Death and Unanswerable Questions

2014 was the year my father died, something we’re still coming to terms with. His death was particularly hard to make sense of, because everything felt so unfinished. It’s not just that he was pretty young (under 60) and seemed healthy enough. Dad took some selfish and inappropriate actions in May that caused a crisis in my parents’ marriage. My last post was mostly an attempt to answer my despair and anger over the situation, trying to reconfigure my anguished “I NEVER want to be like him” into some kind of statement of what I wanted to stand for, some kind of affirmation to fill up the void left by repudiation. Family meetings were held, Dad expressed a wish to fix things, appointments with mental health professionals were made. And then, suddenly, he was gone. The timing was so paradoxical that almost all of us initially assumed suicide, but no, it was just a weird medical accident: no resolution, no answers, no teleological purpose written in the night sky, no meaning.

I wrote the following piece less than a week after his death, trying to put my emotions in some kind of order. It’s still a process, I still feel guilty sometimes for missing my grandmother, who died 2 years ago, more than him. But life isn’t some big-screen narrative where all the loose ends get tied up within ninety minutes. What I do know is that healing is sometimes helped by a little honesty and transparency, hopefully here with the right balance between obscurantism and oversharing.

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Early one Thursday evening, perhaps six hours before I learned that my father was dead, I watched my then-11-month daughter playing with a wind-up music box. Our little one is not exactly a calm baby–she is always crawling toward the next toy, pulling herself up on furniture or diving headfirst off the edge, loudly telling us what she thinks about the world as if her language is completely obvious and logical (which to her it is, I suppose).

But for a few minutes, she was transfixed by the tune of her music box (some timeless masterpiece like “Jingle Bells”), rocking gently from side to side, singing softly under her breath, totally enraptured. These are the kind of moments that fill up a parent’s heart with love for no good reason whatsoever.

At the same time, I was thinking about my dad. I had no mystical premonition of the news to come, no idea that something in his body had already failed catastrophically. Rather, for several weeks I had been caught up in my frustration over his latest stupid mistake, something that was threatening to destroy a marriage of 33 years.

 

I have always envied those people who seemed to have a loving, close relationship with their father. To be brutally honest, my dad was just plain bad at relating to his children (and most people) on a personal level: talking to us, sharing wisdom, asking questions, getting at what made us tick. His blindness prevented him from fulfilling a lot of your typical “dad functions”–taking us fishing, teaching us how to ride a bike or drive stick-shift or change our oil–but I always felt like he could have made up for that by being a moral role model. The anger issues he dealt with for the first half of my life (which resulted in severe screaming matches but fortunately never any kind of physical abuse) certainly didn’t help my impressions of him, although to his credit he really did undergo a kind of healing about fifteen years ago that severely blunted the edge of his rage. I only clued in later in life to some of the mental illness and past trauma that had partly made him who he was, but by then it seemed hard to relate to him with any emotion warmer than pity. When I thought of his legacy, I could only seem to point to many of the traits that I most disliked about myself. Passivity. Laziness. Social awkwardness. The inability to carry on a satisfying conversation. Coming across as intelligent by mastering rote facts instead of critically analyzing them. Blundering over words.

But despite my frustrations with Dad, the way he had seemed to squander so many opportunities to connect with people or do something with his life, I couldn’t help but circle back to my daughter’s response to her music box. As she listened to it, she felt secure and purely in the moment, interacting with something beautiful, something that made her happy. She felt loved, even if she doesn’t have the abstract capacity to understand what that means yet, and from that place of stability, of fundamental safety, she was able to experience a sense of wonder. This wonder, or what one psychologist has theorized as “flow,” doesn’t have to emerge from a sense of love, but those two things are among the most necessary ingredients in “the good life,” something I’ve been trying to figure out for quite a while. Could my dad have experienced such feelings himself, or even the kind of tenderness I feel toward my daughter?

