There was something powerfully impressive in the sight yesterday of 40 of the world’s leaders linking arms on the streets of Paris in a demonstration of solidarity in the face of last week’s horrific attacks. Equally striking was the fact that an estimated one and a half million ordinary people turned out in the largest demonstration in the history of France, bringing together Muslims, Jews, Christians and people of no religious affiliation in a determination to halt what some commentators have suggested threatens to tear the very fabric of democratic culture.
For Christians there is a long tradition of understanding the painstaking work of mending what is torn as the labour in which God is engaged. One of the Desert Fathers of early Christianity, Abba Mios, when visited by a soldier, attempted to describe the character of God by asking the soldier whether, if his cloak were ripped he would throw it away? When the soldier replied, ‘No’ - that certainly he would mend it - Abba Mios told him, that God’s desire, patience and willingness to mend what is damaged exceeds even our human desire to mend a valued garment.
Some of the work necessary now to prevent the ripping apart of democratic societies across the world needs to be done at the level of national and international leadership, as the dreadful news from Nigeria this morning makes plain, but equally important and consistent action also needs to be taken by ordinary people at the local and domestic level. Both in France and in our own rather different context, for example, we all need to be responsible for resisting the temptation to respond to the terrorist desires of the few with an Islamophobia that further undermines the universal human rights that have been at the heart of Europe since the end of World War II.
Less dramatically, we all also need to be engaged in the patient labour of building cross cultural relationships in our everyday settings. This was brought home to me last week, in an unassuming way in the person of Hussain, who came to the house to do some work. In the course of the conversation that developed, he spoke about his Middle Eastern background and I confessed to being a Christian minister, and in the process the stereotypes that so easily attach to both of us were, with some humour, put on one side as we discovered a mutual passion in giving new life to things that need work.
A response that is going to be adequate to the events of last week, to the divisions in French society, and to the complexity of the way in which global challenges affect different parts of the world cannot be made by a single day’s march on the streets of Paris, nor by any one-off personal encounter. Rather, it will require a widespread and active commitment - on behalf of every one of us – to the weaving of multi-cultural and just societies so that even if they might suffer damage by those who wish them harm, it will not be possible for them, irreparably, to be torn apart.