If you ever find yourself in Geneva and want to know where lies the Promised Land, writes Denis McClean, climb the hill overlooking the croissant-shaped lake and pass through the great oak doors of St Peter's Cathedral.
Look down the nave towards the stained-glass windows dating from pre-Reformation days. "You are actually in a Roman galley rowing towards Jerusalem. The nave is the ship and the aisles represent the oars - except, of course, the whole thing is upside down," says the Very Rev Dr William Adams McComish, the 60-year-old Ulsterman who presides over this ancient ecclesiastical pile which lies at the heart of Geneva's reputation as the Protestant Rome.
He adds later that the cathedral is rather unwisely perched on an unstable moraine typically found at the bottom end of a glacier, such as Lake Geneva once was. It survives thanks to a mass of steel scaffolding which plunges 40 metres down to lake level.
Part of a side wall had collapsed into the street when the citizens of Geneva gathered in front of the cathedral on May 21st, 1526 to expel the Catholic bishop by unanimous popular vote, introduce free education for all boys and establish a hospice. "That was really the foundation of our Protestant republic here in Geneva," Dr McComish says.
Tongue-in-cheek, he likens it to "a new liberal economic downsizing. They got rid of 600 priests and nuns and replaced them with 12 pastors."
Dr McComish - Bill to his many friends - is a firebrand liberal who is giving up his British passport to take Swiss nationality partly because of his objections to the war in Iraq. He would be equally happy with a French or an Irish passport, but he has spent 25 years in this city and preaches regularly to its faithful in French tinged with a strong Belfast flavour.
In his book of reflections, Permettez-moi de m'expliquer, published in response to 9/11, he recalls how he was greeted by the Catholic bishop Dr William Philbin as gunfire and rioting raged around them in Belfast's Ardoyne district in 1969: "Young man, I believe that we worship the same God." In his profound commitment to ecumenism, he cites this as one of the most important things anyone has ever said to him.
His experiences as a minister in Armagh jail and in Belfast's New Lodge area have also helped him in his conflict resolution work on behalf of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in places such as Indonesia, where last year he sat cross-legged on the floors of mosques trying to bridge divisions between Protestant and Muslim communities in the Moluccas.
"The New Lodge was a good place to be a Minister. Streets were burning all round us and we made truces between streets and helped negotiation. This still remains with me. Belfast taught me that decent people will always get on with decent people, but the violent will always tear communities apart. This is why I am so keen on inter-church collaboration."
During his time as Dean of St Peter's he has welcomed distinguished envoys of all mainstream religions to make use of the pulpit from which John Calvin used to preach.The Dalai Lama and the Imam of the Geneva Mosque have spoken here and songs have been sung to the glory of Allah, Rama, Krishna, Guru Nanak, Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Zoroaster, Mahavira, Shirdi Sai and Sathya Sai.
Dr McComish talks with boyish and scholarly enthusiasm about Calvin and his beloved cathedral. The Genevois of Calvin's day were not "a mean crowd", he says. "Genevans were not iconoclastic. A lot of icons and crosses were removed to the loft of the Cathedral where they were only destroyed by a bolt of lightning which hit the roof and set fire to the whole lot. It led some people to say that it was an act of God and they should have all been burned in the first place," he says.
"The whole Reformation in Geneva can be explained in Marxist terms. After the Black Death we saw the rise of an industrial class here and elsewhere in Europe and the emergence of a new middle class of bankers and traders who were numerate and literate. And it is that early modern class that became Protestant," says Dr McComish.
"Luther was an ignorant German peasant but Calvin had written about Seneca. He was an educated French lawyer who today would be working for IBM. He was the greatest Christian theologian since St Paul."
He attributes much of Geneva's development as a place of refuge and compassion and a centre for humanitarian action to the city's Calvinist and Presbyterian traditions. Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, attended the Cathedral. Woodrow Wilson, founder of the League of Nations, was a devout Presbyterian familiar with Geneva's history when he promoted it as the location for the new global body.
Dr McComish points to a plaque on the Cathedral's western wall. It commemorates the first inter-faith service in the church on February 20th, 1946. He credits Martin Niemoller's sermon on that day as laying the foundation of the ecumenical movement after the second World War. "Powerful stuff indeed and so meaningful in that context. On the same occasion, the bishop of Oslo, Evinnd Bergrau, preached in German," he says.
Pastor Niemoller was a former submarine commander in the German navy who spent eight years amid the horrors of Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps for speaking out against fascism. He told his listeners in St Peter's that the most frightening thing that he had learned was not the reality of Nazi terror "but the rediscovery of an ancient truth that had been forgotten, that sin and guilt are not mere words used by preachers but that they have a terrible reality".