A scene from a South African film called “Tsotsi” has stuck in my mind for years. In it, a thuggish teen points a gun at a crippled beggar, a character portrayed in the film as truly pathetic. “Why should I let you live?” he asks. (Subtext: you don’t contribute anything to the world, and your existence is desperately unhappy.) The beggar’s halting justification for his own survival–“Sometimes, I like how the wind feels warm on my face.”

At some level, we’re all faltering through, trying to find that warm wind. We know that “the night is dark and full of terrors,” but we clutch forward, believing that the day will return and bring with it some small joy. We construct coherent systems of thought and tell ourselves that there is reason to hope that everything will be well in the end, but ultimately we don’t really know. We understand much less than we think we do, and at the best moments we’re not all that different from babies experiencing simple joys for the first time, without even a vocabulary to describe what it is that’s happening, but just feeling loved and safe, perfectly situated for wonder.

At least, most of us start out that way, and then bump up against others blundering through, maybe a little more aggressively than we’d like, trying to snatch their own piece of the light; we bruise, develop calluses and rhino skin, forget that many of our experiences of wonder are better when they’re shared, all the while learning how to push others out of our way to get what we want.

My dad blundered around more than many. Honestly, if I thought that I was ever going to cause as much pain to my wife and family as he did, I’d just give up on life now (yes, I’m still young and naive). While he probably didn’t fully intend the consequences that his actions brought, he still made many horrible and selfish choices, over an extended period of time, progressively warping his character and leaving us still scratching our heads in disbelief. But he too was once a dearly beloved darling baby with parents who thrilled over his every move as if it was world record-setting; later, he too experienced that sense of love, that sense of wonder, probably not least as he felt my own tiny 11-month hands in his own. And there is at least some part of him in me and in my baby girl. I wish I had gotten over myself sooner and tried to show him, in a way that he would have understood, the love that we all desperately crave but are usually too arrogant and stupid to reach for.

Dad, you were deeply flawed, and my anger toward you is honestly still greater than my sadness over your death, but I promise to carry on what good there was in you by loving Rosa unreservedly and unashamedly.

A Manifesto

-to bring life into the world. To oppose the Powers, to oppose death, pestilence, rot. To take the graveyard’s humus and plant a new sapling.

-to search for truth in all places, where least expected. Not to accept easy answers. To reject, no matter how well-footnoted, any answers that justify oppression, marginalization, meanness, complacency, prejudice, pettiness, selfishness. Not to stay in Omelas, not to walk away from Omelas, but to start tearing it down brick by fucking brick until we figure out a better way.

-to scream until my throat bleeds (bis der Hals kracht) for every child soldier, every rape victim, every crack baby, every refugee, every 4th-generation criminal, every passenger pigeon, every widow, every orphan, every alien, every leper, every beloved child of God rotting in a mass grave, every deluded boy from the sticks with blood on his hands who was only doing what they told him to, every girl trapped in a boy’s body, every burned library, every blown-up giant Buddha, every girl targeted for attending school.

-to render coal into diamonds, lemons into lemonade, mud into porcelain, shit into a flowering garden. To squeeze strange chords out of the rusted strings of my guitar. To wash and bandage my hands, and start all over again. To make all things new.

-to befriend Jew and Gentile, slave and free, woman and man. Not to be colourblind, not to pretend we’re all the same. Not to ignore my own privilege.

-to search out the light shining through the billion trillion cracks found in everything.

-to hug Rosa.

-to look for the helpers, follow the healers, accept their feet of clay.

-to order the spicy items off the menu.

-to carve the tetragrammaton into sky and ocean, mountain and forest, plain and river. To bathe daily in the mystery of creation, of atomic physics, of black holes, of angels dancing on the head of a pin.

-to rage, rage against the dying of the light. To curse, to beg for mercy. To argue with God. To regret, to forgive, to hate, to love, to feel.

-to hold myself as complicit as the billionaire stockbroker or fat oligarch.

-to take step by failing step toward wholeness, reconciliation, redemption–further up and further in.

-to view everyone I meet as a potential friend, brother, sister, grandparent, niece, nephew.

-to glory in the stench of the “corpse flower” (Titan Arum).

-to oppose petty divides that would sunder us from our siblings, however they dress, whatever language they speak, whatever temple they burn incense in.

