by: Fr Michael Lapsley SSM, Director of the Institute for Healing of Memories

Good day, friends. It is an honor to have been invited to give the Havel lecture for 2012. I am humbled to follow in the footsteps of the distinguished individuals who have preceded me, particularly the first lecturer for whom the series is named, Václav Havel. I thank the organizing committee for inviting me. In my address I propose to explore what it means to be a courageous citizen. Václav Havel was one such person—a brave writer and intellectual who endured much hardship and eventually became a great statesman.

Some years ago, I was invited to be a visiting professor in democracy at what was then called the New School for Social Research in New York. As many of you will know, the graduate faculty of the New School was founded by Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazi regime. The eminent political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, was one of them. The fact that these distinguished individuals banded together for this critical intellectual enterprise was itself an act of courageous citizenship undertaken by this band of exiles in their newly adopted land.

So years later the invitation that was extended to me by the New School was in the tradition of its founders and, in a sense, was a recognition of the importance to the whole human family of the transformation we were attempting to bring about in a newly democratic South Africa. I hadn’t been in a university environment in many years, however, and mindful of the New School’s illustrious history, I was a bit unnerved and thought, ‘What will happen when my students discover that I’m not a real academic?’ It took them a couple of weeks to figure that out and to my relief they were delighted. I learned from that experience that someone like me who was not an academic, who has lived a life of activism, nevertheless may have something important to contribute in the market place of ideas by reflecting on my own experience. Let us hope that that continues to be true here today.

So, let me begin with my own journey. Having been born and raised in New Zealand, I was sent to South Africa in 1973 by my Anglican religious order, the Society of the Sacred Mission. I was a newly ordained priest, only 24 years old. One could say I was still ‘wet behind the ears,’ Although I had read quite a bit about apartheid, nothing could have prepared me for the stark reality of what I encountered. In retrospect, I realize that I was quite naïve.

I thought I would find three groups of people— the oppressed, the oppressors, and a third group of human beings to which I would belong. Unfortunately, I soon realized that when I went to South Africa I stopped being a human being and became a white man. In one way I was very fortunate because I was appointed a university chaplain to both white and black students, and so from this privileged position I was able to witness first hand what it meant to be on both sides of this terrible divide. Nevertheless, despite my best intentions, I was locked into an oppressor/oppressed relationship. Perhaps one example will illustrate the point. There were two elevators in the government building where I went to sort out some problems with my visa. One was marked, ‘Whites Only,’ and the other ‘Goods and Non-Whites.’ So whites were implicitly human, whereas people of color were lumped with goods. The point is that no matter which elevator I chose, I was compromised.

The fact is that in apartheid South Africa every single aspect of my life was determined by the color of my skin. Black people had to keep silent in order to survive and they bore the myriad indignities heaped upon them as best they could while in many cases anger seethed underneath. White people led their comfortable and separate lives, either blind or inured to the injustices carried out in their name.

Some, for example, may have thought that simply treating their black maids with simple human kindness was enough to absolve them of responsibility for the terrible things that were being done in their name. A white South African I know recently told the story that in all the years that her black nanny had looked after her and her brothers and sisters, they never knew her surname. When this black woman left the family’s employ after the children in the family had grown up and left home, the parents did not considered this significant enough to even inform their now-grown children and give them the opportunity to say goodbye. The nanny simply disappeared even though she had been their chief caregiver for many years. The inhumanity of apartheid was profoundly traumatizing to me and early on I decided that I faced a choice: Beat them or join them. Not for a minute did I consider joining them, so I decided to beat them, though at this early stage I couldn’t have said exactly what that meant.

The white Dutch Reformed Church was a staunch supporter of apartheid as in reality were the members of many other churches. The state and the church justified their actions by distorting scripture and putting themselves forward as the earthly manifestation of God’s will. Clergy, both black and white, encouraged black people to be docile and not worry that they were oppressed because their reward awaited them in heaven.

