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Scooter Radio Program
Rosetta Kamlowsky Tapes
Provost Williams, Coventry, England
Interview date: December 30, 1971
Rosetta: Provost Williams, you are from, presently Coventry, England, and you are in
Helena, and when we think of Coventry, England, we think of, oh, I think comes to mind,
those of us who were around during World War II, this will probably be a historically
significant town. And I think those who are not aware and those who would like to be
reminded, you can tell them about Coventry, England.
Provost: Coventry was a medieval city of quite some importance going back to the 12th
century and St. Michael’s Cathedral was the center of the whole life of the city, its social
life, its religious life, and its commercial life. Apart from that it had no significance other
than any other great city in England until the war. And because it was then a major
center of the aircraft industry, it attracted attention from the then enemy. And before the
destruction, it was stated by Hitler screaming over the radios of Europe that he was going
to destroy a city in England in one single operation from the air. This would have been
the first time this experiment had ever been done in warfare, and Coventry was selected.
And on November the 14, 1940, right through the night, the city was subjected to what
was then up to that point the highest concentration of high explosives and fire bombing
that had ever been known. And the city was destroyed, and the heart or the center of the
city was destroyed, and the cathedral which stood at the heart of the city was destroyed
with it. So in a very significant sense as far as the future was concerned the cathedral
died with the city, shared the agony with the city. And it has been this fellowship of
suffering which has resulted in a fellowship of reconstruction. And this has given us an
opportunity to do all sorts of new things in terms of Christian ministry which perhaps in
other circumstances might have been a little more difficult.
Rosetta: What do you mean “ different” administering and Christianity, through as result
of this destruction and rebuilding program? What has happened?
Provost: Well, you see, it’s very easy for the church to separate itself from the tensions
and the struggles and the agonies of city life. This has always been true and it’s
particularly true now, and so that religion seems to be a sort of an escape hatch, people
escape within the walls of a church from the agonies of this world. Well here, we were
totally exposed to the same agonies and problems as the city was exposed, and we’ve
kept this characteristic. We’ve shared in the reconstruction of the city, we share now in
its problems, and they are considerable now, the industrial situation in Great Britain
today. We rebuilt the cathedral with the city and because we had this close relationship
with every aspect of the city through the destruction and the rebuilding, we were able to
provide equal leadership with anybody else in the city, and the leadership we were able to
give was very much around this theme of spiritual and model renewal on the one hand
and internationally the whole theme of reconciliation, because you can see, when the
cathedral was destroyed we could very easily then have reacted in the same way as many
other cities and places of destruction have reacted, to build a memorial to hatred, just to
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keep alive of the revenge and the hate, and one of the most significant things that
happened was almost immediately after the destruction the small band of Christians who
loved this cathedral carved the words in the wall behind the ruined alter, the words
“ Father forgive.” Well, it takes a mighty big understanding of the heart of the Christian
faith to be able to say that. And out of this, the destruction, came this world famous
symbol of the Cross of Nails, nails which had held the roof of the cathedral together and
which a young man rather by inspiration fastened together in the shape of a cross so that,
taking the sign of the Christian cross, meaning crucifixion, it implied that through
forgiveness we could work for a resurrection and this is just about applicable to every
aspect of our society today.
Rosetta: And this started then in England and you say the Cross of Nails is becoming an
international drive.
Provost: Yes.
Rosetta: Who’s spearheading this, how is this being handled?
Provost: Well, it, in 1958 when I came there I had an opportunity of confronting a
British public with the implications of keeping alive the hatred against Germany, which
was very, very intense at that time.
Rosetta: Yes.
Provost: And which was very much symbolized in Coventry. This Coventry business
was kept alive and I was terrified when I got there that it was, Coventry was going to be
just another one of these world symbols of keeping alive hatred. And I had an
opportunity very soon of confronting the British public and testing myself over the honest
implications of Christian forgiveness when the President of Germany came on the first
state visit to England of any German leader since the Kaiser had come before the First
World War. And he came and gave a gift, a very deeply symbolic gift of 5,000 pounds
towards the, one of the chapels in the new cathedral and I went down to London and with
great publicity because of the significance of the cathedral, there I received it. And the
next day the newspapers and the news media reacted on the whole favorably, but one of
them, without knowing what he was doing in terms of the future made me absolutely mad
by printing a headline, “ Provost of Coventry Receives Blood Money.” And so, I was
pretty angry about this and determined at that moment that I was going to fight this. And
I did this, not by shouting from Coventry, but by shouting from Berlin. Herr Willy
Brandt, the current Chancellor of Germany’s a great personal friend of mine and he was
at that time Mayor of West Berlin and through his help I set up a news conference in
Berlin and said, “ As the German people have made Coventry a symbol of destruction and
hate, so now I call upon you to join hands with me in making Coventry a symbol of
reconciliation.” And this of course, hit the news as you imagine, it’s highly emotive.