-to learn new songs always, preferably in languages I don’t speak.

-to delight in the soft fur of baby rabbits, to hold carefully tiny ducklings. To let the dolphins swim free. To consider my cat Jeoffrey, a servant of the living God duly and daily serving him.

-to recognize myself in what I hate most.

-to wake up from my slumber.

Teenage Thoughts on Triviality

Today’s offering is a blast from the past. I wrote this back in 2001, fresh out of high school, before blogs even existed (at least as far as I or most people knew). Actually, it was an entry for a newspaper writing contest, which I lost, probably due to being a pretentious git, as the following will likely make clear.

I’m not sure that teenage Matt really knew what the heck he was talking about, either. He was obviously terribly proud of himself for reading 19th-century Russian literature and felt an immense sense of superiority over those peons watching “Dawson’s Creek.” (At least he didn’t get his hands on any Ayn Rand…)

However, despite the curmudgeonly tone, I couldn’t help but reflect upon how many aspects of my basic worldview have remained stable since then. I’m still distressed by the triviality of many of our pursuits, which I think leads to passivity in the face of injustice. I also think we have a tendency to avoid the big questions due to a fear of admitting how bad things really are, and that even the kind of “awareness campaigns” (read: link-sharing) indulged in by those of us who pride ourselves on being socially aware are often a substitute for actual action. But most distressingly, I’m left wondering whether my writing has actually improved since I was eighteen.

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I Want my Brain Back, Please

Are people stupider these days? (Being a “young adult,” perhaps I have no authority to judge the state of affairs “these days,” lacking an abundance of “those days,” but allow me to be cocky and naïve.) The shorter answer: mmm, sorta. The longer: In a way, but they’re doing it on purpose, so it can’t totally be considered stupidity. Maybe the term of the moment is “self-deafened.”

Has anyone else noticed an overabundance of triviality in daily life? I speak not of the regular activities that make the average day “daily,” but of the overwhelming obsessions people develop to create the illusion of personality. Barring irregular events that rip a black hole in normalcy, life is mundane and predictable. So we cover it up by working on our builds, memorizing the Primetime lineup, becoming intimate with all the details behind the latest Hollywood breakup. Oh, everyone is a Trekkie at heart, a shameless nerd too afraid to face “the real world,” a creator of his or her personal universe. And life has become so rooted in black-and-white Kansas that tornadoes are about all we have left to look forward to.

Unconsciously sensing this inherent lack of progress, humanity seeks the sensation of motion. And it’s not difficult to find. Life’s hecticity factor is on the rise, replacing dial-up doldrums with high-speed cable hijinks. (Thank goodness, no more dancing penguins!) As more and more distractions come along to draw our attention, however, less and less time is doled out to each. (Show me a teenager who can sit through a seven minute song with no blistering guitar solo or hypnotic 1-2-3-4 beat, and I’ll show you someone who’s been playing violin since the age of 2.) And as less time is spent on each activity, everything becomes less important. We need more to fill the void, in ever-increasing numbers, preferably packaged with colour-coded accessories and a glitter pen. So kindergarteners parade on TV, demanding faster Internet connections. McDonald’s throws half a litre of melting ice cubes in your Coke and doubles your grease intake for a mere 50 cents extra. Libraries discard Dostoevsky and fill up on less mildewed Star Wars tie-ins. (But hey, at least we still have libraries.) Unfortunately, most of the people riding this roller coaster down a steepening hill don’t realize that amusement park rides always end up right back by the ticket booth, unless there’s an accident on the way. And Uncle Bozo is just a stupid old clown; he really has no idea how to steer the thing, even though he’s sitting up front.

OK, we get it already…

Most of this drive into madness is, nevertheless, somewhat purposeful. We recognize that we act like animals, existing solely to munch ‘n mate, as it were. But for the most part, that’s how we want it. Humankind has an instinctive aversion to moments of infinity. They come along, for sure, but the years diminish the worth of their eternity, allowing us to forget and go on with the numbers game.

