Name: Cameron Howes
Age: 26
Location: London
Religion: Christian (Anglican)
Programme: Emerging Peacemakers Forum 2018 (EPF18)
Reflections on EPF18, by alumn Cameron Howes, 4 years on.
An unscientific but nevertheless attractive insight, often apocryphally attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, is that if you really want to understand a person and what motivates them, look at what was happening when they were 21. For me, a student based in London and halfway through a political science and history degree, the abstracted ideas burst out of the neat confines of my textbooks and shaped a new reality around me.
I turned 21 in November 2016. In the six months prior to my birthday I witnessed two political earthquakes: Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. All the experts, that we had apparently had enough of, didn’t see either coming. Wilful blindness and structural deafness left a system exposed to the justifiable wrath of the marginalised. Pouring this sentiment into a binary pot was a recipe for a poisonous process that regardless of the outcome, left society fractured and broken.
In the six months after my 21st birthday a series of violent extremist attacks took place in London and Manchester in the pursuit of an apocalyptic caliphate and neo-nazi white supremacy, each adding fuel to each other’s fire; while the flames that consumed Grenfell tower and the ensuing fatal tragedy exposed an ugly truth about corporate-state negligence and the relegation of human life below opportunities for profit margins.
Throughout all of these events, the relationship between voice and power was placed into sharp focus. For many, who we listen to and how we listen had morphed from open questions to closed articles of faith. In the midst of it all, I wanted to know: how do we faithfully respond to a legacy of failing to listen? How do we build a society that listens generously and authentically?
It was with those questions circulating in my mind that I participated in the Emerging Peacemakers Forum in the Summer of 2018. It was there that I met an unlikely group of exceptional young people, distinctive through their individual stories and identities but united by diverse faith commitments that demanded, and came to receive, deeper mutual recognition.
Cameron (front, second from right) with part of the EPF18 cohort.
It’s impossible to truthfully distill those ten days that we shared into a comprehensive reflection. But what I experienced and witnessed first-hand, was that deep listening is possible even with the most unlikely dialogue partners.
The clearest example of this for me was within a scriptural reasoning session, a form of dialogue that puts scripture at the heart of the conversation. In perhaps our third or fourth session as a group, one of the Muslim participants changed the entire course of the conversation with a simple question “why do Christians insist prophet Isa (Jesus) is God, rather than His messenger?”. What followed was a memorable exchange that was tense, life-giving, awkward, generative, clumsy and attentive all at once. It wasn’t a debate. Persuasive accounts were made, but not with the intention of persuading.
We didn’t leave with our minds changed, but with our eyes opened to how our brothers and sisters related differently and deeply to a shared figure. Denial and validation metered out in equal measure in a complex, messy but joyous exploration.
Deep listening requires a well-cultivated environment, a lot of hard work, and social tools that take a lifetime to hone - but it is not beyond us. I didn’t find answers to my questions, but I did see habits and behaviours modelled that captured my imagination and pointed towards a restoration of brokenness.
Cameron at the EPF18 closing ceremony.
I have spent the last four years of my early professional life continuing to follow the threads that these questions from 2016 and the Emerging Peacemakers Forum have posed, working with others to think about new and creative ways of responding to them. In my work at the LSE Faith Centre, I have been able to pursue this from a theoretical and practical perspective, combining research insights with workshop facilitation, encountering a wide range of challenging perspectives and continuously re-evaluating where I stand. Sometimes this is unsettling, and sometimes I encounter differences that feel unbridgeable. But having experienced the Emerging Peacemakers Forum I frequently place hope in the fact that we can patiently build appropriate places of encounter and I have faith that we will be drawn to meet one another there.
I don’t know where I will be called to next. If we are to build a society where justice abounds, there is work to be done by all of us in altering the very fabric of our collective thinking and imagination. That work can never take a singular, static form. It is radically attentive to the context that it finds itself within, willing to be interrupted and cast adrift. I’m reminded here of a particular translation of Ephesians 6:15 “As shoes for your feet, put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace”. My experience with Rose Castle taught me that I don’t need a career path, but an anchor, and if that anchor is Christ’s gospel of peace, then I’m willing to step out into as yet unknown positions.