For now I just want to leave a few extended quotations (and minor commentary) that really got my juices stirring.
The first comes from page 43:
When the new dispensation came into being, Terror [Patrick Lekota] was elected Premier of the Free State, one of nine provinces into which South Africa was divided. (He gained his nickname not for his political activity but for his prowess on the soccer field.) When he came to greet our Synod of Bishops, which was meeting in his province, he spoke warmly and appreciatively of the work of the churches in South Africa, particularly about their role in education. Nearly all the leaders in the black community had been educated in church mission schools. When we asked him why he was so dedicated to reconciliation and to being willing to make concessions to his opponents, he did not hesitate to say that it had all been due to the influence and witness of the Christian churches. This was echoed by Tokyo Sexwale, the first Premier of the leading industrial province of Gauteng, when he too came to greet our synod as it was meeting in his province.
Could you imagine someone in North America saying something like that about the Churches out here? It just baffles me. Out here people can't find enough reasons to bad-mouth the Churches. And a large part of me can see why.
Here's a snippet from earlier on, page 31:
Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human. When we want to give high praise to someone we say, "Yu, u nobuntu"; "Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu."...It is to say, "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours." We belong in a bundle of life. We say, "A person is a person through other persons." It is not, "I think therefore I am." It says rather: "I am human because I belong. I participate. I share."...What dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me.
This way of looking at humans holds a close correspondence with something Rikki Watts (Professor of New Testament at Regent College) often says: 'We are defined by our relationships'. He challenges people to try and see who they are apart from all their relationships. His challenge got me: my language was given to me by my parents and teachers; everything I know about this world was passed on to me by others; every category I use to understand the world uses the language passed on to me by others and the ways of thinking I learned from others. I don't mean to be reductionistic, but its very true that our relationships are central in defining who we are. Interesting link with Biblical Theology there (go figure, NT professor) which I won't touch right now.
Finally, I quote at length Tutu's quotation of Mary McAleese, President of the Irish Republic, describing Gordon Wilson's reaction to the killing of his daughter (pg. 157):
It is a rare person who arrives at that state of perfect spiritual serenity. I suppose they are saints of sorts, not necessarily beatified and canonised saints but the kind of people in whose presence we intuit the nearness of God because they bring their best friend everywhere with them. God does not accompany them as a bodyguard or go in front of them like a Soviet tank clearing a path. He accompanies them like a soprano's pure voice accompanies a song, like a dewdrop sits on a rose.
One such was Gordon Wilson. He was a man so practised in the discipline of love that when his beautiful daughter Marie died, hard and cruelly, at the slaughter that was the Enniskillen bombing, her hand in his as she slipped away, the words of love and of forgiveness sprang as naturally to his lips as a child's eyes are drawn to its mother. His words shamed us, caught us off guard. They sounded so different from what we expected and what we were used to. They brought stillness with them. They carried a sense of the transcendent into a place so ugly we could hardly bear to watch. But he has his detractors and unbelievably his bags of hate mail. How dare you forgive? they shouted. What kind of father are you who can forgive your daughter's killers? It was as if they had never heard the command to love and forgive anywhere before. It was as if they were being spoken for the first time in the history of humanity and Christ had never uttered the words, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." As one churchgoing critic said to me on the subject of Gordon Wilson, "Sure the poor man must have been in shock," as if to offer love and forgiveness is a sign of mental weakness instead of spiritual strength.
What can I say...what incredible love and forgiveness.
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