As a committed Christian who was also a priest what I saw as the perversion of Christianity was deeply unsettling. I was fortunate to have been brought up in New Zealand by a loving church-going family who taught me that all human beings have value and are children of God. My father was good friends with the Maori bishop, and from time to time African bishops would visit and were always welcomed with great respect. So, the first point I want to make is that, though I was young and in some ways my spiritual outlook was not fully formed, I nevertheless arrived in South Africa with a firm moral compass. For me that compass was then, and always has been, firmly rooted in my understanding of the Christian gospel. However, I am not one of those triumphalist Christians who claims a monopoly on human wisdom or an understanding of who God is. In South Africa, as in the United States, there is a kaleidoscope of religions. Through the years of struggle I learned to entrust my very life to comrades who followed other faith traditions or in some cases none. I soon came to realize that all of us, regardless of our spiritual path, drew guidance and courage from a shared moral vision that often arose from these varied traditions.

While I had received several years of theological training in Australia prior to my ordination, I had not yet undertaken university studies.

So when I arrived in South Africa I enrolled as a student at the same university where I served as chaplain. The faculty was predominantly white, and some were remarkably progressive. Under their tutelage I began to develop an intellectual understanding of what was happening in the country. In particular, I began to understand the power of language. For example, when violence was used by the state against the majority it was called “the defense of law and order,” whereas when black people resisted their oppression it was called “terrorism.” Conscription, which applied only to all white males, gradually became a hotly contested issue. Language was used to obfuscate the choices white youths faced. Most white students would say, “I have to go to the army.” They would never say, “I have decided to go to the army,” so the question of moral responsibility was taken off the table by the way they spoke of it. I began to raise this matter with these white students. That was a bit scary since in apartheid South Africa the conversation itself was illegal. I also came to understand that violence did not always arise directly from the muzzle of a gun, but was built into the very fabric of apartheid society. But hidden behind the slick language used to justify apartheid repression, there always lay the veiled threat of the power of the gun. It was a system that inverted the moral order: good was called evil, and evil was called good. Language was perverted to justify the unjustifiable.

In its reliance on terror, apartheid was immoral, and in its attempt to warp the perception of reality, it was insane. So my second point is that education may and indeed should bring with it a clarity of vision, and with that clarity comes a different kind of power. Formal education, however, is not required. Experience itself can sometimes be the best teacher. Nevertheless, the ability to think for oneself and to see clearly what is really going on despite the prevailing viewpoint, is an indispensable condition for informed, courageous citizenship. When that clarity is buttressed by a moral vision, one is then brought face to face with the possibility and indeed the choice to act. Do we dull our conscience out of fear of the consequences, whether they be for ourselves or for others? Do we rationalize our sense of right and wrong for reasons of comfort, expediency, or even out of a sense of hopelessness? Or do we step forward with conviction and make the choice to do what is necessary?

In my own case, not quite three years after I arrived in South Africa the Soweto uprising occurred. Two years previously the government had passed a law mandating that Afrikaans should be the language of instruction in all black schools. African students resented this because Afrikaans was seen as the language of the oppressor, and beyond that they were protesting their inferior education under the apartheid system.

Students in Soweto, a large township outside Johannesburg, organized a demonstration during which the police opened fire killing twenty-three people. This proved to be the match that ignited protests throughout the country, the police responded with overwhelming force, and quite literally all hell broke loose. Hundreds of people were killed, more than a thousand were injured, and countless others were arrested, killed, or tortured. The violence galvanized me into action and I began using my platform as a university chaplain to denounce the killing and torture of children. This made me an irritant to the apartheid state and it refused to renew my student visa, so I was forced to leave the country. I too was now confronted with yet another choice—I could have returned to the safety of Australia—but that was not an option I entertained even for a moment. And so, with the support of my religious community I joined a growing group of South African anti-apartheid exiles in Lesotho, a tiny country completely surrounded by South Africa. There I again became a student and a chaplain at the university.

