the giver of the ‘inspiring address’, to all the visiting lodges and bands who had attended, to County Grand Lodge for leading the parade, to the brethren of the district and the lodges for all their support and ‘heartfelt thanks to the Grand Master for visiting us, thanks to the ladies of Rossnowlagh, thanks to the owner of the land … we hope with God’s help that we’ll all be here next year … and may God bless you all and have a safe journey home and may we have a pleasant weekend’.*
Gerry and I walked back to the car park ahead of the parade. He had to file a report and I was rushing back to Northern Ireland to get the low-down on the latest negotiations over Drumcree.
8. Lurgan, 26 October 1997
It was Reformation Sunday. I had been held up in Belfast and had to drive at illegal speeds to get to Lurgan before the parade set off. I am vague about distances, but I realized I was getting close when soldiers, police and Land Rovers began to appear.
As I reached Lurgan and parked the car at the end of the main street, I could see a ceremony was in full swing. Denis Watson, the County Armagh Grand Master, and officials of the Lurgan male and female lodges were laying wreaths at the war memorial. Watching respectfully were twenty or thirty men in suits, a couple of dozen women in big Sunday hats and maybe twenty girls. All were wearing Orange collarettes.
Standing slightly to the side were the preacher for the day, the Reverend Brian Kennaway, and Graham Montgomery, who was holding, upside-down, a pile of six bowler hats, for those performing the remembrance ceremony needed to be bareheaded. Typically, despite the solemnity, I got an immediate smile and nod from Brian and Graham and the other three or four Orangemen I knew.
Only a couple of dozen locals watched this small parade walking to the annual Reformation Sunday service at Brownlow House, the headquarters of the Royal Black Institution, who share the Victorian Gothic building with their landlord, Lurgan Orange District. It was being rebuilt, having been damaged the previous year by petrol bombs on the day before the Apprentice Boys’ march in Derry. Many of the treasures of the Royal Black Institution were destroyed or damaged; it is costing about £8 million of public money (from the fund for compensation for terrorist damage) to repair and refurbish the house. The band, the Craigavon True Blues, seemed incongruous: they were a typical ‘blood-and-thunder’ band, containing young men one would rather avoid in a dark alley who wore bright blue uniforms and played the hymns like a call to battle. It is hard to avoid mixed feelings about these bands: on the one hand the macho, aggressive aura is off-putting; on the other, they’re wonderful to walk along with. That is why the republican bands that have emerged in the past decade or so are mirror-images of them.
So I walked along the pavement keeping pace with the band for the mile or so to Brownlow House. Here and there, a few residents came out of their houses and watched with the air of people pleased to have some diversion on a dull Sunday afternoon. We walked up the drive, someone opened the door and the members of the Orange Order went upstairs. The drummers wiped the perspiration from their faces and, along with the rest of the band, turned and went home.
Slightly ill-at-ease, although I had been invited, I followed the worshippers up the stairs and went to the back of the room. Many knew I’m from a Catholic background, and some of them even knew I’m an atheist, and I was nervous that my presence might therefore be offensive to some of them. But I was overlooking the determined hospitality of the rural Orangeman.* Denis Watson summoned me to the front bench, where I sat between Graham and a man I had met before, who gave me a big grin and said with heavy irony: ‘That was a very offensive parade, wasn’t it?’ It wasn’t the moment to tell him that you wouldn’t have to be neurotic or republican to find the Craigavon True Blues a bit much. The Worshipful Master of the lodge then removed my anxieties by making a kind reference to me in his opening remarks. I realized then that Orangemen are as unselfconscious about welcoming you to their worship as to their houses.
Brian Kennaway is a Presbyterian minister whose religious belief he describes as being ‘expressed in the simplicity of the Gospel recovered at the Reformation of the sixteenth century. That simple biblical religious belief affirms that salvation can only be achieved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, revealed to us in the scriptures alone.’ For someone from the Roman Catholic tradition, the Calvinist dismissal of good works as an aid to salvation is always disconcerting, but Kennaway makes it clear that if you have faith, ‘good works will follow as evidence’. He quotes William Fenner: ‘Good works are a good sign of faith but a rotten basis for faith.’
I’d sung more hymns in the last couple of years than I had in the rest of my life and I’d become pretty expert at ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ and ‘Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus’, but I didn’t know three of the robust hymns that Kennaway had chosen. However, a large Orangeman was valiantly playing the tunes on a tiny electronic keyboard and I sang along as best I could.
Kennaway took as his biblical text 2 Chronicles 34, where King Josiah deals with false gods by having their altars broken down and their carved and molten images broken in pieces. As he read to us of the burning of the bones of the idolatrous priests upon their altars, Graham grinned at me broadly. (At the end of the service I went up to Kennaway and asked genially: ‘Brian, when you go off to lynch the priests, can I come too?’ He looked at me in horror and said, ‘Surely you didn’t think I meant …’ and then laughed when he realized I was pulling his leg.)
It was a very instructive service for me, for Kennaway is evangelical and radical as well as very intelligent. Of all the services I’ve been to, it was from this that I learned most about what religious Orangemen truly believe and why the Reformation is so immediate to them. It was an exemplary service, too, in its clarity and homely informality.
Kennaway was determined to show his audience of old and young, and many shades of Protestantism, why they owed gratitude to God for giving men like Calvin, Knox, Luther, Wyclif and Zwingli and their successors ‘all the gifts of understanding so that they translated your word into the common language of the people of the day … We thank you that your work is not static or stagnant: it is a living word.’
He gave thanks that ‘the word lives by your spirit in the hearts and lives of men and women and boys and girls,’ and wished that it would ‘really live in the hearts and lives of our people throughout this island.’
His sermon was about the relevance of his Old Testament text to the sixteenth-century Reformation.
We are here today to give thanks to God for the Protestant Reformation. And we make no apology for doing precisely that. Because we have everything to give thanks to God for in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. We do so today, because this is the nearest Sunday to the last day of the month, because it was on the 31st of October 1517 that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wurtemberg … There was nothing particularly dramatic in this nailing theses or statements or propositions to the church door. There were no newspapers. Indeed if you go to any university today you’ll see noticeboards and all sorts of announcements and notices nailed to those noticeboards. That was a simple way that Martin Luther had of drawing attention to issues which concerned him.
Not all the theses were worth reading, he pointed out, and read out some that were, several of which were about the ‘the over-enthusiastic sale of indulgences or letters of pardon from the pope’. There was some more about what was owed to Luther’s successors and then he came to the heart of his homily:
It seems to me that we’re very good at drawing parallels in our local situation in Ulster to other situations in the world, but we’re not so good when it comes to drawing parallels to our spiritual situation in Ulster with spiritual situations in the scriptures. And for that reason I wanted to draw the parallel today because the problem of Ancient Judea is exactly the same as the problem of Ulster. It’s spiritual. Brethren and sisters, you had better believe it.
The answer therefore to the problems of Ulster