Desmond Tutu is convinced that God has a great sense of humor.
He said so in his talk last September in McKenna Hall, the Center
for Continuing Education. But the Nobel Peace Prize winner from
South Africa is pretty funny himself. Consider this bit of national
self-deprecation:
"Have you heard about the spaceship South Africa plans to launch
to land on the sun? People said, 'You'll burn up long before it
gets close.' You think we are stupid? We're going to launch it
at night.'"
Tutu was at Notre Dame to give the keynote address at an international
conference on peace-building sponsored by the Joan B. Kroc Institute
for International Peace Studies. I can only speak for myself,
but I suspect that everyone packed into the U.N. General Assembly-style
McKenna Hall auditorium that night -- and the overflow watching
a closed-circuit feed in two other rooms -- came away feeling
as I did. More optimistic about the future of the human race than
I had been in months. Like it must have felt to be around Gandhi.
I've found over the years that the smartest, most accomplished
people often appear relaxed, even playful when talking to large
groups of strangers. So it was with this gentle dark man in the
clerical collar with the ready grin and bright eyes.
Early on the Anglican archbishop said it warmed the cockles
of his heart ("I don't know what cockles are, but they were warmed")
thinking of the college students whose protests in the 1980s convinced
institutions to divest themselves of investment in companies that
did business with South Africa during the apartheid era.
"We are free today because of you," he said.
I had to wonder if he realized that his audience was largely
made up of current students. They were probably watching Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles about the time Nelson Mandela was released
in 1990 after 26 years in prison.
In any case, he asked the audience to give itself a round of
applause. And it did, in polite fashion. Which was not to his
satisfaction.
He said we were very nice people but that he had a magic wand
here that would transform us from shy, reserved Americans into
boisterous fellow South Africans. A wave of the invisible wand,
and, presto, the applause resumed in more raucous fashion with
cheering.
"Thank you. I wave it again and you return to normal."
He then confided that one time during a talk, he made a similar
request, asking, "How about giving God a standing ovation?" and
afterward, without thinking, he said, "Thank you."
That great sense of humor Tutu believes God to possess might
be more accurately termed a sense of irony. He said there was
no other explanation for why God would choose to make South Africa
the model for peaceful conflict resolution when the country was
so lacking in virtue for so much of its history. As he noted,
many predicted that with the end of apartheid in 1991 a bloodbath
would ensue as the oppressed black majority took its revenge on
the ruling whites. "They had every reason to want to pay back
in the same coin." Instead, black South Africans realized "that
their own humanity was tied up in the humanity of the other,"
he said.
At the beginning of his talk, I wondered briefly if this white-haired
71-year-old was going to last very long at the microphone. Long
pauses stretched between his words, as if he were struggling to
put his thoughts in order. But as he described the process of
peaceful reconciliation post-apartheid, the smile widened, his
eyes gleamed, and the audience hung on his every hopeful word.
He told us restorative justice was "more about healing than
about punishment." And, "Even the worst perpetrator remains a
child of God with the capacity to change." And, "True peace and
security will never come from the barrel of a gun, no matter how
high the fire power."
"Lord, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in
thee," he later prayed, quoting Saint Augustine. "We are fundamentally
good; the aberration is the bad. Not just some [are good] -- all
. . . all . . . Arabs, Jews, gays, lesbians . . . "At this point
he appeared to be on the verge of tears. "All . . . all . . .
all are meant to be held in this incredible embrace of the one
who will never let us go."
Nowhere can they ever say a problem is intractable, Desmond
Tutu said, because God says, "Look what happened in South Africa.
Their nightmare ended. Your nightmare will end too."
I believed him.
