Our lives can be helped by paradox

On Friday last I was in a coach taking our tour party to Bethlehem and just after passing through a border checkpoint I gazed at a Banksy gable wall portrait of a masked youth hurling a petrol bomb.

High on a hill commanding Palestinian settlements clinging to barren slopes flew a large Palestinian flag and I reflected that the same standard flies over the Bogside in my native city of Londonderry (Derry is equally used by me).

Coming up to the Relief of Derry parade on Aug 12 the Israeli flag will fly over the predominantly unionist estates on the east bank.

I have much sympathy for our local MLAs as they are conditioned and contained by past attitudes.

Politics was once defined as second order activity about first order principles but our politicians are rendered incapable of agreement by conflicting aspirational destinies.

Our lives can be helped or hindered by paradoxes and I recall from memory (hopefully correctly) that Alex Kane, our benign atheist, and Dr Ian Paisley quoted the same verse from Tennyson to support their contradictory beliefs:

“Strong Son of God, immortal love,

Whom we, that have not seen Thy face,

By faith, and faith alone,embrace,

Believing where we cannot prove.”

George Mc Nally,Londonderry