Faithful

Sometimes, in spite of yourself, you end up exactly where you need to be.

I was tired the other night after a day that included working furiously to meet a deadline and two meetings, one of them with the same people who made us fingerpaint about apartheid so, you know, I was already on my guard. I wanted to come back to my room and take a shower and fall asleep early. Instead I let myself get dragged to some church in Athlone, one of the Coloured townships (as opposed to the black townships). There was a 20th anniversary memorial service for two young people who had been killed by the security police in 1989, my friend said. She is a struggle veteran, so one feels it is poor form to say “I don’t really care about your history, I was kind of hoping to find a rerun of ‘Gilmore Girls’ on TV,” so I went.

We arrived at a church already packed with people. Desmond Tutu was there; so was Trevor Manuel, who basically runs the country (come on, we all know it’s not Zuma) and Farid Esack. They gave great speeches, passionate and pleading, their power to sway a crowd undiminished after all these years.

But it was not the luminaries who fascinated me, though I am something of a hero worshipper. It was the crowd.

Many of them—perhaps most—were struggle veterans. Some had been part of the nonviolent, civil society resistance; others had been part of the guerrilla armed struggle. A handful of them were dressed in the fatigues of Umkhonto weSwizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the pre-1994 ANC that led the armed struggle. We tend to think of the South African freedom movement as very like our own civil rights movement—nonviolent in its orientation, convinced that violence only begets more violence. For many in the movement, this was true. But others believed without the fear instilled by an element of insurrection and violence, they would never achieve their desired ends.

The violence gave the police a reason to come down ever more harshly and a way to justify it to the public. The two MK kids who died were 20 years old. They were killed by a security police bomb. Their bodies were almost unidentifiable. And their stories are unremarkable. Things like this happened to struggle activists all the time. Someone I interviewed said, “There was a time when we thought we’d never stop going to funerals.” Twenty years on, I think I would still be filled with rage—corrosive, poisonous rage.

Instead, they rose as one and sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

Perhaps you haven’t heard the lyrics in a while; so few churches sing old hymns anymore.

Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father
There is no shadow of turning with Thee
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not
As Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be
Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see
All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

I struggle with the armed resistance. I understand, of course, why 20-year-olds rage against oppression that brutalizes their parents and families and communities. But I wonder if it didn’t do more harm than good. People died, went into exile, were detained and tortured; of course, this happened to the nonviolent activists as well. Yet I wonder if MK wasn’t the best propaganda tool the apartheid state had: concrete evidence that the revolution was at the doorstep and any means was justifiable in pushing it back, even if it meant killing kids and deploying the army into people’s neighborhoods. And on a moral level, I struggle with armed resistance. Christian tradition is not monolithic on this—Aquinas writes of just war, while the Franciscans and Mennonites and others are pacifists; Bonhoeffer struggles to hold the two together and ends up realizing that one can only act, in the full knowledge one may be absolutely wrong, and then throw oneself on the grace of God. There is no way, in a broken world, to get it perfectly right. And that’s no excuse to sit it out on the sidelines.

Summer and winter and springtime and harvest
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love

Robbie and Coline, the two cadres being memorialized, were bright, brave, ambitious kids, by all accounts. They still have friends and family who miss them, who know that there is a seat missing at the family table at Christmas, who know they lost grandchildren and nieces and nephews as well when they lost Robbie and Coline. They are frozen in memory as they were at 20: hopeful, determined, with all the zeal and idealism of youth. The comrades at the service—those who fought in the same struggle, whether armed or not, and made it through to the other side—did not meet the same end, but they are not unscathed either. A woman I interviewed said they are “a scarred generation. But we wear our scars like badges of honor.” It may be true, but though they have built up normal lives for themselves, have kids and jobs and mortgages, the scars are never far below the surface. Some are tormented by what they’ve seen. Some are tormented by what they’ve done. Some are tormented by what was done to them. All are, in some way, tormented. And yet they sang.

Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide
Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside.

I grapple with the armed resistance from a moral perspective; I believe it’s essential for Christians to do so. And I don’t think you can easily dismiss a Jesus who says “Blessed are the peacemakers.” But it is theoretical for me: I am not in a position that requires me to make such a choice. And as David Russell, a former bishop, said to me, his nonviolent protests were protected by MK. Our ability to take such a stance is often ensured by those who have taken a different one. The pope is a pacifist, but is protected by the Swiss guard, after all. So I am learning to temper my tendency to pontificate with a bit of humility. Those who fought, in whatever way their consciences led them, bear the scars of their suffering on behalf of others. Is that not part of being remade in the image of Christ?

When people went up to light candles, they sang the MK anthem that was sung when a cadre dies. I looked at two of my friends: one who was an organizer for UDF; one who, though a priest, ran MK missions into Botswana. Both are scarred. Both are luminous. Both challenge my understanding of Christian witness. We clasped hands to sing “We Shall Overcome,” the old civil rights song, and I found myself hoping desperately that they would—overcome their own hurts and scars, but also that this wonderful, wounded country would overcome, that the deep challenges it faces will be turned into opportunities for moral imagination and agency. Because the price they have paid has been so high, and I want the reward to be commensurate.

In some form, perhaps not the one any of us envision, I am confident it will be. Because our faithfulness falters; but there is One who never does.

Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.