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Soar toward goodness

Anti-Apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivered the 2008 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture at the University of Michigan on Oct. 29. Tutu mused on the battle against Apartheid in South Africa, on the struggle between good and evil in each person, and on the existence of God. Video of one portion of the speech, and a slightly edited transcript appear below.

November 18, 2008

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The video clip above is an excerpt from the speech. To see Archbishop Tutu's Wallenberg Lecture in its entirety, you can visit U-M's site at iTunesU (you'll need iTunes to view it).

Transcript:

Thank you so very, very much, Madam President, for your very kind introduction. You know that they sometimes say about certain people, oh, when he's, or she's, very well known, and really doesn't need any introduction—I've told this story before. I'm not particularly original. I'm very repetitive.

Learn more about U-M alumnus and anti-Nazi activist Raoul Wallenberg

But one day I was in San Francisco and minding my own business as I always do, when a lady came up gushing, and oh, she was so warm, and she was screeching, and she said, "Hello, Archbishop Mandela!"

Sort of getting two for the price of one.

But thank you so very much for this extraordinary award, this prestigious award of this wonderful institution. Thank you Wallenberg Committee for choosing me and seeking to let me join a remarkable group of human beings, numbering among them such extraordinary persons as Elie Wiesel and the Dalai Lama and so on.

I have usually said that when I am given such awards I can really accept them only in a representative capacity, because the people you want to honor are the many, many millions who for a very long time were anonymous, extraordinary human beings in their courage, and I had the privilege of being their leader. And what is a leader without followers? And so when you stand out in a group it is only because you are being carried on the shoulders of others.

And so on behalf of all of those remarkable human beings, who are often described in a misnomer as ordinary, there are no ordinary human beings. Every single person is extraordinary, for each one of us is a God carrier. But, yes, for those we often refer to as the ordinary, I accept this prestigious award.

And now don't go away with the notion that, oh, he's so modest.

I'm nothing of the sort.

And I tell the story of how my wife and I went to West Point Military Academy and at the end of the visit the cadets, to commemorate that visit, they gave me a cadet cap. And, trying it on, it did not fit.

A nice wife would have said, "Oh, dear, the cap is too small."

My very dear wife said, "His head is too big."

So thank you. Thank you so very, very much.

I have a book of cartoons. Some of you may have seen it. It's a collection of charming line drawings by the late Mel Calman, who was a cartoonist for the British newspaper The Observer. And the title of this anthology of cartoons is "My God."

One of them shows God somewhat disconsolate, because God is getting all these different prayers.

"God, we are farmers, please send rain."

And somebody else, "Oh, God, please, we're going to a picnic, please give us sunshine."

God then says, "Oh, dear, sometimes I wish I could say don't call me, I'll call you."

But the one that I wanted to refer to is one that shows God somewhat bemused and he—or she—is sort of scratching his head and he says, "Oh, dear, I think I've lost my copy of the divine plan."

Well, when you look at the state of the world, you wonder whether God ever had a plan at all. I mean, just think of it. You have a devastating drought in one place and you have an equally devastating flood in another place. And you say, well, God, do you really mean you couldn't arrange things in such a way that there was enough water everywhere rather than the mess?

And it's almost as if God makes it incredibly difficult for those who would want to justify the ways of God, the thing that they call the theodicy, where you try to work—I mean you try to explain why it could be that in the universe of a good God, all of these awful things happen. You have a holocaust, you have a genocide, you go on and you have—you have this doleful catalogue. Just look at what's happening now. Darfur, Burma, Tibet, the Middle East, Somalia, and just now, the awful, awful accounts that are coming out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and of course Zimbabwe. It is a real mess. And how could you ever hope to be credible when you say to people—as we did, actually—when you say to people, you know, this is God's world and God is in charge?

Those many times at home in our struggle against the awfulness of apartheid, when the apartheid rulers were strutting arrogantly as if they were invincible cocks of the walk, and other people were being treated as if they were rubbish, their dignity trodden underfoot carelessly, how could you ever hope to be credible, believable? But that's exactly what we said. We said, hey, hey, hey, this is God's world. God is in charge.

Sometimes of course you wished you could whisper in God's ear, "God, we know that you are in charge... why don't you make it slightly more obvious?"