Lesotho freed me from the shackles of apartheid and allowed me to reflect on all that had transpired during the turbulent three years I had spent in South Africa. As a result, I began to question my own faith. As a young theology student I had read not only Jesus of Nazareth, but also Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

As a teenager I had become a committed pacifist and regarded violence as the antithesis of the gospel message. I had come to South Africa overflowing with youthful idealism, believing that nonviolent methods were the only morally defensible way to deal with conflict. What I encountered was a system based on systematic violence and repression. I also noticed that the state was very happy when I preached nonviolence to black students, but much less happy when I suggested to white students that they might resist conscription. I gradually came to realize that my understanding of the gospel did not take account of the sheer magnitude of evil that we faced. It was perhaps adequate to another time and place, but it had little to offer unarmed protestors facing a barrage of lethal bullets.

The more I learned about the African National Congress, the dominant liberation organization headed by Nelson Mandela, the more convinced I became that in its commitment to nonracialism it embodied the Christian gospel. The stumbling block for me was its embrace of the armed struggle. The fact is that the ANC had for fifty years stood for peaceful, nonviolent protest but finally had abandoned that in the face of unrelenting violence by the white minority government. So after much prayer and soul-searching I began to realize that I too needed to follow the same path taken by the ANC.

I came gradually to the realization that to ask unarmed black people to face down guns was to ask them to be complicit in their own deaths. So, I reluctantly decided that as a last resort, when all other avenues were closed, the armed struggle was consistent with the Christian message of love and justice. I suppose my shift illustrates a third aspect of courageous citizenship—that we must be prepared to adapt and change according to the context. We need to keep an open mind and not hold rigidly to preexisting beliefs, because that sort of rigidity can make us ineffective and at worst can lead to a sort of fundamentalism that is one of the most dangerous elements of our present world.

As I continued my reflection I came to the conclusion that solitary prophets were not a sufficient challenge to change the status quo. Only organized movements were able to wield enough power to challenge and unseat an unjust system. I therefore undertook a formal application to join the ANC and began writing and speaking out on behalf of the ANC particularly among faith communities. While the church at least theoretically did not take sides, in many ways large and small it failed to challenge the apartheid system and was often complicit. My activism brought me into painful conflict with some of the leadership of the church who saw me as partisan and disobedient.

Members of my own religious community labeled me a terrorist and refused to sleep under the same roof with me. Their excuse was that I could become a target of retaliation by the South African government and they were afraid they would become collateral damage. The real reason was that at least some of them had made their peace with apartheid and were challenged by my uncompromising stance.

Recently a friend described to me a sad but not surprising incident involving my community that occurred a few years before I arrived in South Africa. My friend was a member of the Anglican Students Federation and he attended a student conference held at the my community priory in Modderport, a small rural town in South Africa. On that occasion the Fathers of my community insisted that the students occupy racially segregated sleeping quarters because they had discovered an old law that prohibited whites and blacks from sleeping under the same roof. My friend commented that it was an obscure law and the Fathers must been unwilling to risk even a mild confrontation with the State. In the end, the church and Southern African members of my community maneuvered to have me expelled from Lesotho. During this whole unpleasant episode, I had the unwavering support of the ANC and the group of university students that I served, and this confirmed for me the importance of acting in concert with others, particularly when one is advocating an unpopular position.

So let us take a look at some other instances of courageous citizenship that can inspire us to action. Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu offers us many examples. Within the church, his vision of our common humanity led him to speak out about the rights of women, which was not always popular, and he has gone further in championing the rights of gay and lesbian people as well. Do we have that kind of consistency in our own moral values and do we have the courage to act on them? In the very week that I was preparing this talk, Archbishop Tutu offered another example that received wide spread notice. He refused to share the platform with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at a major symposium in Cape Town because of Blair’s support of the US invasion of Iraq.

Recently with eight other Nobel Prize winners Archbishop Tutu also spoke out against a new NBC television series called Stars Earn Stripes. The stars in the series title are celebrities who are paired with military personnel, the stripes, to compete in a series of elaborate war games. The host, a retired United States Army general, Wesley Clark, claims that the program is intended to honor our service people. The Nobel laureates, on the other hand, have taken the position that it treats military maneuvers like fun and games and glorifies war as entertainment.