And from this, we used this as a growing point and we established many centers of
cooperation throughout Germany and it occurred to us then to use the Cross of Nails as a
symbol of this refusal to allow the wounds of the past to remain unhealed, wherever they
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are. So we established these centers throughout Germany and very soon people began to
say when I was speaking about this all over Germany, and what about Dresden?
Well, I didn’t know what they were talking about because the destruction of Dresden had
up to that point been hidden from us because of its ghastliness. The fact is that long after
it had become any significance militarily, this beautiful city of Dresden was destroyed
just a few weeks before the end of the war for no apparent reason at all. It was destroyed
in a mathematically constructed firestorm and in eight hours of concentrated fire and high
explosive bombing 135,000 people were burned to death. In eight hours. That’s more
than Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. And this of course left a very deep wound in
the heart of the German people. So I determined that as Germany had responded to us in
this reconciliation, so we must respond to them. Well, the end product of this was that
we sent a group of 20 or 30 at a time over a period of two years we sent 240 young
people to rebuild a Christian hospital in Dresden. I, it took me about five years in
political preparation for this because Dresden’s in communist Germany and of course
here was another aspect of reconciliation between the West and the Communist East.
And we worked at this and now have very good communication relations.
You don’t have to, reconciliation doesn’t mean you’ve got to be like the person you’re
reconciling yourself with, but just to keep communications open. So we have very good
contacts with Eastern Europe through this ministry of reconciliation. Then you can see
how it could spread every other aspect where reconciliation is needed. Racially, so we’ve
got a very strong center on the border of East Pakistan at the moment where we’re doing
some leadership training work; we’ve got a good one in Alabama where we’ve been
working for a long time; we’ve got two in South Africa. But more than this
reconciliation means more than just black, white or national or international. It’s
industrial, so we see a search out in industrial centers and try to work out this theme of,
well, not to be sloppy about the word, Christian love. Really, our being understanding of
each others’ positions and not just separating ourselves into these inflexible polarized
situations.
And then, what about society, what about the fragmentation of our society, I believe
sponsored very largely by the specialization of our universities today. I think university
study today’s the greatest contributor to the fragmentation of our society because the
specializations in these universities just don’t communicate with each other, so they’re
just turning out a whole lot of unrelated specialist and adding to the specialization and
fragmentation of our society. So we try to work on this too. This is a field of
reconciliation. And then of course deeply the whole thing implies personal
reconciliation, families. If every single family which has a quarrel could really take
seriously this word, Father Forgive, and the words “ let not the sun go down upon your
wrath,” and do this every day, then there would be fewer people queuing up for the
divorce courts, there’d be far fewer people in mental homes, there’d be far fewer people
in prisons, there’d be far fewer people freaking out of society because they are unloved,
even in their homes. It’s no good just talking about peace and love and forgiveness
during the sentimental time of Christmas which is just ahead of us. It’s got to be thought
of every day and I believe the center of the Christian faith is Father Forgive
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internationally, ideologically, racially, socially, intellectually, personally, and in families.
And if we don’t do this, I believe it doesn’t mean that we’re bad Christians, I think it just
means we’re not Christians at all.
Rosetta: How does one learn to forgive? I follow you entirely as I’m sure the listeners
are but there are some who find it more difficult to forgive than others.
Provost: I think this is largely because forgiveness is so often mentally associated with
forgetfulness and they say you can’t forgive because you can’t forget. Of course you
can’t forget. You can’t just wipe it out of your brain. But you’ve just got to work at
mutual understanding. No, people don’t behave what they, in the way they do behave,
just for bloody mindedness. They behave as they do because of some deep pressure
within themselves, unhappiness, unforgiveness, if you like, unhealed prejudices from the
past, and forgiveness simply means “ I am as guilty as you are. You wouldn’t have
behaved the way you have behaved if pressures to which I contribute hadn’t made you
behave that way.” You notice in this, these words that were carved, not Father Forgive
Them, but Father Forgive Us All, we’re all guilty and we’ve got to all involve ourselves
in this common factor of guilt.
Rosetta: Very good. Thank you so much Provost Williams.