HUMANITY NEEDS TO BE TALKED DOWN TO. It’s not because we’re stupid or shallow. It’s because we’re afraid to think over the big questions, having left them to the philosophers and scientists, and not appreciating the conclusions they’ve brought up. The bright confetti and fake diamonds we fill our nests with are distractions that allow us to avoid wondering what’s over the trees, or past the river. We’re not de-brained, just very small.

World Vision USA and the Gospel: What Bible are we Reading, Anyway?

I wasn’t going to comment on the World Vision USA hiring fiasco (for those who haven’t heard, the organization announced several days ago that it was going to start hiring married gay Christians, and then reversed its decision today after receiving severe backlash on the order of 2,000 cancelled child sponsorships), but I have found myself getting steadily more frustrated and I have to try to organize my thoughts somewhat. This will necessitate an attempt at laying out some of my core beliefs in a kind of partial credo.

Once again, the North American evangelical church has failed to demonstrate an understanding of “good news,” “gospel,” or “evangelion.”

As I interpret the Bible, Jesus’ mission is about drawing people into the reconciling work that is already being carried out by God in the world. Every day, everywhere, in the places where we least expect to find it.

The gospel message is about being given the choice to follow Jesus into the deepest and darkest corners of earthly existence, finding God at work there, and in some way contributing to the mission of reconciliation, that long moral arc that is leading slowly but inexorably toward justice. It is about slowly chipping away at our own selfish imperfections and being changed into humans who more closely resemble Jesus in self-sacrificial love, not fearing our own deaths because ultimately Jesus is Lord. God will triumph over injustice, as the dominant ways of the world–the ways of empire, of hierarchy, of power imbalances, of oppression, of “redemptive” violence–are destroyed. No, better than destroyed–somehow turned upside down, and yes, even reconciled.

To somehow reduce this message–this gospel–into a ticket into heaven, or a list of sins that we are to avoid, is deeply unfortunate.

To turn away people who wish to participate in the work of reconciliation is also deeply unfortunate. One’s personal sexual predilections have absolutely no bearing on the kind of work World Vision does.*

I have expressed this many times, and I’ll probably keep doing it forever: if anyone thinks that the Bible is primarily about sexual relationships, or that they’re even a topic of secondary importance, that probably says more about our own cultural obsessions than anything.** The two big-picture issues that emerge from the Bible are giving our primary allegiance to God, and bringing about justice in the world. Jesus gives us the Cliff’s Notes version of this when he sums up the entire law & prophets as “Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbour as yourself.”

Reducing this mission into rules about what to do with our private parts is embarrassing, shortsighted, pointless, and tragic. It is a distraction.***

The more that Christians get suckered into idiotic wastes of time like this (see also: Duck Dynasty, Chick-Fil-A), the less time is spent actually participating in the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom is not of this world, something that we forget when we try to legislate moral standards that arise from a single religious conviction rather than being universally recognized human rights (see also: Hobby Lobby). The kind of Christendom thinking inherited from many centuries when the church served as the primary moral authority in Western society has many thinking that Christians have a right to set the moral agenda for the world. Here I’m showing my Anabaptist colours.

As Christians, we’d do better to work at serving God through service in our communities and worry about being a living incarnation of the gospel. When a person identifying as LGBTQ enters our worshipping community, let’s love them as we would love any person, get to know them without agendas. Learn where God is working in their lives; learn from them as they reveal ways they see God working in our lives.

God is moving in the world, reconciling all things in creation, working out a greater narrative than we can grasp in one sitting. Let’s not quench the spirit of those who wish to participate in that work.

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*There is certainly room to critique models of international development and charity, but that’s a much bigger discussion; I don’t mean to say that WV is a perfect organization, but its humanitarian intentions seem genuine.

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**To be totally clear, I am what some call an “affirming” Christian. This means that I see no reason why any LGBTQ person (married or unmarried, practicing or nonpracticing) should be denied full participation in a church body should they wish to be there. The Christian tradition has had a troubling and problematic understanding of sexuality, the human body, and the material realm in general, leading us to the quasi-Gnostic position held by many North Americans today, that holds the body to be largely dirty and impure.