Yes, it is as if we were mocking those who suffer under the yoke of oppression, of injustice. I mean, you go to a Darfur and you look at the conditions under which those people live there, a situation where for a woman to dare go beyond the safety of the camp is the surest invitation for her to be raped. To know that there are so many parts of our world where rape has become a weapon of war. Where child soldiers are used. You know all of those things. You know how they recruit young people to become child soldiers. They make them shoot members of their family and make certain that they will not be able to return home.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the University of Michigan

Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivered the Raoul Wallenberg Lecture in Hill Auditorium on Oct. 29, 2008. Photo: Lin Jones, U-M Photo Services

And you say, what kind of universe is this? And then, yes, you say, no, no, no, those of us who say that this is a moral universe don't inhabit some cuckoo land. It is for real. It is for real that injustice and oppression will not have the last word. And when you look at the verdict of history, there was a time when Hitler looked like he was going to vanquish all of Europe. Where is he now? When Stalin had his gulags and killed at his whim, Mussolini, Franco—I mean, fed his crocodiles with those who fell out with him. Where is he now?

History seems to give the evidence, yeah, yeah, this is a moral universe. We used to say to the South African government, the apartheid government, "Hey, you have lost. You have already lost. And we are being nice to you. We are being nice to you white people"—in South Africa, I mean.

"We are being nice to you. We're saying, come, come, come, join the winning side. Join the winning side."

And you look and you say, yes, all of those who strutted around, who looked like they'd never, never be defeated, without exception have bitten the dust and done so ignominiously.
And so in 1990 the prison doors opened, and then Nelson Mandela walked out. And in 1994 the world looked on in amazement as it saw those long, long, long, long, long lines of South Africans of all races, those long lines snaking their way slowly to the polling booth on that magical day, a day like no other, the 27th of April. They asked us, "How did you feel?" I say, "Hey, man, how do you describe falling in love? How do you describe a beautiful rose to a blind person? How do you describe a glorious symphony to someone deaf?"

Well, when you vote for the first time when you are 63 years of age, for the first time in the land of your birth—yeah!

Now, you know something? Yes, we won a glorious victory over the awfulness of apartheid. But what is so marvelous is it was your victory, too. We really would not have made it on our own. We had the support of some incredible human beings.

You had a President at the time who had a policy called Constructive Engagement. I sat with him in the Oval Office and tried to persuade him to apply sanctions against the apartheid government. He would have none of it. And so we appealed over his head to the American people. We appealed to yourselves.

And I want to tell you that it was fantastic.

I used to come, and I would come about the time when students ought to have been concerned about degrees and their grades, April/May. It was incredible. I didn't go to all of the campuses—there are too many—but to those that I went it was just fantastic. I don't know what cockles are, but it warmed the cockles of my heart to see students sitting out in the baking sunshine in order to pressure their institutions to divest. The people were just fantastic, those who were involved in the anti-apartheid movement. And young people, like most of you here. Not exclusively, because the anti-apartheid movement had a whole range of people, people who were prepared to be arrested on our behalf, people who were prepared —well, they were prepared—they prayed for us. People were prepared not to buy South African wine, and it's very lovely. It's one of the best around.

And not so expensive.

People did that for us. That was extraordinary.

And so the moral climate in this country changed. And where you had a very popular President standing up against the anti-apartheid legislation that would impose sanctions, you changed the moral climate to such an extent that Congress, not only did it pass that legislation, but it mustered a presidential veto override.

And so we are free today. We are free today because of you and your— well, I was going to say forebears but that doesn't seem quite right—those who went before you, who are now probably sitting here and not there.

And you see, I've come—you know, it's 14 years down the line—I've come to say to you thank you, thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

Is that how—if somebody removed the shackles from your wrists and from your ankles, do you think that is how you would clap them?

Okay, I know that you are shy.

I discovered, in fact, that I had a magic wand. When I wave it over you, as I do now—it turns you into instant South Africans.

And so I say, fellow South Africans, let's give these Americans a real humdinger. Come on now!

(RAUCOUS CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

Thank you, thank you. Thank you so very much.

Yes, well, I wave it over you—and you revert to your normal, shy selves.

But that is actually for real, because unless you have been unfree, it's difficult to understand what it does mean to become free.

And—thank you, thank you, thank you.

I have to be careful about this asking people to clap. I was with a group of young people once in Australia and I said, "You know, the trouble with us is that we don't celebrate who we are. Let's give ourselves a warm hand." And they did a wonderful thing that nearly took the roof off. And then I said, "Well, let's give God a standing ovation and they really went to town."

And when they finished, without thinking, I said thank you.

Thank you.

