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For many years I taught a course at Year Here about the inner lives of great social leaders. I was curious, both for myself and for the amazing young people in that organisation, about why our best-intentioned efforts to address injustice so often fail to make much impact. It was obvious that many of us in the social-change sector were operating like zombies chasing treasure in a broken system. We were too busy to think clearly, unaware that we were unaware, anxious that we were anxious. We wanted to make a difference but we were often motivated by personal hang-ups, ambition, emotion or fear. And no wonder. It is confusing to be living in a time of massive institutional failures and to find ourselves collectively creating results that almost nobody wants. And it is overwhelming to be blasted every day by news of yet more tragedies and crises, policies and solutions. It leaves our heads spinning. The young people at Year Here were natural do-ers, the sort to get stuck in and try to sort the mess out. I found it a huge privilege to teach them, but I also noticed that they carried enormous expectations that they should be active all the time - raising money, developing apps, starting enterprises, fire fighting, strategising and so on. I saw it as my job to help them slow down and check whether they were frantically doing more of what already wasn’t working. And to help them step back and ask themselves if they were in a strong personal and spiritual state to be agents for the kind of change they wanted to see in the world. We looked to many great social leaders of the past for guidance, people who had the clarity of mind to see what needed to be done, as well as the courage and leadership to do it. And we often talked often about Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the world’s great peace-builders. In his work leading South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s, Tutu applied principles of restorative rather than retributive justice to healing a post-Apartheid nation. Restorative justice is about acknowledging and repairing harm done to victims, and preventing its continuation, by identifying shared values between the oppressors and the oppressed. It’s a very different approach to the kind of retributive justice we are currently seeing in Israel-Palestine, where retaliatory punishments are imposed, based on ideas such as the Islamic concept of ‘qisas’ and the Judao-Christian concept of ‘eye for an eye’. I don’t want to wade in about what is and isn’t justified in today’s conflict, not least because I don’t think ideas of justification are helpful. I only want to us to remember that different forms justice and peace-making exist, and look to Desmond Tutu’s work in South Africa as an illuminating example of that.
What interests me most is how Tutu supported himself to be able to see clearly and act wisely in the face of so much hate and hurt. I want to know how he nourished his spirit so that his actions could be so healing. In the foreword to peacemaker Scilla Elworthy’s superb book Pioneering The Possible, Tutu wrote: The world is in crisis. It needs people who have the skill to combine inner power with outer action. Inner power comes from self mastery, observing and controlling the ego, and deepening integrity through a regular practice of reflection or meditation. This generates not only the ability to transform conflicts, listen to others, communicate clearly and develop trust, but also the creative innovation and energy to resolve local and global problems.
So what was his own “regular practice of reflection and mediation"?” In God Has a Dream, he wrote: I am deeply thankful for those moments in the early morning when I try to be quiet, to sit in the presence of the gentle and compassionate and unruffled One to try to share in or be given some of that divine serenity…People often ask about the source of my joy and I can honestly say that it comes from my spiritual life – and specifically from these times of stillness. They are an indispensable part of my day regardless of what else I might face.
I’ve chosen to share a prayer with you today written by Tutu and his daughter Mpho, a remarkable priest and activist in her own right. It honours the complexity of peace-building and speaks to all the groundwork that has to happen before conversations about reconciliation can even begin. It invites us to acknowledge our resistance to forgiveness and to open our hearts to becoming better agents of peace.
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