So here we have a group of world citizens who are willing to go up against the power of the entertainment industry and to be seen as questioning blind patriotism.

This is happening in the United States, a country that in my view seems to be in danger of becoming addicted to endless wars. What is the effect of unending war on the soul of a nation? What does it do to one’s own people let alone those we are fighting against?

We shouldn’t be under the illusion that wars stay in Afganistan and Iraq. They come home with the war veterans, and they live on in the homes, the hospitals, and the bedrooms of the nation. One terrible example was Nidal Malik Hasan the army psychiatrist at Ft. Hood who killed many people, but he was just one of the countless numbers of soldiers who come home with deep physical, psychological, and spiritual wounds. Events like this and the recent massacre at the theater in Colorado challenge all of us. Do we say ‘enough” to wars, and do we resist the idolatry of weapons in the United States? I am aware of the constitutional issues involved, but does that stop us from calling out what that idolatry is doing to U.S. society? Or do we crumble in the face of the lobbyists of the National Rifle Association or the approbation of our neighbors?

Outspoken public figures like Archbishop Tutu serve to inspire others by setting an example, but none of us should for a minute minimize the importance and the courage of ordinary people who bear witness to what is right in courageous conversations held in the privacy of their families, their neighborhoods, and their places of worship. They enjoy none of the protections afforded by public visibility and they brave the real possibility of broken relationships with those that they love particularly since courageous conversations need to flow into courageous actions. I think of brave young men who as conscientious objectors and war resisters endured the disapprobation and even abandonment by loved ones during the apartheid years in South Africa, the Vietnam era in the United States, and today in Israel. Many went to prison or into exile for their beliefs. I think too of a white South African woman who worked tirelessly and with great devotion to help create a better society in our new democratic South Africa. Now, she has retired and has gone to live in a beautiful, rural part of the country. There, her neighbors are not drawn from the progressive urban culture that she used to work with. They are mostly Afrikaners, many of whom were staunch supporters of apartheid and who now find themselves in a society they never wished for and in some case resent.

Nevertheless, this woman speaks movingly of building relationships with these folks and of her great surprise at discovering that she has grown fond of many of them. She says she is now engaged in a new form of work that she describes as “transforming the country one conversation at a time.” I call these courageous conversations.

The Christian theologian Donald Shriver has written an important book whose title delights me. It is called “Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds.” It is addressed primarily to a United States audience and in it he argues for the honest teaching of history—acknowledging, for example, that the United States was built on the backs of African slaves and on land that was stolen from native Americans. True ownership of these realities might demand an apology or even a form of reparations, and can act as a counterforce to U. S. exceptionalism. In his book, Shriver calls for a movement of national repentance. Speaking as a Christian, he points out that the Christian tradition has almost exclusively emphasized guilt and repentance at the individual level. Shriver, on the other hand, writes movingly of the need to develop a collective sense of responsibility and repentance for a nation’s misdeeds.

There is a section in my recent memoir written by my friend, Karin Penno-Bermeister. Karin is the director of a concentration camp memorial in Ladelund, Germany.

She was born a little more than 10 years after the end of World War II and so was in no way personally responsible for the Holocaust. Nevertheless she writes with moving honesty,

Remembering the crimes of National Socialism has become the theme of my life, my family, and my identity. At the Ladeland Concentration Camp Memorial we have succeeded in bringing together elderly people who are former supporters of National Socialism and the families and children of people who died in the concentration camps, and they now regard each other as friends.

In particular, she speaks of the role of shame in making this development possible and says that it can be destructive or a force for good, depending on how we work with it. She writes,

Many children of former perpetrators are open to feeling shame. Not that we feel personally responsible, as we were only children and we are quite clear about this. But we do feel a broader sense of shame because our parents were National Socialists or supported Hitler, or more simply because we are Germans and these things happened in our country. So we have been motivated by our collective sense of shame and this can be a very good thing. It is a sign that we have a new moral outlook and that we intend to live differently than our parents’ generation. We must accept this sort of shame and ask it to help us rather than fear that it will destroy us.

