Whitby & Kleve.

When I was very young I attended a Church of England primary school. It was during the Second World War. and whenever the siren wailed, warning of an impending air raid, our teacher would calmly lead us in orderly procession across the country lane that divided the school from the church.

I do not remember being at all frightened, only delighted at the break in lessons, the change in routine. Once inside the church we filed down into the crypt and there we took our places, sitting on the stone floor. There were about a hundred of us squashed together round the ancient boiler. This contraption heated the church above only in theory, but we were safe enough unless the enemy scored a direct hit on the church. something that never happened. We spent those hours in the crypt singing. Our teacher was the most fervent of patriots, and all our songs extolled our country, with God sometimes thrown in for good measure.

I emerged from my primary school a true-blue English girl. I was proud of my king and queen, of Winston Churchill and the Union Jack. I had a map of the world on my wall which showed a considerable proportion of the countries colored in bright red. All of these were our empire, the places that we had conquered, the people that belonged to us. I had no doubt then, that Britain was best.

These very personal reflections must seem to have nothing whatever to do with ecumenism. But it seems to me that if I am to make any headway in the understanding of how people can come to share in the truth, then I have to start by trying to work it out for myself, by tracing the influences which have led me to where I am now. Like peace, ecumenism has to begin with me and I see a clear parallel between my nationalism and my religious development.

The doubts about Britain came, gradually, almost unnoticed. They were a part of natural maturing, of rationalization, and especially of a growing, deepening Christian faith.

After the war, like any true Brit, I hated the Germans. In all our games, they were the enemy. It has been a long process that has brought me to where I am now, seeing the Germans -like the Russians, Jews, Zulus, and every other race - as my brothers and sisters, equal in the sight of God though far from equal in terms of human suffering. And I am able to acknowledge that the British have played no small part in the oppression and victimization of the world's people. I see that my country now cuts an insignificant figure on the stage of the world.

And yet, although I have come to think of myself as a citizen of the world, a creature of the planet Earth, and may seem to some to be a paragon of tolerance, to others an absolute renegade, yet there is still some gladness and pride in me that I come from this particular race, that I was born in this once-emerald isle.

I know this because, on those rare occasions when England wins a gold medal at the Olympics, I jump up and hug whoever happens to be next to me. It makes no difference that I am not really interested in sport, or that the superpowers in politics are also superpowers in athletic prowess: there is just a moment of spontaneous pride and delight which on reflection seems to be no bad thing.

And this brings me, at last, to the crux of this essay, to the point I am trying to make. There are moments when I feel spontaneous pride and delight in being a member of the Roman Catholic church.

This happened when I saw what Oscar Romero did, and did because he was a Roman Catholic. It happens when I see what Mother Teresa does, and does because she is a Roman Catholic. It happens to me when I come away from the Sacrament of Reconciliation and feel the incomparable joy that comes from the forgiving embrace of God. I am grateful and happy to be a Catholic, at a deeper and more serious level perhaps, but in much the same way as I am grateful to be English.

But such gratitude and happiness are as nothing compared to the commitment I now feel toward God and toward all those everywhere in our world, whatever their particular creed or discipline, who seek to worship and to serve him. It is not so much a case of standing together and being a light to the world, as of sharing the truth and proclaiming the kingdom of truth, justice, and love for which all people long.

It is terrible to think of what we have done to one another in the past in the name of religion. And even more terrible for us, because we see it happening before our eyes on television, are the barbarities committed by those who maim and kill one another in the name of nationalism. If hatred is the fruit of religious or national ardor, then such ardor has become evil and must be resisted and condemned.

For the ordinary concerned Christian the sense of powerlessness in the face of bigotry and fanaticism is overwhelming. We look round our world and see the apparently irreconcilable: blacks and whites in South Africa, Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, Hindus and Muslims in India. In what was Yugoslavia we see Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians - Orthodox, Catholics, and Muslims - fighting with the ferocity of caged animals. Within our Christian world we see any variety of groups entrenched within the limits of their own structures, unable, through what seems like loyalty but may be fear, to cross the barriers that divide us. Can we realistically hope for reconciliation?

Recently I experienced something which I see as a small sign of hope. It began with one man. His name is Ray Hamley and he was a British bomber pilot in the Second World War. As he watched the destruction of a church in the small town of Kleve in North Germany, where he had scored a direct hit, Ray felt a satisfied glow of achievement. The church that had been a medieval building of great beauty was now a heap of rubble. It was a job well done.

But as the years went by and Ray grew older his attitudes began to change until at last he was filled with unbearable remorse. He sat down and wrote a letter to the Burgermeister of Kleve, asking forgiveness for what he had done. The mayor passed on his letter to Father Leinung, the priest of the church (rebuilt but no longer so beautiful). He read Ray's letter to his congregation at Mass the following Sunday. He told them that he had answered the letter, saying that he personally was willing to forgive Ray, and had left it open so that anyone who wished could sign too. At the end of Mass there was a queue to read the letter, and it was posted to Ray with hundreds of signatures.