Some of the reasons for my stance are detailed in this video, but obviously I didn’t just arrive at this conclusion randomly. It arose from years of reading and careful, prayerful consideration–much the same process that the board of World Vision USA described going through before reaching their original decision to allow same-sex married Christians to join with them in their work of bringing children out of poverty. Then their apparently careful decision was undone in mere days after a couple of influential evangelical gatekeepers riled up the troops and held them hostage with the threat of severe revenue cuts.

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***I don’t want to imply that it’s a waste of time to argue over the inclusion of people who identify as LGBTQ in the church. I recognize that as a privileged straight male, I am potentially welcome at any church I choose to enter. For people who identify as LGBTQ, the lack of this assurance is a tragedy, and marks another failure of the Church universal. I merely want to point out my frustration that so many Christians have chosen “opposition to gay marriage” as their hill to die upon when the Bible says nothing about this issue and clearly has some obvious priorities, like caring for the poor, that have absolutely nothing to do with sexuality.

Pope Francis Says All Religions are True: Wishful Thinking and Bias Confirmation

This was inspired by a recent spate of posts on Facebook, where at least 10 of my friends excitedly linked to this story, entitled “Pope Francis Denounces Racism and Declares that ‘All Religions are True’ at Historic Third Vatican Council.”  A bit of digging revealed that the story was an artful satire, but one more convincing than most.  To be clear, I in no way mean to denigrate those who were initially fooled.  People who are fairly knowledgeable about the Catholic Church would recognize that a Third Vatican Council would be very big news that wouldn’t just pop up out of nowhere after it had already happened, but unless you have a particular interest in this area, there’s no reason you should know that.  Rather, I’m going to reflect a little bit on why so many people–to their credit, I think–were fooled by this story.

There is a good amount of detail in the spoof article that comes across as believable, since it is similar to things that the pope has actually said in the last year.  Hopefully nobody would be shocked to hear Francis denouncing racism or speaking up for the basic human worth of immigrants and refugees, and lines like “Through acts of love and charity the atheist acknowledges God as well, and redeems his own soul, becoming an active participant in the redemption of humanity” are not that far off from a famous genuine statement he made in an interview a few months ago: “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics…Even the atheists. Everyone!…We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

However, other supposed statements by Francis in the satirical article, calling hell nothing more than a metaphor, supporting the idea of a female pope, and claiming that people of all religions are really praying to the same “God of love,” are too much of a stretch from orthodox Catholic dogma to be believable.  In fact, some directly contradict the pope’s own statements.  The satire is really taking aim at the tendency of liberal types (like me, I suppose) to fawn over Francis’s pronouncements on social justice, excoriation of global capitalism, and apparent inclusivity toward LGBTQ persons and non-Christians as if he’s some kind of radical reformer who will “usher the Catholic Church into the present,” when in a lot of ways he isn’t all that different from his predecessors.

When I first read the satirical article and all of my friends’ joyful exclamations in favour of the pope’s stand, my thought was “Here’s a left-wing version of the ‘Abortionplex‘ debacle.”  In 2011, the Onion, probably the most famous satirical “news” source in the United States,  reported that Planned Parenthood was developing a massive $8,000,000,000 abortion themepark which would be able to conduct 2000 abortions simultaneously.  The article was pretty ludicrous, even by the Onion’s standards (and much more obvious in its satire than the Francis article), but at least one pro-life congressman fell for it, reposting it as fact.

This might seem like a farfetched parallel, but bear with me for a moment.  Socially and religiously liberal individuals fooled into believing that Francis would finally admit that all religions are true and we should just get along?  Pro-lifer fooled into believing that pro-choice organization wants so badly to maximize the killing of babies that it would turn it into a Disneyland experience?  In both cases, wishful thinking is at play.  Our biases are confirmed, which immediately dulls critical faculties and leads us to accept as true something that’s just a little bit fishy.

