A story of peace and reconciliation by Oliver Schuegraf, Chair of the German Community of the Cross of Nails
As the 75th anniversary of the Coventry blitz draws closer, each day we are sharing a story from our archive or from our partners within the Community of the Cross of Nails.
This is a reflection of what it was like to work at Coventry Cathedral by Oliver Shuegraf (Chair of the German Community of the Cross of Nails board) and, in particular, when he met Stuart Hooke from New York – in the years following 9/11.
From 2002 to 2006 I worked at Coventry Cathedral as Co-ordinator of the Community of the Cross of Nails. At the beginning I quite often asked myself: What do I have to offer in regard to reconciliation? I am a well-off German, born in 1969 into a time of peace and prosperity. I gratefully look back to a sheltered childhood und a university full of opportunities. No real harm was ever done to me. I’ve never had to struggle for justice or peace. How can I dare to talk to others about reconciliation?
On Friday mid-day I regularly led the Litany of Reconciliation in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and presided over the following Eucharist. One Friday in 2005, we were visited by Stuart Hooke, an Anglican priest from St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City. St. Paul’s is the little church in Manhattan surrounded by skyscrapers directly opposite Ground Zero, where until 11th September 2001, the towers of the World Trade Centre soared up. It is also the only building in the area surviving the attack without any harm. A bit after the service in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, Stuart Hooke recorded his impressions in an internet video to his church community. I was quite amazed by the powerful emotions that were evoked in him by my own rather modest utterances which I had made on so many similar Fridays. My original words must have gained much more pathos in his memory than they had actually possessed in reality:
“There he was, standing in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, celebrating the Eucharist. It was a Eucharist of Reconciliation, and there was a large group of people there – pilgrims, tourists, curiosity seekers.
And he said to them after the service: ‘Look at me! I am a young German Lutheran minister. I am offering the sacrament of unity in this place. Unity and reconciliation and forgiveness’. And he said: ‘Do you understand the symbolism of this?’
And they all said: ‘Oh yes’.
Well, I was standing in the back, and I just … ah … teared up immediately, because it was just immediately for me resonant of what we are about at St. Paul’s.”
During my time in Coventry, I was constantly amazed how Coventry Cathedral and its story have the power to move people and to bring alive the message of reconciliation. More than once I was able to experience that, for people from the most varied crisis-torn regions of the world, the encounter with this place became an incentive and a motivation to fight unceasingly for justice and reconciliation. The link back to Coventry’s ruined cathedral and its history of reconciliation is more than a mere nostalgic reminiscence of times gone by.
And I also had to find out that apparently the story can move especially when it is told by a German serving at Coventry Cathedral and giving living witness to the fact that things can change: Coventry Cathedral has stretched out the hands for peace, British and Germans have been reconciled by God’s grace and it is by now almost the most normal thing in the world when a German is presiding over this Friday noontime service in the ruins. It has been a privilege of telling and symbolizing this reconciliation story.
Oliver Schuegraf
Chair of the German Community of the Cross of Nails
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