Faith That Gets Under the Skin

A Year of Last Days – Reflections in an Anabaptist Direction

The last day of April 2010 and just three days since Freedom Day. This month saw more outpourings of racial invective in South Africa than any other month of our sixteen year democracy. Eugene Terreblanche’s murder, followed by a controversial Whites Only funeral, have re-opened wounds that are not yet healed for many South Africans. Vitriolic blog entries at the feet of on-line newspaper articles, callous cartoons, the public outcry among black intelligentsia at the suggestion that Terreblance’s murder can be compared to Chris Hani’s assassination, and distasteful jokes have rubbed salt into South Africa’s still wounded racial consciousness.

In contrast, as part of its Thirty Year Celebrations this April, the Pietermaritzburg Association for Christian Social Awareness and Action, PACSA, organised Pietermaritzburg’s only public viewing of the movie Skin, the beautifully reconstructed true story of Sandra Laing, a black child born to white parents in the late 1960s in the rural Eastern Transvaal. This anniversary screening was well attended by Christians of all denominations and ethnic backgrounds who share PACSA’s commitment to justice and peace. I met a handful of people I knew over drinks and snacks before the show started, friends old and new, black and white. When we were all seated we were welcomed and invited not just to be entertained by the film, but to stay on afterwards to “process” anything that the film might “raise” for us.

Although a biography the film Skin portrays very hauntingly South Africa’s demonic racial experiment and the devastating consequences it unleashed in relationships and in the deepest beings of everyone caught up in its machinations. The film is both exceptionally demanding and lovely, perhaps more so for this PACSA audience because of our thirty year involvement and commitment to ending discrimination in South Africa. The movie’s portrayal of a forced removal which brought Sandra to her most painful turning point brought back my own memories of the forced removals which were indeed my own turning point in relation to Black South Africans. As an undergraduate in 1984 I visited two “Black Spot” communities awaiting forced removal and two communities which had suffered removal, with Peter Kerchhoff the founder of PACSA. We heard firsthand the trauma of the mayor of Roosboom whose people had lost their homes, their freehold land and their livelihoods in the forced removals to Ezakheni and Ekuvukeni just a year or so earlier.

During the screening of Skin there were three power cuts, which, besides being unsettling reminders of South Africa’s unfolding energy crisis, added to the emotional demands made by the film. It was as if the view through a window onto our recent past in South Africa was just too much to handle in one glimpse. As if the window had to be blacked out again and again as we struggled to return to such a painful South African legacy to make our peace with ourselves and one another. Not surprisingly, when the film ended, while the credits showed pictures of the real Laing family and alluded to the ongoing journey today of the real Sandra Laing, the audience stood awkwardly and prematurely and began to make its way out, sombrely crowding the EXIT door. I waited deliberately to see if anyone would be staying for the discussion and then joined the tail end of the departing crowd, not without my own tears.

Our invitation to stay and “process” our grief had perhaps been sprung on us inappropriately, but nevertheless the audience’s unanimous vote for the EXIT rather than staying to share or even just hear the pain of unburdened grief, made me realise what a long way there still is to go before South Africans’ wounds from racial hatred and xenophobia will truly be healed. It seems like such a long journey, even for this audience with its Christian association and Christian points of reference. My tears expressed a mix of emotion. Partly for memories of my own complicity in the painful story that is every South African’s story, and partly the result of a strange and sudden compassion I felt for this grieving yet evading “congregation”. They were like sheep scattering in the centrifugal instinct of trauma, rather than turning for help to one another, or to the voice of the only One who can bring about healing for such deep wounds.

The Church in South Africa has still to make this radical journey of turning to Jesus, the wounded Healer, for his decisive and transformative reconciliation and healing. Christians in this part of the Kingdom still have to embrace a faith that gets under the skin, that painful New Testament faith of metanoia that Peter encountered at the threshold of Cornelius’ door in Acts 10, and yet again when Peter was rebuked for racism by Paul at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, a faith that faces the need for transformed attitudes to and relationships with people of a different race or nationality, a faith willingly embracing the kind of worship and fellowship that truly reflects Jesus’ destruction of all barriers between all peoples, a faith that allows the heart’s deepest hostilities to be conquered by Jesus’ love, a faith that reaches out with hospitality to the other of whichever ethnicity or gender or culture or nationality, a faith that enters the pain and the much deeper joy of true communion with Jesus in the mystery of his diverse body, the Church.

How do South African Christians begin to journey into this faith that gets under the skin? Our almost homogenously white and black and coloured and Indian local churches show that we have yet to truly receive this radical kind of faith. Firstly we need to recognise that we are wounded and still estranged from those whom we have wounded, that we are all in need of Jesus’ healing, transforming love. This free confession is a decisive turning away from the EXIT door syndrome to admitting together, our unique South African brokenness. Second, we need to remember that it is not we who begin the healing journey of faith, but Jesus who has made our beginning for us. Our healing and reconciliation in South Africa is his free gift. Like Peter, South African Christians dare not turn a deaf ear to the Holy Spirit who is leading us to step over the threshold of otherness, cultural estrangement, historical conflicts, ethnic diversity and gender difference. We need to face the painful threshold that Jesus is opening to all South Africans and step over it, to receive a new faith from Him who reconciles all things and heals all wounds.

When we follow the Spirit’s lead and cross this threshold we will receive the gift of a new and particularly South African faith for our unique challenge, faith that we will be received, faith that we will have Christ’s love to give, faith to forgive and be forgiven, faith to make amends, to effect restitution for so many years of prejudice, so that the fellowship that flows out of our true forgiveness by those whom we have wounded will become South Africa’s real Freedom Day. Only in this new freedom that is the fruit of Christ’s love will South African Christians create a new way to worship together, to be together in fellowship, to grow together in communion and to express the oneness we share in Jesus, unity out of such different cultures and languages, and out of our shared painful history.

Jesus is standing hidden to us yet audibly knocking at our door, inviting us to feast in freedom and fullness of joy. South African Christians’ dare not leave him standing there.