ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Good morning.

Sr. Berchamans runs a school in Pakistan’s largest metropolis – Karachi with its close to 20 million inhabitants. Sr Berchmans hails from a rural village on Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard, and she has spent sixty four years teaching girls in Pakistan. One of those girls - Benazir Bhutto - went on to become the world’s first female Muslim Prime Minister.

Recently, I was contacted by a friend in Karachi who told me that he wanted his daughter to be taught by Sr. Berchmans. He said that as a practicing Muslim it was important that his daughter get a good education and a solid formation of character. For him and his family the best place to get such a balance was at the Convent school.

I was reminded of this story on Monday as I sat and listened to the public information campaign around vigilance in the face of a growing terrorist threat. So much of it was a reminder of similar campaigns in the 70s, 80s and 90s when terrorism, inspired out of the Northern Irish Troubles, spread across the country. All of the advice we heard about being aware of your surroundings, to report anything suspicious and to move away from trouble, sounded prudent, appropriate and necessary. But it raised for me a bigger and perhaps more difficult question about how we can prevent such circumstances from ever emerging in the first place by addressing the underlying causes.

Remedy and response, don’t get me wrong, have their place in how a society must defend itself from terrorist attack. But based on the experience of the Troubles it was not the hard preventative steps that helped to reduce tension or violence, rather many of those measures tended to fuel alienation.

In the gospels Jesus has a number of encounters with people, often women, from outside his ethnic and religious community. What they show is that a deeper, more profound set of values is what brings real change - a set of values which engages, includes and raises the horizon beyond the immediate.

So in this time of renewed threat – that deeper question for us is how we engage the other in our midst, perhaps the stranger or those who might be different to us in terms of appearance, outlook, background, etc.

The example from the Convent school in Karachi – whether of Sr. Berchmans or the Muslim parent - shows us it is not about hiding what one is, or reducing difference of faith to a level where they are no longer distinctive or relevant, but it is about a mutual respect and a willingness to not only learn about the other, but from the other.

Show less