Whispers of Reconciliation
Harold, Clodagh, and a Peace Tree
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
— Matthew 5:9
On the morning of June 15, while sitting at my father’s house in Alabama, I learned that Clodagh Good had died in Belfast the evening before.
News like that has a way of collapsing time.
Nearly thirty years disappeared in an instant.
The first thing I remembered was a kitchen table.
Not Stormont. Not the Good Friday Agreement. Not the many public stories that could be told about Rev. Harold Good and his quiet role in the work of reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
I remembered a kitchen table.
I could see it clearly. The sink and window looking out the side of the house. Plates of familiar Irish food—potatoes, carrots, parsnips, Brussels sprouts, gravy, perhaps roasted chicken or fish. The easy rhythm of conversation. Most of all, I remembered the welcome.
By then, Harold and Clodagh were living in retirement in Holywood, County Down. I had returned to visit them several times over the years. Their home had become, in some inexplicable but undeniable way, another home to me.
But the first table I knew was not that kitchen table.
The first table I knew was in the manse. It stood in a dining room rather than a kitchen, but the welcome was the same. There was always room for one more person.
I arrived in Belfast in the summer of 1997 as a student from Drew University, spending a year at Edgehill Theological College. I was young, curious, occasionally defensive, and carrying all the assumptions that come with being an American abroad. I was also, though I did not know it at the time, about to be taken in by two people who would shape my understanding of ministry, reconciliation, and hospitality.
Over time, I came to realize that people from many different places found their way to that table. I remember one meal shared with Paul Boafo, then a doctoral student from Ghana who would later become a Methodist bishop. Whether my memory has arranged the details correctly or not, the larger truth remains: that table gathered people and quietly sent them back into the world changed.
Somewhere along the way, the relationship changed. They opened their home to me, gave me a place to be away when I needed to be away, and took care of me. Eventually, they became family.
I cannot tell the story of Harold and Clodagh without telling it around a table, because tables were where so much of their ministry happened. Hospitality was not an occasional act for them. It was simply the way they lived. People were welcomed, fed, listened to, and cared for.
That lesson would stay with me.
So would they.
Harold was also my supervisor in a ministry placement that year. On one occasion, he gave me a patient’s name and directions and sent me on ahead by myself.
When I found the room and knocked, a man in a suit answered the door and invited me inside. He then pointed me toward a second closed door.
When I stepped into the room, I understood immediately. I was in the prison ward. Inside sat an inmate, his prison tattoos immediately recognizable even to me, and he appeared high or strung out. Then I realized that the man who had answered the outer door was a police officer.
I remember being glad to leave the room in one piece.
There was fear then, though there is no longer fear in visits like that. It was a lesson I have never forgotten. Harold and I talked about the visit afterward, as we often did after hospital visits and visits to parishioners’ homes. He had a way of teaching by experience and then by reflection.
Years later, the world would come to know Harold Good because of his role in helping bring peace to Northern Ireland. I knew him first as the man who welcomed a young American seminarian into his home, walked hospital corridors with purpose, and taught by experience and reflection.
I would later realize that those things were not separate from one another. The qualities that made Harold a pastor also made him a reconciler.
At critical moments, some of the quiet work of peace in Northern Ireland unfolded in Harold and Clodagh’s living room. They opened their home to senior figures from opposing sides of the conflict and hosted conversations in secret. The secrecy was not intended to protect reputations so much as it was to protect the process itself and preserve the possibility that a lasting agreement might emerge.
Only later did I recognize the consistency in all of it. The same couple who welcomed students and parishioners into their home also believed that people who regarded one another as enemies should meet, talk, and listen. Harold believed relationships mattered and that trust, however slowly, could be built.
He possessed an unusual ability to build relationships across lines that others regarded as fixed and immovable. He was patient, trustworthy, and willing to sit with people who distrusted one another—and, at times, distrusted him as well.
Not everyone understood what he was doing. Some believed he was operating outside his lane as a Methodist minister. Others questioned whether he should be involved at all. But Harold seemed less concerned with protecting his reputation than with the possibility that another future might yet be possible.
