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.

Gonna Be a Lovely Day

as Kirk Franklin would say. If you are on this site, you received an invitation to be. I had a couple of, shall we say, unexpected South African visitors to the site (feel free to email me for more info on that one), and it was hampering my ability to talk about what I was doing here and, more importantly, my ability to be snarky about it. New readers are welcome, they just need to email me for access. So take heart: you're a small, select group, the elite in-crowd, just like you wanted to be back in middle school.

SO: what's been going on? I am working on two projects here in Cape Town. The first is creating a document for an organization called The Foundation for Church-Led Restitution, to be used by churches becoming interested in a restitution-vs-charity paradigm. It's very interesting, although I have some ideological problems with it the deeper in I get. I'm eyeballs-deep in finishing a draft of it by Tuesday so I'll write more reflectively about it later.

The second is the script for an exhibition St. George's Cathedral--known as "The People's Cathedral," or more colloquially to most of us, "Desmond Tutu's church"--is creating to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Peace March of September 13 1989, which was one of the biggest marches Cape Town had ever seen and one of the death knells of apartheid (it happened just a few days after F.W. de Klerk, who would ultimately win the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela, had taken over from P.W. Botha--apparently Afrikaner politicians are only allowed to have initials, not actual names). The Cathedral is creating a Space of Memory and Witness, which is a nice and slightly theological way of saying a museum, to commemorate the role it has played in justice movements over time, and this is its first exhibition, so I'm pretty excited to be the author of it. It's also allowed me to meet and interview some really interesting folks, including Allan Boesak--there's a post coming up on him--and the then-mayor and a lot of struggle activists. Who are a screwed-up lot as a whole, an observation which deserves its own post.

I have a script due tomorrow for them, which is obviously why I've chosen to blog now.

Anyway: welcome to the newly selective Cape Town to Cambridge! Consider yourself a VIP--I sure do.

And the Bible Metaphor of the Day Award Goes to...

Dionne, for this advice when I lamented the occasional moments of surreal, "are they crazy or am I? am I really here? can you see me?" absurdity that threaten to intrude on my placid life:

"When you get your boarding pass at the airport, keep facing forward. When you walk up to the gate, face forward. When you sit on the plane and take off from South Africa, face forward. Don't look behind you, lest there be a pillar of salt in your future."

Bwahahahaha.

Happy Sunday.

I Have a Patron Saint!

I passed a church today called St. Martini’s and I almost passed out from the wave of reverence that came over me. Surely the presence of the Lord is in that place, y’all. I can hear the rush of angels’ wings, I see glory on each face…I was overcome. I have a patron saint! My PresbyBaptist self can still embrace liturgical traditions! On his feast day, do you wear little black dresses at swanky bars or lounge around the house in silk dressing-gowns drinking martinis from one’s own sterling silver cocktail shaker? (I’m a shaken-not-stirred kind of gal.) Then I found out it was just St. Martin’s in Afrikaans and my religious aspirations wisped away like so much gossamer. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

Also, I am acutely feeling the sadness of missing Michael Jackson's funeral. I tried to stream CNN but there wasn't enough bandwidth. Or as Runako said, "Lots of little South African students couldn't do their homework on Wikipedia because you were using up all the bandwidth trying to watch Michael Jackson. I hope you're happy." Which I absolutely WOULD HAVE BEEN if it had actually *worked*.

And now I am trying to pull an all-nighter, or at least a late-nighter, to finish a draft of a project due Friday. But how am I possibly to do that in a land without Starbucks? And no coffee maker in my room? This is going to be a subpar product, South African friends--that's right, I know you're reading--just prepare yourself for it now.

Hey Kim, Farid Esack remembers you. Which suggests to me you did not maintain our hallowed undergraduate tradition of sleeping/not paying attention in class. I'm gravely disappointed.

Random Encounters

I'm having communion with Desmond Tutu Friday morning. Eat your hearts out, suckers. I'm secretly hoping for a better picture with him than I got last time, because as you can see, I had kind of Mufasa hair in that picture.

Also, every photo I take has that glare off my Tyra forehead, I can't do anything about that. I can't be cute at 7 in the morning, it's just asking too much. I do wish I knew what happened to that fleece I was wearing, it's one of my favorites.

Also, at the laundromat today a couple of old men actually just stopped and watched while I was sorting my delicates. Apparently no one told them the rule about how in public places like that we all keep to ourselves and, if we must look, we do it surreptitiously. It was creepy. Yes, dude, it's red lace underwear. Keep moving.