And she ends by saying.

Those who dare to enter the memorial site can sense the importance of facing these memories, no matter how painful, because it opens a dialogue between the older and younger generation that is important for the future. And this is the beginning of liberation from a lifelong struggle with shame and guilt—not in suppressing, but in remembering; no in justification, but in admission; not in weighing one against the other, but in the willingness to mourn and be sorry; not in bitter retreat into protective arguments, but in asking for forgiveness.

And so we lift up Karin Penno-Burmeister as someone who while not known on the world stage leads a life of courageous citizenship.

On my way to the US I came across a dramatic example of courageous citizenship from within the academic community – on this occasion by Stanford University and NYU. It was an article that appeared in the UK newspaper The Independent on September 25 about the CIA’s use of drone attacks. These are in reality extrajudicial killings which violate the territorial integrity of sovereign nations. As we all know these attacks involve unmanned aircraft used to kill supposed insurgents. The defenders of these operations describe them as surgical attacks against precise targets.

Researchers from Stanford and NYU have just released a study that paints a very different picture. According to their study barely 2% of their victims are known militants. Recent tactics involve what is known as double tapping. A target is hit. Local people rush to see if they can help survivors and while all the rescuers are on the scene there is a further attack.

The report concludes by calling on Washington to re-assess its drone attack program or risk alienating those it seeks to win as well as setting worrying precedents for extra judicial killings. The courageous citizens are pointing to policies that may well come back to haunt the nation.

People sometimes point to my own life story as an example courageous action. If I too am such an example, I am certainly not alone. I am willing to accept the label provided that we can agree that there is no single answer to the question, What makes a courageous citizen? Rather there are a myriad of answers, just as there are a myriad of individuals who have trod that path. In reality the world is filled with countless persons who might well have been invited to give this lecture were it not that they are unrecognized and unappreciated. Each of them has walked their own distinctive path.

One element of my work across the globe has been to lift up the stories of such individuals who come to our workshops in search of healing and often leave ready to do their part in making a better world. In my memoir, Redeeming the Past, you can read a number of their stories in their own words and Karin Penno-Burmeister’s story is one of them. By including them in my book, I wished to make the point that I am not walking the path of courage alone.

Courageous people are not people who never experience fear. I remember the day that I was told that I was on a South African hit list. I remember my fear about what might happen to me, but I also remember my prayer that my life decisions would be governed by what I believe in and that I would not be controlled by my fear.

I would like to conclude by speaking about hope, because it is hope that buoys us up in the face of difficult odds. Hope is based on our vision for the future, but what I call realistic hope is not sentimental or utopian. Rather, it is practical and down to earth. It requires courage, but it is also based on collective hard work. People sometimes ask how it is that I don’t become discouraged.

Of course there are moments when I despair. It is very easy to become discouraged about my own beloved country of South Africa, beset by violence and corruption, by a world economic system that tramples on the poor, and by the constant threat of war. Nevertheless there are always signs of hope. There is a story about two men in a prison cell with one small window. One looked up and saw stars. The other looked down and saw mud. I suppose on a bad day I see mud and on a good day I see stars, and maybe on a realistic day I see both.

Hope is daring to work for what you believe, even if the odds seem daunting or impossible. We are not guaranteed success. However, the satisfaction that is guaranteed to we who hope is the knowledge that we did our best. In South Africa we are on a journey that will take many decades, indeed many generations. We lost many martyrs who never lived to see the triumph of their dreams, and yet others of us have witnessed the dismantling of constitutional racism in our country. I think we have to take a long-term perspective on the moment of history that we can neither control nor predict. Some things are known only to God. But we are called to be God’s coworkers in creating a better world. That is the true meaning of courage and of hope.

Before we conclude I would like to invite each of you to consider, not just tonight but in the days ahead what courageous citizenship means for you. Thank you to each of you, who in a wide variety of contexts are already courageous citizens. I hope that you feel validated in what you are doing and inspired to do more.

Hopefully tonight we also have gained some more recruits.