MISSION IN SOCIETY
Vol. XVIII x No. 4
APRIL-MAY 2006
The God of our every day events
In these times that are, after all, the same as always, we should not trust any apocalyptic vision. For sure, we must commit ourselves to the full so that bad guys like Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush may not impose their different and differently sick worldviews on us. But we must also be able to see, to recognize our God, the God of Jesus, who visits us in our every day events.
By Renato Kizito Sesana
Comboni Missionary
It is said that we live in difficult times. Some even say that we are living the last times, and that a gigantic struggle between good and evil is taking place. Naturally they side with the good and blessed are they for having such clear ideas. Among those blessed people are the leaders of the so-called Christian Zionism.
It often happens to me when I rise very early in the morning – in Kenya we can receive some American TV channels free of charge – that I hear peculiar people like Tom DeLay and Pat Robertson, who was even a presidential candidate for the Republican Party, emphatically declaim their contentions. In short, they sustain that all the actions of the government of Israel are approved by God, that when Israel will be re-constituted, the end of times will come and, therefore, Christians must back Israel in order to accelerate Christ’s return. As for the Palestinians, woe to them for being on the wrong side!
Well, let us not exaggerate; not really all Israel’s actions should be approved. For, according to them, the Katrina hurricane in New Orleans was God’s punishment on the USA for encouraging Ariel Sharon to leave Gaza… Nobody is more dangerous than those who are certain of knowing God’s mind. In the meantime, I put in order my papers and look through the window at Kivuli’s courtyard and the big dormitory where the children are lost in their happy sleep, their belly full, protected as they are and loved, and I ask myself: “But really that guy who speaks on television and I believe in the same Jesus?”
Lilian’s confusion
Lilian comes to my mind. She was a little girl from Lusaka, aged six or seven at the beginning of the eighties. I was told a few days ago that she had been dead for some years because of AIDS. I remember her with her little pink dress, her kinky hair tied in two huge pompoms and barefooted.
I had gone to visit the family of a young man who wanted to join Koinonia. Lilian had come to open the door of the extremely modest house there where the city turns into a countryside. She had stared at me with her big eyes. My appearance had obviously evoked in her an image from the catechism book, and without heeding to my request to see her mother, she had run to the back of the house where her mother was setting the fire under the corn gruel pot. With a controlled voice but with a very high note of alarm, she had said: “Mama, ndi nthawi yotsiriza. Mulungu a mphamvu zones ali kulowa m’nyumba yathu!” I will never forget it because it means: “Mom, these are the days of the end (of the world), God Almighty is entering our house!” Poor Lilian! For you they were really difficult times, of hardened hearts that let you die because the pharmaceutical companies did not want to forego the sacred principle of profit! Profit always, profit everywhere!
I believe that in these times that are, after all, the same as always, we should not trust any apocalyptic vision. For sure, we must commit ourselves to the full so that bad guys like Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush may not impose their different and differently sick worldviews on us. But we must also be able to see, to recognize our God, the God of Jesus, who visits us in our every day events. Lilian had slightly exaggerated in seeing in me Mulungu a mphamvu zones, but she had the right attitude. We must recognize the great ideals and build them in flesh and blood, otherwise they are ghosts, ways of escaping from reality, inconclusive pietism.
Derik, Haring and the girl
Derik of Kivuli was 13, more or less, when he died in September 2004, choked by an epilepsy crisis, in the corner where he had taken refuge. He was strong for his age and he almost never spoke. He had arrived at Kivuli three years before, with a deep cut on his head, sign of a blow given by his stepmother.
Every time I went back to Kivuli, he would encircle me in a strong embrace that could last even some minutes, in silence. His arms around my waist, his head reclining on my chest, as if to listen to my heartbeat, he would stand like this without letting me go. I have already worked out my strategy: when it will be my turn to appear in front of God, the Judge, I will ask for Derik, and I want to see if they will be able to separate me from him.
Bernard Haring, the moral theologian of the second half of the last century, has turned upside down the Christian way of speaking about love. I met him one winter evening in the cold and badly-lit guest room of a convent in Rome. When he came to know where I was coming from, he asked me about one of his students who had become a professor of theology in Lusaka seminary. “But do students love him? For, if he taught theology without communicating and making love grow, his teaching would be useless!” As soon as I came out of that short encounter, I realized that I had met not only a great theologian who wrote about justice and peace, but a saint, a person who, with the commitment of a lifetime, had trained himself to think only in terms of love, witnessing the Gospel in absolute transparency. And I have understood how, around the great saints, so many legends have blossomed: they are born out of the almost impossible task of making people comprehend how this person has touched you in the depth of your being, and so you make up a story that make all that understandable.
There is, at Kibera, a group of boys and girls who live in indescribable inhuman situations. I committed myself with them to an educational project and it never ends to surprise me how clean and simple their dreams are and how eager they are for justice, how committed they are to change the world. To meet them is always a challenge.
There is a girl who drives me crazy, doesn’t take anything for granted, every time puts everything back into question, nothing is ever done passably well for her. Some time ago, we were talking about the possibility of starting a street newspaper at Kibera, that may help people to make community and to share their problems. Opinions were controversial, mostly negative. There is no money, there is no professionalism, there is no time and will when you have to fight all day just to fill the stomach…
Esther was just looking around, then with great calm said: “Guys, what is missing is the will to be human beings. As for myself, I go ahead with this thing!” We were seated on the grass outside the Shalom House. The others stayed there, staring at the tip of their shoes, then one said: “You are right!” and from then on nobody has ever given up.
The Gospel of the little ones
What is the connection between these people and the things I was talking about? Perhaps what I wanted to say is that the Lord only whispers the great things to us. That He visits us on tiptoes. It is His style. Like the light breeze that speaks to Elijah; the salt dissolved in the food, the leaven hidden in the dough. If He visited us with the fullness of His light, He would blind us. We must instead recognize Him in the fragments of our daily life. Perhaps I wanted also to say that the important commitments that give taste, color and sense to life, are growing slowly; they seem unconnected episodes, but then, with time, one realizes that there is a warp that holds everything together.
Or that the commitment to build a better world has also moments of tenderness that give one strength and light for months and years. The stench of Kibera’s sewage, the desperate tears of the mothers who put down their children of few years into the ground, the rotten wounds of the Nuba soldiers, the rebellion in the eyes of an adolescent who is forced to leave the books and to go to work because his family is too poor to keep him in school – all these things you can bear because Derik has embraced you in that way. It is the small people who make you understand that it is worthwhile to commit yourself for the great changes. This, at least, is true for me. If I had to loosen the connection between the Gospel, the commitment for justice and peace and the persons of the little ones, I would feel lost and useless. In the little ones, whether in age or spirit, there is a special beauty. This is the beauty of which Nagib Mahfut has written about: “It is a jump of the heart that wounds, a whiff of life that spreads on the soul, an ethereal sense of loss in which the spirit sails to embrace the skies.”
Christian apocalyptics, contrary to those of Christian Zionism, do not teach us to defeat the enemy by power of weapons, but tell us to keep our eyes open and our hearts ready to recognize, even in the depth of crisis, the signs of the beginning of a new world. Morning is near. Easter is here, friends. The One who was defeated, nailed on the cross in the place of infamy, outside the doors of the city, is now the Risen Lord. His tunic is still soaked in blood, His feet bare, His wounds open. But He smiles at us and beckons us to follow Him. <WM
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