Yearning for the Way Things Will Be  

Gideon Strauss
Executive Director, Max De Pree Center for Leadership 

On December 13, 1993, Bernadette Langford and her friends stopped in at the Heidelberg Tavern in Cape Town, South Africa, for drinks. While they were there, soldiers of the Azanian People’s Liberation Army entered the tavern, threw hand grenades into the crowd, and opened up with machine gunfire. Bernadette, a recent college graduate, died. The tavern, a place of celebration, became a scene of carnage.

Three years later, Bernadette’s killers applied for amnesty from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I was an interpreter at these amnesty hearings. Bernadette’s mother, Andrea, concluded her survivor’s testimony at the hearings with these words:

Mr. Chairman, these [she points to the amnesty applicants], are the perpetrators of gross human rights violations. They say, as you have heard, that they were acting under orders. . . . I too act under orders as I sit here. Now, just speaking directly to you [she addresses the perpetrators], . . . I believe that God is God, and I act under God’s orders, and God’s orders for me, God’s orders are to say to you and to all of you, yes, I have forgiven you. . . . And so if you give your hearts to God, you will find the peace that I have found, with which I can say to you, I have forgiven you, and I will not oppose your amnesty. Then you will know what I know, regardless of how I feel.

Most of the testimony I interpreted while working with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was that of perpetrators, rather than victims, of abduction, torture, and murder. Interpreting this woman’s words was a rare, extraordinary experience—being present at the moment when a grieving mother invited the murderers of her child into reconciliation.

I wish I could say that this moment of reconciliation offered was symbolic of a larger societal effect of the work of the Commission, but it is not so. The Commission certainly unearthed much truth about what had happened in South Africa during the most intense years of struggle over apartheid. But rather than reconciliation, the commission contributed to a national accommodation—an arrangement within which South Africans have been able to live together, accommodated somewhat to one another’s differences, but still far from having achieved anything like a thoroughgoing reconciliation with one another, or with the griefs and grievances of the past.

During Lent we reflect on the life of the one who makes reconciliation possible. We recall moments of reconciliation, in our own lives and in the history of this wonderful, heartbroken world. But we look around and see, mostly, accommodation to the way things are. And so we yearn for the way things could be, for the way things will one day be. Slowly, as the days lengthen, we are turned, in our reflecting and remembering and yearning, toward the rising of the Christ, and the eventual complete reconciliation of all things in that rising.