However, one important distinction needs to be drawn between the two responses, related to the human tendency toward “othering” those who are unlike us.  In the case of my friends (who probably aren’t Catholic “insiders” or they wouldn’t have been taken in), the response can be characterized as “Wow, that pope guy isn’t all that bad–he’s more like me than I’d thought.”  I think this kind of response shows a potential generosity of spirit; a basic human stance, in my opinion, should always look for points of commonality with the “other.”  In the case of the congressman, the response is more like “Those Planned Parenthood folks are even more evil than I had thought possible!”  I would suggest that, while we should never believe any news source uncritically, it is FUNDAMENTALLY important to confirm every possible fact if we are tending toward the second kind of response.  If we come across something that makes us think “How on earth could somebody be that evil?” and there’s a good chance that it isn’t true, we had better do our darndest to doublecheck that information before passing it on.  While I have my own political leanings which are not always displayed in the most subtle manner, I should note that neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on the tendency to demonize their respective “other.”  I have done it myself, and I would far rather be trapped by wishful thinking that is overly generous to the position of my “opponents.”

This connects quite well with something once written by the patron saint of thoughtful, imaginative young evangelicals, so I’ll let Jack take us to the finish line today:

“The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

A Grandmother’s Legacy

I’m still not sure if this is going to wind up being a personal blog, or one that focuses more on current events and news, or more abstract theological and philosophical ponderings.  But today’s post is going to lean toward the personal.

It was one year ago today that my dear grandmother died, just a few short weeks after finding out that her first great-grandchild was on the way.  Grandma K. was one of my very favourite people in the world; I lived in her basement for a number of years while attending university and starting to work as a high school teacher.  She was a gentle and generous soul with a sharp intelligence and a voluminous appetite for knowledge.  She instilled a deep love of reading in me through the encyclopedias, newsmagazine subscriptions, and many, many books she bought us.  Her inquisitive nature meant that she could talk to almost anybody since chances were she knew quite a bit about whatever the other person found interesting.  Who knows, maybe her stories about growing up in Canada’s Far North, speaking Inuktitut to her Inuit friends, and living on a barren Arctic island as the wife of a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader ignited some kind of nascent anthropological impulse in me that is still bearing fruit.

Hardly a day goes by since the birth of my daughter, who shares a middle name with Grandma K., that I don’t mourn the fact that Rosa will never meet this woman who meant so much to me and who would have loved her so much.  Why couldn’t she have lived just one more year, or even a few months longer?  But we trust that her legacy will survive, and that there is power in the names Rosa has been given.

The memory of Grandma’s passing is especially bittersweet this week, because only two days ago my parents finally moved out of the house they shared with her for four years.  Grandma & Grandpa K. bought that house way back in the early ’60s, so it was in the family for nearly 50 years.  In all the time I knew my grandparents, that was their home, and the memories are thick–more than 25 Christmases celebrated; innumerable family dinners, games, photos, and songs; watching “American Idol” or “Dragon’s Den” with Grandma after Grandpa had passed away; proposing to my now-wife  in the basement and then going upstairs to share the news, Grandma getting up in the morning to make me bacon and eggs many times even though I told her I was fine and that she should sleep in, Grandma singing along to oldies (I mean WAY before “Johnny B. Goode”) on the radio. Of course, a house is never just a house; it’s a box of memories that peel off the walls unexpectedly as you walk by.  Now some developers will be “flipping” it, and who knows what will be left when they’re done.  (Besides our daughter’s placenta buried in their garden…whoops!)

My parents have taken the unusual step of moving from River Heights, one of Winnipeg’s more desirable neighbourhoods, into the West End, which is infamous for shootings, drug deals, and prostitution.  But they have chosen this path out of deep conviction, believing that as Christians they are called to identify with those whom God values the most–the marginalized, the refugee, the prodigal, the child of violence.  Rather than swooping in from a suburban refuge to dispense well-being to the benighted denizens of a disadvantaged neighbourhood, they have chosen to join that neighbourhood and live in solidarity with its residents.  So even though it is hard to say goodbye to a beloved landmark (and with it, to Grandma all over again), I can’t help but feel that Grandma is being honoured by what they are doing with the gift she gave them.  There, too, her legacy will live on.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013 (and reflections on hero-worship)

