HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!
Ellie
HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
The Passing of Greatness
On December 9, 2013, 65,000 people braved strong rains to gather in the Olympic Soccer Field in South Africa to pay tribute to a man named Nelson Mandela. They were joined by over one hundred heads of state from around the world, the largest number ever to attend a funeral service for a king, a president, a prime minister or a pope. The rain was not just endured, it was treated as an omen of blessing. My cousin, Bernard Spong, a long time battler against Apartheid in that land from his position as the executive head of the Congregational Churches of South Africa, has told me that rain at a wedding or a funeral is regarded in Africa as a sign of divine favor. The people, these political leaders, and perhaps even the rain, came to pay tribute to a man who had spent 27 years of his adult life in prison, but who had discovered in the words of St. Paul that, “God works in all things for good.” This man expanded the potential of what it means to be human in ways that most people can still hardly imagine. On this first day of a New Year in human history, it seems fitting that I pause to pay tribute to this person who probably did more to alter the affairs of this world in his lifetime than anyone else who died in the year 2013.
Nelson Mandela was born in 1918 in the village of Mvezo and raised in the village of Qunu, where he was just buried. He was a member of the Xhosa tribe and his given name was Rolihlabia, which literally means “troublemaker.” From the perspective of the ruling class of South Africa’s Dutch descendants, known as the Afrikaans, he would more than live up to his name. His father was a chief of the Thembu people, who are a subdivision of the Xhosa nation. At his birth, this area was considered part of the Transkei, a former British protectorate in the South. His father had been stripped of his chieftainship by the British for the “crime of insubordination.” This family was, however, proud of its roots and its heritage. They were conditioned never to accept the definition of inferiority that their oppressors sought to impose on them. They believed that humanity had dignity and they understood that “black is beautiful” long before that phrase was coined by the civil rights movement. Nelson Mandela, endowed with this noble heritage, was also an heir to his family’s unwillingness to be subordinate to anyone. No prison and no amount of time could ever destroy that definition of his being.
The history of his nation on the southern-most part of the continent of Africa was a troubled one, bound up as it was with the colonial search for wealth. Both the Dutch and the English vied for control of South Africa’s gold and diamonds. The Boer Wars (1880-1881 and 1899-1902), which pitted the British against the Dutch settlers, were fought three to four decades before Mandela’s birth. Those wars resulted in a British victory that produced in the Afrikaans population a seething resentment that was not relieved until after World War II when the Dutch population finally came to power politically and instituted the policy of Apartheid, which began the systematic subjugation of black people. Natives of Africa lost their citizenship and were relocated to assigned “territories” or “homelands,” which the ruling Dutch party had carved out of those areas of the nation that the white community did not want. The land in the “territories” was so poor that poverty for black people was assured and survival was at risk. A forced separation of the blacks from the whites became law. Black people were not allowed in white areas after sundown. The police force in this police state had no black officers. At all times, black people had to carry identification passes; and to be without a pass was a sure way to jail. Very few black people were allowed passports to enable them to leave the country. Black children were not to be educated except to the level necessary for them to do menial tasks, which was thought by the white population to be all that they were capable of achieving. Nelson Mandela came to maturity in that kind of world.
Given his ability and royal background, Mandela became a lawyer, although at that time he still had no law degree. He then identified himself with the resistance movement and began to live on the edges of what in that land was deemed to be “legal.” When there is no legal way to redress grievances, people will inevitably employ illegal means to guarantee their survival. Mandela joined the African National Congress. He participated in guerilla activities against his government. Ultimately he was arrested and served a prison term in a Johannesburg jail. When released, he returned to the work of the ANC and was arrested again, this time on charges of sabotage and treason, both capital crimes. In the subsequent trial the South African government asked for the death penalty. By this time, the impressive and articulate Mandela had been chosen by the ANC to be the face of the black resistance movement and great national attention was focused on his trial. The General Assembly of the United Nations even passed an almost unanimous resolution calling on the South African government to spare his life. It was successful as one of the defendants was released and the other four, including Mandela, were sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island, a maximum security prison. Nelson Mandela was 44 years old when he entered this prison. He was 71 when he was released. In that time he went from being an inmate to negotiating the transfer of power in South Africa from the white minority to the black majority. This was accomplished without civil war and Mandela became the first elected black president. This peaceful transfer of political power was unprecedented in World history. Mandela became a universally admired human being, honored in his life and in his death by the whole world. How did this miracle happen? Nelson Mandela had out-loved and out-lived his enemies. I do not mean that he out-lived them in years, though he did that too, but he out-lived them in the quality of his life and in the essence of his humanity.
I watched South Africa’s struggle from the vantage point of one engaged in America struggle over segregation, our version of Apartheid. Transition times in national life are never easy. I was serving a church in Lynchburg, Virginia, when Mandela was sentenced to life in prison. Our segregation battle was fierce in the South. The pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg was one Jerry Falwell, who started what today is known as Liberty Baptist University as a segregation academy. Falwell publicly referred to Nelson Mandela as a “communist” and stated that the Apartheid government of South Africa was the only thing keeping all of Africa from becoming a communist continent. In those days, the charge of communism was leveled at any force which threatened the status quo of white power.