You'll remember that there were those people who said, "Ah, yeah, they have made this transition from injustice to freedom relatively peacefully, but you wait. As soon as a black-led government is in power, we are going to see the most awful orgy of revenge and retribution." And then—and then the world watched and saw the extraordinary spectacles unfolding before their very eyes of the process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Where, given a wonderful lead by Nelson Mandela, of magnanimity, of generosity of spirit, the President who said, "Let us walk the path of forgiveness and reconciliation rather than that of revenge and retribution." And people followed him.

It was an extraordinary privilege to have been asked to preside over the process of healing of a traumatized people as a wounded healer, for none of us in the Commission could claim to be morally superior to any of those who came before us. None of us could claim that we had not ourselves been deeply, deeply wounded by the ghastliness of apartheid.

And it was just an incredible experience, sitting there and listening to people give accounts of grievous, grievous suffering, people who by rights ought to have been consumed by bitterness and resentment and who had a lust for revenge, but they were nothing of the sort. Amazing, amazing, amazing, sitting there and listening to this white woman who had been at a Christmas dinner party when one of the liberation movements attacked the venue, the golf club, and they threw hand grenades and several people were killed. And this woman says that she was so badly wounded that she was in ICU for weeks. And when she came out her children had to bathe her, clothe her, feed her, because she was so disabled. And she still had shrapnel in her body. And she was saying, you know, she couldn't go through a security checkpoint because it would go berserk.

And then she says of the occasion that left her in this condition, she said—ha, she said, "It has enriched my life."

Enriched my life? And you sit there and then she goes on and she says, "I want to meet the perpetrator. I want to meet him in the spirit of forgiveness. I want to forgive him,"—which is mind blowing in itself—and then she goes on and says, "and I hope he forgives me."

And many times I would say, "Shh, let's be quiet, for we are in the presence of the holy. Let's be quiet. We ought really to take off our shoes, for we are standing on holy ground."

It was fantastic. But of course you had the other side as well, those who came applying for amnesty. You could qualify for amnesty only if you accused yourself, you told of the things that you did. And you'd hear something like, "We gave him drugged coffee. We shot him in the head. We burned his body." And it takes, eight, nine hours to burn a human body. "And whilst the body was burning here we were having a barbecue on the side. We were drinking beer."

And you say, what could have happened to the humanity of people? What could have happened that people could sink so low? And then you realized, "Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, yes, indeed, there but for the grace of God go I." That the perpetrators were not demons. They didn't have horns. They didn't have a cane. They were ordinary human beings like you, like me. They went to church. They were respectable members of their communities.

In Germany it was—they were called German Christians who collaborated with Hitler. So what all of this was telling us is, yeah, you and I have an extraordinary capacity for evil.

Yeah. You and I.

For you see, none of us could say that had we been subjected to the same conditions and upbringing that these had undergone—we could not predict that we wouldn't have turned out like them. But, yes, yes, yes, we have that capacity for evil, but more gloriously, more exhilaratingly, you and I have this incredible capacity for good.

You and I. Unbelievable, but you and I are made for goodness.

That is what we have been created for. You and I are created for transcendence, for laughter, for gentleness, for caring. You and I. And so you understood a little bit why God might get lost, God's copy of the divine plan, because God deliberately did not create the world perfect. That is something that is said in so many religious traditions. Because God is looking to you and to me to be fellow workers with God, to help God turn this world into the kind of home that God wants it to be: a more gentle, a more caring, a more compassionate, a more sharing world.

I finish. I finish, but I must tell you this story. Some of you will have heard it. Doesn't matter.

You were all searched when you came in to make sure that you didn't have tomatoes and eggs to throw at the speaker.

There was a farmer. The farmer had chickens in his back yard. But he had a strange looking chicken. And the farmer wondered, I mean, this strange looking chicken, it does behave like the other chickens, it pecks away, but it doesn't—it doesn't look quite like the others.

And then a traveler comes along who knows about this and he says to the farmer, "No, no, no, man, that's no chicken there. That's an eagle."

And the traveler says, "Please, give it to me."

And the farmer gives him this strange looking chicken. And he takes this chicken and he goes, up, up, up, to the top of the mountain. And he waits for the sun to rise. And as the sun glides through, this man says, "Fly, eagle, fly."

And this strange looking chicken spreads out its pinions, shakes itself, and lifts off. And it soars and disappears way, way into the rising sun.

And God says to us, "Hey, you are no chicken.

"You are an eagle. Fly, eagle, fly."

And God expects you, us, to spread out our pinions, shake ourselves, and lift off and soar, and soar towards goodness, soar towards transcendence, towards beauty, towards laughter, towards caring, towards sharing. Fly, eagle, fly.

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