And I ran into some of my people today. I was going to get lunch, and two 40-something men approached me. In an accent you could cut with a butter knife, one of them says, "Excuuuse me, maaaa'aaam, buuut will thiiis strate take us to Laaawwng Strate?" I immediately recognized him as my people and made a quick guess: Mississippi or Alabama. "Where y'all from?" I asked. "The U.S.," he responded. Yeah I get that. "Where in the U.S.?" I clarified. Sure enough, folks, we have a winner: Mississippi! "I'm from Texas!" I exclaimed and we immediately started to taaawwk sloooowweerr and with bigger hand gestures, and use phrases like "like to had" and "fixin to" while lamenting Cape Town's lack of barbeque or Mexican food. (I did tell him where he could find Dr. Pepper, for which he was appropriately grateful.) The second guy piped in, "I'm from Colorado." Dude, who cares? Mississippi is Faulkner, Elvis, civil rights workers, and brilliant writers who drink themselves to madness. Colorado is...skiing. And Focusing on the Family. No one's impressed.

I even walked them part of the way to Long Street, since they were nowhere near it. I kind of wanted to ask the Mississippi guy, who was *definitely* Old School Mississippi, not part of the New South AT ALL, if he was freaked out by all the Coloured people, since at home they would just be black. (He might identify some as "high yella" or "redbone," but beyond that, probably not making a lot of distinctions.) But I'm a nice Southern girl so I figured it was best to stick to safer topics. He was already a stranger in a strange land.

If Desmond and I take a better photograph tomorrow, I'll be sure to post it.

Mark Sanford is Determined to Destroy The Last Shreds of Hope for His Marriage

That is all one can deduce from his fatal proclivity for continuing to talk to the press when he needs to just pipe the hell down and ride out his last year as governor before disappearing quietly from the political landscape. This latest round of “tearful, emotional” interviews (per the Associated Press) has him saying that this wasn’t just any affair. Oh no y’all, nothing so tawdry as that. This was a “tragic and forbidden love story.”

I KNOW. I KNOW. I’M DYING TOO. CAN. YOU. EVEN. IMAGINE. When did he start taking his cues from the back covers of Harlequin romances? When did the A.P. become his pastor/therapist/bartender? And don’t you feel like he’s somehow trying to create a moral high ground in which this is not in the same class with other people’s affairs, because it was True Love?

And then he said that she wasn’t the first woman he had “crossed lines” with.

Well, of course she isn’t. Who ever is? She’s the first one you got caught with, Mark. We were all clear on that without you saying it and further embarrassing your wife.

And THEN, because apparently he has never heard of the phrase “no comment,” he said that he would “go to my grave knowing I have met my soulmate” but that he owed it to his kids and 20 years of marriage to “try this larger walk of faith.” He is, and again I quote, “trying to fall back in love with Jenny.”

Well.

Well then.

I bet Jenny is awful grateful for that, Mark. It must have warmed the cockles of her heart. Why don’t you toss her some more crumbs from your table?

Remember how people got upset when Bill Clinton wouldn’t answer questions like these and said he was irate that people even had the nerve to ask? A little of that outrage would stand Sanford and his family in good stead right now. Why won’t he just stop answering questions? Why the public confessionals? Aren’t we all uncomfortable enough?

This guy doesn’t need a press corps, he needs a therapist.

Favorite tweet seen on this: “We can’t judge until we too have slept with a woman in Argentina. Who’s up for a road trip?”

Maureen Dowd at the New York Times is apparently sharing a brain with me on this, and does it better than I do, so go read her column "Rules of the Wronged" at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/opinion/01dowd.html?_r=1.

I will post about actual South African things soon, including my work, and how I am hoping to mobilize some people to put on our Barack T-shirts and go be obnoxious Americans for the 4th of July. Even though I really try and live as if loving one's neighbor transcends all borders and nationalism leads us to war and destruction, there is a tiny (but, it turns out, oftentimes loud, particularly when it's had a couple of drinks) voice that feels like on general principle, but *particularly* since the November election, I should get free drinks on July 4. Like on my birthday. Come on, we're the country that brought you brilliant constitutions with kickass bills of rights, Michael Jackson, blue jeans and iPods/iPhones/iMacs. We deserve to be a superpower.

Coffee, Winter Days, and My New Political Crush

Sometimes, in quiet moments, I reflect on John Newton’s statement that “I know but two things: I am a great sinner, and Christ is a great savior.”

Other times, I reflect on how I would take just about anything from the Starbucks menu right now, and on what grave desperation must have driven the man who invented Nescafe.

I used to wonder why South Africans seemed to adopt the worst aspects of British culture. Like tea. I mean, I like tea fine, and I certainly like it a lot more now that I’ve figured out you can put a lot of cream and sugar in it. But why weren’t people here coffee drinkers, I asked in bewilderment? And then I realized that if all you knew of coffee was Nescafe, you would turn to tea as well. (Theological analogy here: you know how we’ve all been told that “you’re all of Christ that some folks will ever see?” And you think to yourself, wow, that is unfortunate for them, because I am not Jesus’ best foot forward, as it were? We are the Nescafe to Jesus’ Arabian coffee, y’all. Ponder that rich insight for a moment.)