From this beginning a friendship began to grow between Ray and the people of Kleve. Ray lives in the historic town of Whitby on the north Yorkshire coast, and gradually more and more of his friends were drawn into this association. Last year, the people of Father Leinung's parish invited the people of Whitby to come and join them in the consecration of a new altar.

It was a pilgrimage. As on Chaucer's pilgrimage of old, we were an odd assortment of people. We were traveling to join our friends in a Roman Catholic parish, and most of the pilgrims were Anglican. When we arrived after our journey by coach, ship, and coach again, we were welcomed not as strangers or even visitors, but like old friends. These were not the hated Germans of my youth, they were people.

The consecration of the new altar was very important for Father Leinung's parish. The people had decided that it was not right for it to be consecrated until they had made a sacrifice and a gift. They waited until they had collected enough money to build a school for the poor in Kerala, South India, and when the school was built, they were ready.

When an altar is consecrated, it is usual to insert holy relics into its fabric and cover them with a stone. The relics of Kleve are unconventional, but surely as holy as the bones of martyrs. They are symbols that speak of reconciliation.

The first two relics were in their different ways connected with Poland. The first was a piece of wood, the second a piece of wire. The wood was a small fragment taken from the shrine of Saint Adalbert. In the twelfth century, Adalbert took Christianity from the region round Kleve (now known as Westphalia) to Poland. During the German occupation of Poland, a soldier from Kleve discovered that some of his comrades were about to demolish Saint Adalbert's shrine. He succeeded in stopping them.

The small piece of barbed wire came from the concentration camp at Auschwitz, scene of unimaginable suffering. Here it was that the Pole, Father Maximilian Kolbe, gave his life for another. A married man was ordered to the death chamber; the priest offered to take his place. Members of Kolbe's community came to the consecration of the altar. This community has the same dedication to Mary as the church in Kleve: in German, Empfangis, in Polish, Niepokalanow. In English, Immaculate One.

The last relic was a twig from a living tree. There were Jews living in Kleve during the war, and as elsewhere they were persecuted and carried off to concentration camps to be killed. A Catholic man hid one of the Jews in his house to save him from the Gestapo. The Jew escaped, but the Catholic was discovered, taken to Dachau, and murdered. The Jew is still alive, living in Jerusalem where he planted a tree in memory of his rescuer. Now aged eighty-four and unwell, he was unable to travel to Kleve. He sent a twig from his tree instead.

The connection between Kleve and Whitby goes back a long way. Cleveland, an area close by Whitby, got its name from the Saxon invaders from Germany. In the seventh century, Saint Willibrord, whose master, Saint Wilfrid, was a pupil of Saint Hilda in the great abbey of Whitby, traveled to north Germany and converted the people to Christianity. Then there was Ray, then there was our pilgrimage.

The stone that the bishop placed over the relics came from the ruins of Whitby Abbey.

The altar was consecrated during the Mass. In the sanctuary, amid the various Roman Catholic dignitaries, were the Anglican rector of Whitby and the Protestant minister of Kleve. And outdoing everyone in splendor were two little Tamil sisters, representing Kerala, decked in red and gold with flowers in their glossy hair. So it all came together in a celebration that was both solemn and joyous, so many threads drawn into a living center of unity and friendship. Everyone present received our Lord, redeemer and reconciler, in Holy Communion.

Whitby and Kleve are unimportant places. The consecration of the new altar made no headlines. But hearts were touched and thoughts were stirred. There was a movement, slight and almost imperceptible, toward the peace and unity our world so needs and desires.

I love my country; I love my tradition. But my heart reaches out for something greater and beyond, for the kingdom where

The wolf will live with the lamb,

the panther lie down with the kid,

calf, lion and ox together

and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear will graze,

their young will lie down together.

The lion will eat hay like the ox.

The infant will play over the den of the adder;

the baby will put his hand into the viper's lair.

There will be no hurt or harm

on all my holy mountain

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of God

as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9.)

It is hard to pin our faith on such a vision, something so remote from us in time and comprehension as the reconciliation of all things. But it is the nature of the Kingdom, as of God himself, to be both transcendent and immanent, to be paradise at the end of time and to be very near.

If we can recognize the nearness of this vision in our own lives, then we can dare to break free and involve ourselves in its realization.

ANTHEA DOVE, a grandmother of five and a retired teacher, is now working with a resource center for the disadvantage in her hometown of Whitby, North Yorkshire. She spent four years as a member of the ecumenical community at Hengrave Hall in Suffolk.