A supple movement through tense passages: 1963, 1993, 2001, 2010

     Grace is a supple movement through tense passages.  Mysteriously linked to forgiveness.  This is a lesson taught to me most dramatically and recurringly at this time of year, as August mellows into September.
     On Monday, August 23, 1993, I was in Gugulehtu, outside of Cape Town.  It was a time of turbulence in South Africa—politically, socially, racially.  Laws that had held apartheid in place were gone, but free elections were still 8 months in the future, and no one knew if they would really come to pass.
     There were powerful forces in the land intent on fomenting violence that would keep South Africans terrified of the move toward democracy and show the rest of the world how unready South Africa was for government of, by, and for the people.
    On Tuesday evening, August 24, Amy Biehl, a Stanford grad and Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach, CA, working in South Africa for peace, drove a friend home to Gugulehtu from the University of Cape Town.  Their car was attacked and Amy was killed with stones and rocks thrown by a group of young men. 
     I knew nothing of this until, after the long hours in flight and a night’s sleep at home, I walked into my kitchen in Shaker Heights OH and, in an attempt to reorient myself to North American time zones and current events I flipped on the Today show.  Peter and Linda Biehl—Amy’s parents—were being interviewed.  I still remember the cold linoleum under my bare feet as I gripped the edge of the Formica counter and hunched myself toward the 12 inch TV screen, piecing together what had happened. 
     While my mind was scrambling for facts and motives, my heart was entirely captivated by these obviously grief-wounded people who with absolute grace and deftness would not be cornered into demanding vengeance no matter how often and relentlessly the interviewers shoved them in that direction.  Nor would they be drawn into the tango of condemning all black South Africans for the murder of their white daughter.
   On September 15, 1963, I stood transfixed in front of a grainy TV screen and received my first soul-jolting lesson regarding justice and healing.  At that time of great turbulence in the United States—politically, socially, racially—a church was bombed in Birmingham, AL on a Sunday morning and 4 young girls were killed. Among them was Denise MacNair.  Her father was interviewed by TV reporters.  There was a flurry of questions.  “Do you want to see your daughter’s killers brought to justice?  Do you hate all white people for what these men did?  Will you seek the death penalty for them if they are found?”
     Mr. MacNair spoke to the heart of the matter from the heart of his pain and his convictions:  "Of course I want the killers brought to justice—who could bear to leave them free to do this again?  But to have them executed?  What would be the point?  Their deaths will not bring our children back to life.  The only way we could inflict upon them the suffering we are enduring would be to kill their children—and then truly we would all have gone mad."
     The words of Charles MacNair and Linda and Peter Biehl echo through the good counsel offered by President Nelson Mandela in his inaugural address when he spoke of the need to “forgive what we dare not forget.”  To acknowledge the horrific wrongs that had been done, lest such depravity come again and not be recognized.
     Grace is a supple movement through tense passages.  Mysteriously linked to forgiveness. A source of freedom.
     Are there implications for our commemorations of September 11?  You may remember that Psalm 46 was one of the lectionary readings for Sunday, September 16, 2001.  The psalmist’s affirmation that “God is for us refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble…..” involves us with a force more powerful than fear, more tenacious than terror. 
     These words frighten even us who are believers with its implications, with its claims upon our actions, with its counterintuitive applications. These words admonish us to let our reactions go beyond the satisfyingly reflexive to the creatively effective, to commitedly avoid getting tripped up in the knotty rhetoric of war, flexing strong and well-used muscles when new stretches of ingenuity are called for.
     "Throw down your weapons and know that I am God!” the Holy declares.  God is, for us, refuge and strength.
     God’s grace is a supple movement through tense passages.  Mysteriously linked to forgiveness.  A source of freedom.