A pacifist born in a battle zone

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, March 11, 2006

The Rev. Barry Keating came of age in a battle zone.

You’d never know it to look at him. In an office lined with books – J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the Bible and “The Da Vinci Code,” religious history and “Memoirs of a Geisha” – Keating has the look and demeanor of a scholarly professor.

Today, he is pastor of Maplewood Presbyterian Church in Edmonds, where he’s been for eight years. In another time and place, the Northern Ireland of his youth, he was a witness to hate, violence and uneasy reconciliation.

Those experiences left their mark and formed Keating’s life. He is now focused on peace.

Michael O’Leary / The Herald The Rev. Barry Keating, who grew up in Northern Ireland, is now pastor at Maplewood Presbyterian Church in Edmonds.

Born and raised in Protestant East Belfast, Keating will speak at a St. Patrick’s Day Mass for Peace at noon Friday at Plymouth Congregational Church, Sixth Avenue and University Street in downtown Seattle. The main celebrant will be Seattle’s Catholic archbishop, Alex Brunett.

” ‘The troubles,’ that’s what they call it in Ireland,” said Keating, 54, whose strong Irish accent gives away his heritage.

Troubles is a huge understatement for the decades of strife between Northern Ireland’s mostly Protestant Unionist community, associated with British rule, and its Roman Catholic Nationalists, long oppressed and bent on reunification of the island. The island was split in 1922, and Northern Ireland became part of the United Kingdom.

Not simply explained, the dissension goes back centuries and centers on whether part of Ireland should be ruled by Britain. Fighting was reignited in the 1960s and escalated after “Bloody Sunday,” Jan. 30, 1972, when 14 people were killed by British troops after a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland.

For years, the paramilitary Irish Republican Army countered with bombings and other killings.

With violence raging during his teenage years, Keating became involved with Protestant and Catholic lay people in a Belfast-area peace movement through the Corrymeela Reconciliation Community. The violence “never really stopped” until 1994, when peace treaties were signed, Keating said.

He went to college at Queens University in Belfast and briefly played professional soccer in England before studying theology. Keating was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1980. Working as a prison chaplain, he served for a time in Long Kesh, or the Maze Prison, where IRA inmates were held. Ten of them died in 1981 when they conducted a hunger strike at the prison.

In his talk Friday, Keating will explore aspects of forgiveness.

“How do we move on? It’s not that we ignore 500 years of British domination or brutal terrorism. And it’s not that all Protestants can go home. There have been Keatings in Ireland for 1,000 years,” he said, explaining that the British used Presbyterians in Ireland as a “buffer between the Catholics and the ruling Anglicans.”

“National governments are not great about apologizing,” he said, but there have been examples of horrible wrongs acknowledged. “One model is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa,” he said.

In the 1970s, Keating said, he saw an amazing example of forgiveness in the mother of a Catholic boy slain as he left Mass in Belfast.

“She got the names and addresses of all these people who’d had somebody killed – police officers, mothers, relatives of IRA people killed by accident as they were carrying out attacks,” he said. “They became ‘the cross group.’ They came together to carry crosses.

“They became a powerful group in Ireland,” he said. “Forgiveness has a power to it.”

In the Edmonds area, Keating lives with his wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Shea. He is far from Belfast, where the new peace is intertwined with the difficulties of finding political solutions to old divisions.

Here, we’re concerned with our own war in Iraq, where peaceful solutions seem impossible to achieve. Keating sees parallels with the situation that ripped apart his homeland.

“The Middle East of today was created out of European colonialism,” he said. “We are still reaping the whirlwind of colonialism there, and the American influence is another Western power.”

Keating is wary of mixing patriotism and religious fervor, or of any government claiming to have religious righteousness on its side.

“I watched it in Ireland,” he said. “The rest of the world has a lot to learn from the Irish situation.”

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.