I remember learning about Nelson Mandela when I was in grade 9.  We were singing a bunch of South African “Freedom Songs” in choir, in both English and Zulu (if you’ve been in a choir in the past 20 years, you’re probably familiar with the genre), that included cryptic lines about a figure locked up on Robben Island.  When I think back on it, singing lyrics like “Power to the people” in a Christian school in Canada’s Bible Belt would have been pretty unlikely in most other contexts.  Some of those songs, like “Freedom is Coming,” have stayed with me over the years and still pack an emotional punch.  Their message of liberation from the evils of the world, and assurance that God is on the side of the oppressed, was probably my first exposure to practical liberation theology.

Amandla!

My choir teacher didn’t ignore his duties, informing us of the context of the apartheid struggle and who Mandela was, which led me to a few biographies at the local library (we’re talking pre-widespread Internet days).  That was the beginning of my admiration and, to be honest, hero-worship of Mandela, a man who symbolizes “freedom” and sums up so much about what is “right” in humanity.  His iconic visage signifies far more than the particulars of his own experience.  Nearly universally-revered figures like Mandela come across as a few centimeters short of superhuman.  As with the other select few of his stature (Gandhi, Mother Teresa, MLK, Oscar Romero…who else deserves to be in this pantheon?), idolizing Mandela is a risky prospect.  We may discover our hero to have all-too human foibles and imperfections, potentially tarnishing his legacy.  Or conversely, and perhaps more dangerously, we might beatify him as a person of incredible moral courage and unique inner strength far beyond the emulation of mere mortals like ourselves.  As my friend Jamie Arpin-Ricci has pointed out, the institution of monasteries had the unfortunate effect of convincing Christians that only a select few with special abilities were called to radical discipleship, and that most of us could basically just go about our daily business without any behaviour adjustments.  There’s a fine line between honouring an exceptional individual for their incredible accomplishments, and brushing them off as irrelevant to our daily experience.

So in honouring Mandela, I hope we are able to learn from his actions instead of consigning them to the same category as Hercules’ mythical feats of strength.  Because he did much which is worthy of emulation.  Most of us are not involved in a system where a whole category of people is dehumanized to the degree that black South Africans were in the apartheid state.  The lines between good and evil are rarely as clearly drawn as they were there or during the American civil rights movement.  Our society is characterized by racism, sexism, homophobia, and other evils, to be sure, but the solution is far less obvious than it was in a time when a single twisted system provided a clear target for activist energies.  The moral leadership that Mandela provided to the anti-apartheid struggle was exemplary, and it was crucial in bringing down one of the world’s last openly racist regimes, but there are other things that we can take away from him.

Mandela initially supported the use of violence against the Afrikaner regime, then later changed his mind, believing that non-violent resistance would be more effective in the long run.  In 1964, he stated “During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realized. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”  Rather than paying with his life, he spent 27 years in prison, mitigated somewhat toward the end by the attention of the international community.  But what is most remarkable about Mandela was his response after the tables were turned.  Unlike other post-colonial leaders like Robert Mugabe, who began his reign as a similarly revered freedom fighter, Mandela did not spearhead a project of retribution against former rulers.  He chose forgiveness instead.  South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, while not without its flaws, brought the abuses of the apartheid years into the open but also provided amnesty for those who voluntarily admitted their wrongdoing.  Mandela’s continual insistence that he was the president of all South Africans, not just those of a particular skin tone, was a powerful affirmation of basic humanity.  Also unlike Mugabe, Mandela didn’t mistake his immense popularity for a dictatorial mandate, but stepped down at the end of his term, providing an example of peaceful transfer of power.

Mandela stands as a symbol, then, of standing up to tyranny, of dignified patience, of love for all humanity, and of employing power to heal rather than to continue the cycle of violence.  Our admiration of him is fully justified, but let’s also remember that we too are called to be faithful with what we have been given, and have our own part to play in bringing shalom to a world in desperate need.