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Good morning. Yesterday saw events marking the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when during a civil rights protest march in Londonderry, members of the first battalion of the Parachute Regiment fired more than 100 rounds killing 13 people, half of them teenagers and injuring at least 15 more.

Three months later an official British Government report under Lord Widgery claimed the soldiers were returning fire in a gun battle. It was seen as a cover up by the families of the victims and led to slogans of ‘Widgery washes whiter than white’ on the gable ends of houses in Derry. Only in 2010 did the Saville inquiry conclude that ‘none of the casualties was ….doing anything ..that could in any view justify their shooting’ and that lies had been created in the attempt to protect the military. This led to a fulsome apology from David Cameron on behalf of the Government although questions remain about what justice for the families might look like.

The combination of the actions of the soldiers and an initial inquiry which blamed the victims discredited the trustworthiness of the British Government and as the journalist Fintan O’Toole wrote recently meant that a pattern of answering outrage with outrage, atrocity with atrocity, was established that would hold its shape for more than twenty years.

Some fifteen years after Bloody Sunday I visited the city as part of a Methodist team, touring Ireland presenting an event called Breaking Bread, a setting of the service of Holy Communion through contemporary music, drama, dance and testimony. I remember vividly the shock of seeing soldiers in shopping centres with guns and the murals on walls. As a naïve English Protestant my eyes were opened to the reality of fear and injustice. In contrast to the inflammatory public rhetoric of some political and religious leaders, I met many Christians working for peace at great personal risk. The most powerful image of that tour was seeing a Catholic nun kneel beside a former member of a loyalist paramilitary group as he received bread and wine. This act of remembering the death of Jesus, was not only about God’s offer of forgiveness for all but also an invitation to follow Jesus’ example of self-giving love. Later they spoke of how their common faith, so often used to divide them, had allowed them to be truthful with one another and that this was the start of a long journey of reconciliation.

The scars of Bloody Sunday will not heal easily. But in two people kneeling at the communion rail I see the possibility of healing coming through truthfulness that does not ignore responsibility, coupled with the offer of love and forgiveness.

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