From time to time, we talked about the long history that had shaped Northern Ireland and how difficult it is to build trust after generations of violence and fear. Harold never seemed particularly interested in quick answers. He believed reconciliation was patient work.
I remember the referendum campaign as exhausting. The signs, banners, flyers, mailers, and commercials seemed endless, much like the final days of an American presidential election. The community itself felt deeply divided. There were loud voices insisting that peace was impossible, but there was also a quieter groundswell of people who hoped another future might be possible, even if many were hesitant to say so publicly. I remember the Republic of Ireland feeling noticeably more hopeful about the referendum and its promise of peace than Northern Ireland itself.
I attended services at Martyr’s Memorial Presbyterian Church on several occasions and heard Ian Paisley preach. I remember the certainty of his opposition and, perhaps most strikingly, hearing familiar hymns of John and Charles Wesley with altered words that reflected the bitterness of the moment. It reminded me how deeply the divisions ran.
Yet I also remember spending time on a Habitat for Humanity build in a Catholic neighborhood during that same period. It was the first time a Protestant team had ever gone into a Catholic neighborhood to help build Habitat homes. Even then, it felt like a small sign that old boundaries did not have to remain permanent.
I still have the voter information booklet and some of the campaign literature urging people to vote yes or no. I kept them because even then it felt as though we were living through something important. When the agreement passed, there was hope, but nobody I knew thought the hard work was over. If anything, there was an understanding that something new had begun and that the long work of reconciliation still lay ahead.
Years later, I visited Harold and Clodagh in their retirement home in Holywood with my parents. At some point, Harold took us into the garden and showed us a tree.
It was a Star Magnolia.
He told us that it had been planted at the conclusion of the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement. Over time it had become known as the Peace Tree.
The tree stood on the edge of the lawn in their traditional Irish garden. It was not especially large or imposing. There was nothing about it that demanded attention. Yet Harold was quietly proud of it and grateful for what it represented.
Like the best symbols, it pointed beyond itself.
It spoke of patient conversations, of trust painstakingly built, of people willing to risk criticism in pursuit of another future. It reminded me that peace rarely arrives all at once. More often, it is planted, tended, and hoped for long before anyone can be certain it will endure.
It seems fitting to me now that the Peace Tree was a magnolia. I was raised in the Magnolia State, where hospitality is measured by tables and porches and whether there is room for one more person.
I have thought a great deal about why a kitchen table came to mind that morning in Alabama. I think part of the answer lies in the Mississippi that formed me. Hospitality mattered in my childhood. It mattered in the quiet conversations that helped make the Good Friday Agreement possible. And it mattered in Harold and Clodagh’s home.
Perhaps that is why I remembered a kitchen table before I remembered history. History remembers agreements and referendums. We remember people differently. We remember where they sat. We remember what they served. We remember how they welcomed us. We remember being fed.
The world will rightly remember Harold for his role in the peace process. I suspect I will always remember Harold and Clodagh around a table.
Looking back, I have come to think of them as a seamless pair, each caring for people in different but deeply complementary ways. Harold’s gifts often carried him into public places and visible roles. Clodagh’s care was usually quieter and more personal. She simply cared about people and had a way of helping them that drew little attention to herself, but mattered nonetheless.
There was also Clodagh’s dry humor. Harold was forever imagining another project, another idea, another possibility. At just the right moment, Clodagh would offer an aside—never cruel, never dismissive, but delivered with impeccable timing. She had a gift for gently reminding everyone, including Harold, not to take themselves too seriously.
I had planned to return again. COVID intervened, and then life and distance did what they often do. I thought there would be another opportunity.
There wasn’t.
On a June morning in Alabama, before I remembered negotiations or referendums or even a peace tree, I remembered a kitchen table, a window overlooking the garden, and two people who made room for one more person. I remembered the sink, the plates, the easy rhythm of conversation. I remembered being welcomed before I had done anything to deserve it.
That is what remains.
If this essay has stirred your interest in Harold and Clodagh Good, I encourage you to read Harold Good’s memoir, In Good Time: A Memoir. It offers a deeply personal account of a remarkable life of faith, reconciliation, and hope.
If these essays have encouraged you, challenged you, or helped you see something differently, I would be honored if you shared Drawing Water from the Well with a friend.