is real.

But the spiritual crisis of authoritarianism can only be met by the responsibility to author a transformative story in which all of us are invited to the table of life, with the only rule being to commit to not consciously harming anyone.

One of the traditions says don’t do to others what you hate for yourself - all the rest is commentary. Part of the challenge of the Golden Rule, in all traditions, is that most of us have not been taught to relate to ourselves in the ways that we deserve. One of the obstacles on that path is the lie that concepts like love aren’t politically realistic, to which I’d say, depends on your definition of love. The creative non-violent force that ended the violent conflict in and about northern Ireland was politically practical even though many said it was impossible, and what sustained it cannot be defined as anything less than love.

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So.

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Step One: figure out what you would do for a person whom you truly loved, and start treating yourself that way.

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The Porch is a community engaged in a slow conversation about beautiful, and difficult things, learning and sharing the practice of transformative storytelling. We dream of and live into an embodied story in which everyone’s needs are met - including the need to create something meaningful, and to help make the world better for everyone.

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We host The Porch Gathering of transformative storytelling near Asheville, NC, in April 2026 - information at www.theporchgathering.com

And you can join us on one of our Ireland retreats for a week transformative storytelling in the context of northern Ireland - details at www.irelandretreats.com