In 1976, as a new bishop, I made my first trip to South Africa. Apartheid was in full force. I stood on the boundary between Soweto, the black city, and Johannesburg, the white city, and watched the flood of black workers come into the city when morning broke and then retreat into Soweto when evening began to fall. About three weeks before I had arrived, riots in Soweto had been put down with massive police force, resulting in the killing of several hundred, mostly teenage black young people, whose bodies were hurled unceremoniously onto flat bed trucks by the white police and taken to the morgue, where grieving parents came in search of their deceased children, The voice of Soweto, interpreting the riots to the world, was the Dean of St. Mary’s Cathedral, a man named Desmond Tutu. While in Johannesburg on that occasion, I joined with eight other Anglican bishops to consecrate Desmond Tutu to be the bishop of Lesotho, one of the “black territories.” At the meetings I attended, held in a conference center in Rosettenville, a suburb of Johannesburg, blacks and whites roomed together in violation of the Apartheid laws. It was my first taste of civil disobedience. Desmond and I became close friends and we were able on three occasions to get him out of South Africa and into the Diocese of Newark to alleviate the pressure under which he lived, as his career and influence grew. He later became the Bishop of Johannesburg and eventually the Primate and Archbishop of Cape Town. On this visit I also met with many in the resistance movement and even talked with some under house arrest on the lawn outside their homes. When Desmond’s passport was taken away and he could no longer travel, I personally went to the South African Embassy in Washington to register my protest and to hear them speak of Desmond with derision.
In 2007 I returned to South Africa do a series of lectures at universities in Pretoria and Johannesburg. Apartheid was now dead, but its effects lingered. By this time, Nelson Mandela had served his term as president, declining to run for a second. Thabo Mbeke had become the second black president of South Africa. On this occasion, we toured the new government buildings and were taken by my cousin Bernard to the place where Mandela had served time in the Johannesburg prison, now a museum. We read the new South African Constitution which banned discrimination on every basis: race, creed, gender and sexual orientation. We saw the Nelson Mandela Bridge. We ate with black friends in restaurants that had once been closed to people of color. We saw the effects of Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, designed to make forgiveness, not vengeance, the way to remove the evil of the past. We saw how this great man, who had moderated the bitterness of Apartheid in the black population and had reassured the white population that was living in fear of revenge. He made a united South Africa possible. These were the gifts of Nelson Mandela to his nation and to the world. He was one of those people who showed the world what it means to transcend the survival fears rooted in our biology and to live out a new understanding of humanity based on wholeness, forgiveness and the common good. Such lives are rare, but surely Nelson Mandela was one of them.
A child looking at a stained glass window of a saint in a dark church once noted that a saint must be a figure through whom the light enters the world. Given that definition, I nominate Nelson Mandela for sainthood.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Brian McDaniel, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
I was brought up Pentecostal. Of course, my church believes in "speaking in tongues." Of course, I hear that an interpreter must be present. Please tell me your thoughts on your "interpretation" of what the "holy spirit" means to you. My thoughts of the holy spirit means the spirit of humanity and anything that takes away that "holy" spirit of life, no matter what that life is to me is considered not "god-infused."
Answer:
Dear Brian,
I wish doing theology in the public arena was as easy as you suggest. You want me to interpret what you call the Holy Spirit in a brief question and answer format. You have stated your own conclusion, formed quite obviously out of both your early Pentecostal experience and your later revision of and perhaps even revulsion at that earlier concept. You have stated a human limit on the Holy Spirit. It is for you "The Spirit of Humanity" and that anything that takes away or diminishes that humanity is not to be considered "God-infused," though I get the idea that you actively think such a removal would be demonic. You assume definitions of God, which are not spoken, so that I can only surmise what they are. You appear ready to defend your conclusion and you ask me to state my opinion so that it might contend with yours. The subject of the Holy Spirit or even what you call the human spirit does not lend itself to the debate format.
Let me pose some questions for your consideration: Is there a difference between the human and the divine? Or is the divine simply the depth dimension of the human, something into which the human enters at the fullness of humanity? Does the presence of the Holy Spirit alter or challenge the human spirit? Do our convictions about God make us more religious or more holy, even more human?
The primary meaning of Spirit, or Holy Spirit, in the Bible is life-giver. In the Christian creeds, we refer to the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost as “The Lord and Giver of life.” The Fourth Gospel spells out the purpose of Jesus as being that of giving to all people the gift of abundant life. So I don’t oppose human spirit with holy spirit, but I see them as two aspects of the same thing. This means that when a person is God-infused, they are simply more deeply and fully human.
I hope this brief analysis will move the discussion forward for you.
John Shelby Spong
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full of love, light and delight.
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