There used to be a coffeehouse in Cape Town that served real coffee, but it closed down, no doubt because of my patronage. I am the Typhoid Mary of Cape Town coffeehouses; two of the ones I frequented in the past have since closed. I almost want to apologize to the café I’m sitting in right now because they are just darling and obviously their days are numbered. Now all I can find is Nescafe, which lo, is an abomination unto the Lord, who hath made all coffee good in His time. But people don’t *call* it Nescafe; they call it coffee, so I am deceived. Then I saw “filter coffee” on the menu and I thought, score! Nescafe is not made with a filter, right? It’s instant, that’s the whole point, so this must be the real thing. But then it came and it had that distinctive light brown film over the top of it. You’ve never seen real coffee with that film, right? It’s the Nescafe giveaway. So all I could figure was maybe they filtered the water before they mixed it with the Nescafe. Or they put Nescafe in the filter basket. Either way, there was no mistaking that bitter taste. My hopes rose briefly when I saw “café americano” on the menu because I thought OK, American coffee. That’s what they call filter coffee in Egypt to distinguish it from Nescafe; maybe Cape Town is taking its cues from their neighbors to the (far) north. But it arrived with the same light brown film. Hopes: dashed.

A young friend of mine here, who is 20, drinks the stuff like it’s the last drink on earth. I honestly want to stage an intervention for the kid. “We’re all here to let you know we love you but we can’t enable this lifestyle anymore, because it’s so far beneath you and you’re not living up to your potential and we just can’t watch you do this to yourself. Have a latte.”

I worry that I’ll eventually get used to it and even come to like it, the way the Israelites in exile forgot the old ways and assimilated into Babylon. I try to hold on to the memory of real coffee, so that like Nehemiah, I’ll be ready when it’s time to return. (I’ve been spending some time in the Old Testament lately, if you can’t tell.)

On another note entirely: you know who’s glad Michael Jackson died? Mark Sanford. That guy’s news cycle got drastically abbreviated by Jacko’s death, and you know Sanford is lighting candles in church for him in thanksgiving and remembrance. I’m kind of sorry, because I was really looking forward to the inevitable parodies of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” after he said he’d spent five days crying in Argentina. Of course that was after he’d said he was just clearing his head in Buenos Aires, driving down the coast. My friend said that’s when he knew a woman was going to come out of the woodwork: he’d been to Argentina and said, “There’s no coastline in Buenos Aires. I knew then we didn’t have the whole story.” Which was itself after he said he’d been hiking the Appalachian Trail, after leaving without telling anyone where he was going or conferring his gubernatorial powers upon the lieutenant governor. I guess it’s a good thing no one needed a death sentence commuted or the National Guard called in for those five days.

Which brings me to what I loved best about this story: I loved Jenny Sanford. Y’all, Jenny Sanford is my new favorite political wife. (Before her, Bill Clinton was my favorite political wife. Hee.) All those press conferences where betrayed political wives stood with pained smiles plastered on their faces while their husbands publicly copped to various forms of infidelity, be it with men (Jim McGreevy, I’m looking at you—FYI he’s in seminary now to become an Episcopal priest), women (John Edwards and a whole raft of others) or boys (that one’s you, Mark Foley), had become so painful to watch. I love that Jenny basically said, “I’m going to the beach house, and you need to man up and take your licks on your own. Peace out!” I saw a parody of a Facebook page that cracked me up: it said “Mark Sanford has added ‘Buenos Aires, Argentina’ to his ‘Places I’ve Been’ application,” followed by, “Jenny Sanford has added ‘Not Your F****** Press Conference, Mark’ to her ‘Places I’ve Been’ application.” (See it here at http://www.slate.com/id/2221581/. Ha! If Jenny Sanford ever runs for office, I am working for her campaign, and I’m not even a Republican. That girl’s got spunk. (And personally I think she's the one who sent the incriminating emails to the newspaper, since they were forwarded from Sanford's private account. She went all Thelma-and-Louise-driving-off-a-cliff on him: if we are going down, it will be in a blaze of glory and press coverage, mo'fo'.)

And to end, it is about 70 degrees here today. In the dead of winter. And people are actually walking around in scarves and mittens. Every time I come here, my Cape Town friends warn me that “it’s freezing! It’s bitterly cold! You must bring warm clothes!” And I think, hmmm, I seem to recall Cape Town winters as being quite mild, but maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. Maybe they’re worse than I remember and it’s just that they pale in comparison to Boston winters, where it actually hurts your skin to go outside. And then I get here and no, it is as mild as I recall. It’s like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, in which I am Charlie Brown and either my memory or my local friends’ deeply skewed sense of “bitterly cold” is Lucy. Here’s how Cape Town looks today:




And here's how Boston looked as recently as April:


Exactly.