Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Address at Convocation Hall Winter 2000

The following is the address made by Archbishop Desmond Tutu at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall on February 16 2000.

We might characterize human history as seeking after a solution to the problems of particularity and universalism, of who or what belongs to what group, and who is to be excluded, what is similar in appearance, conduct, speech, culture, dress, religion, thought and what is different. What do we mean by identity? Who will enjoy the benefits of being an insider-food, clothing, shelter, protection, family?

We might say that most conflicts relate to these issues-who is "in" and who is "out"--in Nazi Germany those who were "in" were supposedly the pure Aryans and those "outside" were the Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, who allegedly posed a threat to the continued existence of the dominant group, and these tensions were exacerbated in times of crisis such as high unemployment, economic difficulties, wars etc. when a scapegoat had to be found to be blamed for the problems by the dominant group. In Rwanda the ruling Hutus felt threatened by the more sophisticated Tutsis and so genocide happened.

The "in" group would tend to monopolize privileges and heap all sorts of disadvantages and discrimination on the outsiders. In Northern Ireland the Protestants, perhaps not always consciously, amassed advantages and privilege at the expense of the Roman Catholics, who were seen as posing a threat to something the Protestants held to be dear, inseparable and indispensable to the sense of who they were, to their identity i.e. their allegiance to the British Crown and abhorrence of "papism" and any possibility of being brought under Roman Catholic hegemony and losing their distinctiveness.

Here in Canada, you are probably trying to discover a distinctive and unique Canadianess that takes account of your various ethnic and cultural histories and identities. You are seeking to work out what it means to be Canadian with its native Canadian, English, French, Caribbean, Asian etc. antecedents and components.

How are you to be welded into a coherent community and people, giving due place to what each of the constituent parts regard as absolutely crucial to who they are without letting that rich diversity overwhelm the unity you want? How can you end up being like an orchestra producing mellifluous sounds in a glorious symphony rather than a whole Tower of Babel cacophony?

The nation or community that succeeds in coming to terms, in coping with difference is in the end going to be the most successful, for the clearest characteristic of our day is that we are becoming increasingly diverse, multicultural, multiethnic, multifaith, multilingual--if you accept that globalization is a fact of life, then you are going to have to accept that we are faced with a plethora of difference whilst we perhaps long for the comfort and security of similarity. It is interesting how the free world reacted recently to Austria and the possibility there of xenophobia becoming part of official policy with all that country's history.

In times of crisis, as during this particular period of transition from repression to democracy in especially Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the so-called Third World, as in South Africa, we find an interesting human phenomenon--because the landscape is changing, we are disorientated, familiar landmarks have shifted or are disappearing and we tend to long for the security and the safety of the familiar, of the similar--what is different tends to fill us with apprehension and we find we have an allergy towards what is different in appearance, in culture, in religion, in thought, in all sorts of ways.

It is not surprising even though so thoroughly reprehensible that so-called ethnic cleansing happens at such times. What is different is threatening, is likely to be the enemy. This kind of reaction is a throw back to beginning times when the stranger was almost always the enemy. In a way it is also atavistic, anachronistic, harking back to the days when the law of the jungle held sway. This impatience, this intolerance with difference, with diversity encompasses points of view, what we accept as so.

The end of the Cold War was a good thing but in many ways it left people rudderless and confused. In Cold War days you were able to define yourself in relation to the Soviet Union or to Western democracy. It was important to know who the enemy was for that did help to define who we were. When the enemy disappeared, it was not always easy to know who the other was over against whom your identity was defined. Then people hungered for the kind of certainty they thought they had when things were clearly black or white.

It was an illusory certainty but they thought they used to enjoy it and they became impatient with all of the various options that were now available. This diversity was disconcerting and thus they were attracted to the spurious certainty of fundamentalism which provided what appeared to be clear cut answers, deluding its adherents into thinking that life could be fairly straight forward where as the fact of the matter is life is complex and pregnant with ambivalence and ambiguity. This is what we have to learn to embrace and to urge others to embrace.

There is the lovely well known story of Adam and Eve--God sets Adam in the Garden of Eden where his existence is idyllic. He lives in harmony with nature and the animals. There is no blood shed for all are vegetarian. Adam is or should be in the seventh heaven of delight, well not quite. God looks on and observes "It is not good for man to be alone" and so asks Adam to choose a partner from the animals God passes before him in procession and asks,

"What about this one?"

"Nope!" "What about this one?"

"Not on your life!"

So God puts Adam to sleep and produces that delectable creature Eve and when Adam awakes he exclaims, "Wow, that is just what the doctor ordered!" This story tells charmingly that we are made for community, for family, for interdependence, for complementarity. We say in our African idiom, "A person is a person through other persons." The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms. I need you in order to be me as you need me in order to be you. We are caught up in a delicate network of interconnectedness. I have gifts that you don't and you have gifts I don't--voila, we are made different so that we may know our need of one another. The completely self-sufficient human being is subhuman. Thus diversity, difference is of the essence of who we are. A rainbow is a rainbow only and precisely because it is made up of different colors. We are placed on earth to discover that we are made for togetherness, for interdependence, for complementarity.

