THE United Prayer Breakfast, held every autumn in a hotel near the Border, is a unique occasion in Irish religious and political life. It brings together politicians and public figures from both sides of the Border and from widely differing viewpoints for a morning of prayer and informal dialogue.

The most remarkable thing about last October's gathering, however, was less the array of unionist and nationalist notables present than the address given by the main speaker.

He was the Rev Michael Cassidy, an Anglican minister whose Africa Enterprise played a major role in facilitating church, business and community leaders to come together to help bring about the peaceful ending of apartheid in South Africa.

The parallels between Northern Ireland and South Africa are not exact, of course, and often are not even relevant, but that does not take away from the power of Michael Cassidy's challenge to Irish Christians. He asks them to follow the example of their divided South African counterparts in coming together, first to pray and then to identify where in their common Christianity they can find the seeds of dialogue, mutual understanding and, eventually, empathy.

This may to our cynical Irish ears sound like the message of one more pious priest far from the real world of deep seated structural injustice, paramilitary violence and sectarian division. But listen to Michael Cassidy's experience.

In 1973 - when the apartheid regime seemed at its most impregnable - Africa Enterprise, together with the South African Council of Churches, sponsored a multi racial gathering of 800 Christian leaders, both evangelical and ecumenical, conservative pro apartheid whites and radical anti apartheid activists.

"The marvellous thing was what people learned from each other. The more evangelically minded suddenly realised we need to take on board issues such as justice and practical care for our society. Those who were more on an anti apartheid bandwagon realised evangelism and the work of the Holy Spirit were important."

IN 1979 he was involved in organising a 10 day gathering of 6,000 people - key church people, politicians, businessmen, student and high school leaders - called the South African Christian Leadership Assembly.

"We had them come together to participate for 10 days in struggling, in tears, in anger, in frustration, in anguish and then beginning to be in love and in breakthrough to finding one another. So when this group of people scattered throughout the country, there was a mighty network of the people of God. The whole theological monolith of apartheid cracked."

Cassidy quotes a Harvard sociologist friend of his who attended this assembly and who said that of all the things he had ever researched, he had never seen so many people change to the degree that they did in those 10 days. "I mean real change, going in one kind of person, coming out another kind of person.

And it was in the small groups of 10 people that the real change took place - "where a teenager could say to a politician, `Hey, man, do you know the implications of your policies down on me in Soweto?'"

Out of that came the important lesson of the "tremendous power" there was in people coming together in small groups: groups of 10 or 20 or 40 people from different sides of the divide who went off into the South African hush away from everything for weekends together.

"And the power came in the sharing of our autobiographies. When you have 19 politicians and each one has to have 19 bits of listening before he does one bit of talking, that's powerful, let me tell you."

Cassidy told of the black guerrillas on one such weekend who advocated "one settler, one bullet" and had just blown up a club and killed a large number of white people. With them were government people and other conservative Afrikaners.

Then the deputy leader of their party began telling of his 25 years of imprisonment on Robben Island, and how he was buried up to his neck in sand and urinated on by warders.

"There wasn't one white person there," said Cassidy, "who didn't say, `If that had happened to me, I would perhaps advocate one settler, one bullet'."

What was the result of all this? Cassidy gives several examples of the power of prayer and prayerful dialogue in the years during and since the collapse of apartheid. Space will allow for only one here.

JUST eight days before the April 1994 election, as the country looked like descending into full scale civil war, 30,000 people filled a rugby stadium in Pretoria to pray for peace. During that prayer meeting, the key document which was to bring about the breakthrough between the de Klerk government, the ANC and Chief Buthelezi was scrutinised by representatives of all the parties.

Less than 48 hours later it was agreed, a breakthrough which was "hailed around the world as a miracle".

And his challenge to Irish Christians?

"Maybe you need to consider an Irish Christian Leadership Assembly, where the Body of Christ here - from across the board, church leaders, pastors, politicians, business people, young people from the churches, from the universities, from the high schools, come together.

"Why don't you do it for a week or 10 days? And have the rest of the nation, the rest of the world praying for you, and fall on your faces before the living God, fall at the feet of Jesus, hear what He's got to say.

"It would be a quantum leap, it would be a paradigm shift, it would be so mighty if God came upon it and anointed it. And, I believe, new kinds of political solutions could come in this great and wonderful part of the world."

I can see the cynics and mockers smirking already, but how many times have mere politics been tried and found wanting in Northern Ireland? The North needs a change of heart more than a change of politics and one of the very few things Ian Paisley and David Trimble and John Hume and Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have in common is that they all regard themselves as churchgoing Christians.

In this, as in many other things, we have a lot to learn from the miraculous change in a nation's heart that is post apartheid South Africa.