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Facing a chapel full of bones

Barbara Butler finds answers to questionsfrom the killing fields

To Rwanda and Back: Liberation spirituality and reconciliation
Mary Grey

Darton, Longman & Todd £12.95 (978-0-232-52664-6)
Church Times Bookshop £11.65

MARY GREY is a theologian whose thinking and writing have always flowed from her encounters and experiences, especially in relations between men and women, and in her work for many years in western India. Her visit to Rwanda unveiled harsh realities, and sharply challenged her thinking and her work for reconciliation and justice.

Grey went to Rwanda in December 2004 as a member of a World Council of Churches group. Rwanda was chosen because it had experienced genocide in 1994. What did the search for reconciliation and justice mean in this tortured country where 95 per cent of the people are Christian? Grey’s devastating insight began at her first supper in the country, when she sat next to someone who had lost his wife and seven children in the genocide, and she realised that his plight was not unusual.

She visited many places of violent and cruel murder, including Ntarama Chapel, where 5000 people were massacred in April 1994, and where rows of skulls and bones are piled up. Massacres took place in churches, schools, and hospitals; some Christians were the killers, among them priests who organised gangs of killers; other Christians died trying to save lives. The institutional Churches, church organisations, and governments were silent before and during the killings, and largely ignored appeals for help.

This book is a search for answers to haunting questions. Where was the compassion for others which is the example of Jesus, and a mark of every faith and hope in our world? How is work for reconciliation to be approached after disasters? Grey calls upon spirituality, the scriptures, and a few saintly people of the world faiths in her search for ways forward.

She suggests that honest remem-bering, repentance, telling stories, sacrificial work for love and justice, work towards non-violent societies where people may flourish, humility, and connectedness all have a part to play. Above all, there is the need for us all to recognise that we are responsible for what happens in our world, so that we may work towards creating a place fit for godly living, a place fit for God.

The challenge and great value of this book is that it offers insights that may move readers on to make connections, to meet people who are different, and to bridge-building and peace-making — not as an option, but as a necessity in our dangerous and fragile world.

Barbara Butler is Executive Secretary of Christians Aware.

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