But even in the Bible the tension between the particular and the universal is a prominent feature. Israel is chosen as God's special people. In a piece that is replete with chauvinism--the so-called P account of creation found in the first two chapters of Genesis it would have been understandable if the author had said only Jews were created in God's image. But this is wonderfully not so. All human beings are created in the Imago Dei even though God is depicted in a sense as a good Jew who observes the Sabbath!

Ezra-Nehemiah represent the strong urge to exclusivism--the Jews must keep themselves pure from contamination by the nations and so those who married foreign wives had to divorce them. Ruth which gives a pagan foreign ancestor to King David, the Israelite par excellence and Jonah which demonstrates that foreigners too can be virtuous, state the claim for inclusiveness. Yahweh is worshipped and understood to be Israel's God in an exclusive sense because other nations have their own deities but this monolatry is clearly at variance with strict monotheism-- if there is one God as they believe then their God is God also of all the peoples who somehow then are his people too. And so Isaiah can describe Assyria as the rod of Yahweh's wrath. Amos describes God passing judgement on all the nations and just when Israel is gloating and with their guard down that that is so, turns on them in words of harsh condemnation. Isaiah boldly calls Cyrus, a foreign potentate, Yahweh's anointed. They resolve it all by declaring that Israel is really God's agent to bring light to the gentiles who will then be drawn to worship God in Jerusalem, the center of the universe when all will know war no more and will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks--the world of different nations and peoples at peace and living in harmony as God had always intended.

Jesus is depicted as being caught in the customary tension between exclusion and inclusion. At one place he exhorts his followers to go to all the world to make disciples of all peoples and declares the temple in Jerusalem to be a house of prayer not just for Jews but for all peoples; but elsewhere he says he has been sent only to the lost sheep of Israel and speaks harshly to a Syro-Phoenician woman who was begging him to heal her daughter. It was not right, he said, to throw the children's bread to the dogs i.e. the gentiles. She disarms him by her retort that the dogs can pick up the crumbs from the table. He frequently told stories in which the hated Samaritans were the heroes contrary to popular expectation.

Often we have thought that Jesus came into an ideal world. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was a highly stratified and fragmented society. There were the occupying Romans and the client Jews, then there was the division between Jew and Gentile, between Jew and Samaritan. There were slaves and the free, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, male and female. In the Jewish community there were various parties and there was little love lost between them--the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots, the tax collectors and the sinners. It was a thoroughly divided community. It would have been extraordinary if Jesus had said that in the new society he had come to establish, all would now be equals. It would have been breathtaking for the slave to be able to regard his master as his equal. What Jesus proclaimed turned out to be far more radical. An equal we could acknowledge perhaps once and thereafter ignore. Jesus said not that his followers were equals, but that they were sisters and brothers in God's family, those who address God as our Father not as my Father--St. Paul was to say there is neither Jew nor Greek, free nor slave, male nor female but all are one in this Jesus Christ whom Ephesians has called our peace who broke down the middle wall of partition, separating Jew from Gentile, making of the two former enemies one people of God. You don't choose your family--we might wish sometimes that this could have been the case. Family are gifts one to another.

Ananias could approach Saul, the persecutor in Damascus who had come to arrest followers of this new movement and say, "Brother Saul…"

Yes--God says we are family rich in its diversity. Jesus declared, "I, if I be lifted up will draw all to me"--not just some but all, all are insiders, no one is an outsider, no one is an alien, all, white, black , brown, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, young, old, those with disabilities, and those without, the gay, the lesbian, the straight, all, all belong together in God's rainbow family.

Can we imagine what would happen if the ethic of family applied in the world today? We don't in a normal family say, "Grandmother or baby you contribute nothing to the family budget so you will eat only according to your contribution." No it is really, from each according to their ability and to each according to their need. We would not spend such obscene amounts in our budgets of death and destruction called defense spending when a small fraction of those budgets would ensure that our sisters and brothers everywhere would have clean water, enough to eat, adequate healthcare, a good education, secure home environment. We would not wonder how to spend budget surpluses as long as members of our family in other parts were starving. We would not let members of our families in so-called third world countries suffer because of the intolerable burden of unpayable debt. We would support Jubilee 2000 and call for the cancellation of that debt as a moral imperative. Thank you for Canada's leadership in this arena as well as that which your country showed in the matter of land mines. We are family, God's family, the human family. Let us celebrate our diversity and glory in our unity and then we will see the fulfillment of the vision of St. John the divine.

"After that I looked and saw a vast throng which no one could count, from all races and tribes, nations and languages, standing before the throne and the Lamb. They were robed in white and had palm branches in their hands, and they shouted aloud:

"Victory to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb!"

"All the angels who stood round the throne and round the elders and the four living creatures prostrated themselves before the throne and worshiped God, crying:

"Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom, thanksgiving and honor, power and might be to our God forever! Amen."

© Archbishop Desmond Tutu Toronto, Canada, University of Toronto Convocation Hall: Feb. 16, 2000

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