WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT: In your acceptance
address to the Nobel Prize Committee in 1984, you began by
speaking about the “deepening crisis in South
Africa”—the discrimination, evictions, brutality,
and daily murder faced by blacks in your country—which you
called “apartheid's 'final solution.'” As a
religious leader in that time of widespread violence, how were
you able to sustain your people's faith in the possibility of
freedom and justice?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: You probably need a modicum
of suffering to help you realize what it means to belong to the
Church. I'm not certain that Christianity flourishes properly
where people are comfortable. It is a faith ultimately
for sufferers. For example, the story of the fiery furnace in
Daniel, Chapter 3, is a nice story. But for people who are
having a rough time, it's more than that. You preach to them,
“Now look, this injustice and oppression are like being
thrown into the fiery furnace. The king threw three guys into
the furnace and then went to find out what had happened to them.
And he counted, 'One, two, three . . . and there was a
fourth!'” We used to say to our people, “God is not
over there; God is here. The God we worship is
not a God who gives you good advice from a safe distance. God
knows your suffering, and God is in this fiery furnace with
us.” So a lot of the Scripture came alive at that time.
God said to Moses, “I have heard. I have seen. I know. I
will come down.” And I would say, “Don't think that
our God is deaf. God has heard our cry in this awful country.
God is not blind. God knows what's happening to us, and just as
it occurred then, God will come down and one day lead us out of
this bondage.”
WIE: I was very moved by an invocation you
recently gave in which you prayed, “God, help us wipe the
tears from your eyes.” In a world that continues to be
filled with so much anguish and conflict, we often pray to God
to help us ease our suffering. Yet you were asking God to help
us ease His. How do we “wipe the tears from God's
eyes”?
DESMOND TUTU: The images that we have of God are odd
because God—this omnipotent one—is actually weak. As
a parent I understand this. You watch your child going wrong and
there's not very much you can do to stop them. You have tried to
teach them what is right, but now it is their life and they are
mucking it up. There are many moments when you cry for your
child, and that's exactly what happens with God. All of us are
God's children.
I frequently say, I'm so glad I'm not God! Can you imagine
having to say, “Bin Laden is my child. Saddam Hussein is
my child. George Bush is my child.” Oh! All of
them, including me. Can you imagine what God must have felt
watching the Holocaust? Watching Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Watching Rwanda? Can you imagine God watching Darfur? Imagine
God watching Iraq and saying, “These are my children here,
and they are killing my other children. And I can't do anything
because I have said to them, 'I give you the space to be you and
that space enables you to make choices. And I can't stop you
when you make the wrong choices. All I can do is sit here and
cry.'” And God cries until God sees beautiful people who
care, even if they may not do earth-shattering things.
There is a fantastic story of a so-called colored woman who
was driven from her home and ostracized by her family because
she had HIV/AIDS. She came to live in a home for people who
suffered from the disease, and there were white men there who
would help her because she couldn't do anything herself. She was
all skin and bones. They would carry her like a baby and wash
her, bathe her, feed her. Then they would put her in front of a
television set and hold her. And this was during the apartheid
years. I visited this home and said, “What an incredible
lesson in loving and compassion and caring.” It was
transfiguring something ugly, letting something beautiful come
from a death-making disease. When God sees that, a smile breaks
forth on God's face and God smiles through the tears. It's like
when the sun shines through the rain. The world may never know
about these little transfigurations, but these little acts of
love are potent. They are moving our universe so that
it will become the kind of place God wants it to be. And so,
yes, you wipe the tears from God's eyes. And God smiles.
Archbishop Tutu was interviewed at the Quest for Global
Healing Conference in Bali, December 2004.