Thought for the Day

Friday 14^th March

Good morning. We long for the killing to stop. We long for a ceasefire in Ukraine and so many other parts of the world; for the guns and drones to fall silent. At least a pause so that the soldiers can take a break and mothers breathe a temporary sigh of relief. But that is not of course true peace. We want something beyond that, something  more substantial and long lasting.

In the Hebrew scriptures the prophets first of all  warned people against a false peace, one based on illusion,  oppression and injustice. Or as an enemy of the Roman Empire once  put it, as quoted by Tacitus ‘They make a desert and call it peace’. That is why Shalom, the great Hebrew word for peace means much more than the absence of violence. Martin Luther King got the meaning just right when he wrote to some white pastors who had criticised him for stirring up trouble. ‘Peace is not the absence of tension but the presence of justice’. That is the biblical idea of peace.

But there is also another kind of peace which we hanker after-peace within ourselves. Both Swedish and Welsh, just to mention two languages, have different words for the two different kinds of peace,  one to denote the absence of violence, the other an inner peace. It was this second form of peace to which Christ was referring when shortly before his death he told his followers ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid’ (John 14.27)

My question though is how this inner peace relates to the kind of peace we want for the world. If you are deeply involved in a conflict say as a mother who has a child in the front line, how can you have that kind of peace? Because you love them you inevitably  worry about their safety. Indeed anyone who cares will worry about the loss of young life. The alternative is to make oneself as stone, impervious to all feeling. So this peace of Christ does not mean we stop having emotions. What it does  mean is that our lives are rooted more deeply in something beyond ourselves, for Christians, rooted in God, the   ground of our being. Perhaps this peace is like a great stake planted in the ground that holds us firm even as our feelings are blown about by events. And with this stake in the ground we are better able to hold steady as peace makers whether at home, in the community or in world affairs.

Good morning. I first got to know Desmond Tutu when I was Dean of King’s College, London and he came to give a lecture. He told us about his time there as a student: how he liked nothing better than to go out into the Street, find a policeman, and walk round him, simply enjoying the fact that he was in a free country and the police were not enemies. Archbishop Tutu’s mother was a cleaner and the young Desmond was first attracted to the Christian faith by seeing the great Father Trevor Huddleston lift his hat to her every time he passed. This led to the Christian faith becoming the mainspring of his life, and prayer being absolutely fundamental to it. He insisted on beginning every day with a good period of meditation and public prayer before any gathering was entirely natural to him. It was this spiritual life that lay behind his outspoken bravery during the apartheid years when he became the voice of the voiceless in the townships. It was also shown in acts of personal courage. In 1985 a black man accused of being an informer had his car burnt by a mob who were about to throw him on it, as they said, to make a funeral pyre. Desmond Tutu dragged the man away against the howls of those who wanted him killed. But his Christian faith not only led him to condemn injustice wherever it occurred but also taught him to love his enemies. As he said “Enemies are always friends waiting to be made.” And this points to his other great achievement, chairing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid-a hugely ambitious, painful process of trying to tell the truth of what happened and work through to new better set of relationships. I will remember his bravery, desire for reconciliation, his deep spirituality, his personal courtesy to everyone and of course his humour. I have seen him literally roll around the floor with laughter, and he captivated every audience with his smile and humour, often with a sharp political thrust. As he used to joke: “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.” A favourite personal memory is spending an evening in his house in Soweto at the height of Apartheid-him drinking rum and coca cola, his standard drink- watching a satirical TV series. One scene showed the Second Coming-which turned out to be of Desmond Tutu himself. I imagine him still laughing now as he is gathered into that heavenly embrace. At a time when it is so easy to be depressed by human behaviour he was someone who showed us another possibility, a different model of what it is to be a human being.