Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Who is Israel?

are you the moon-worshipping nomad who ate lunch with the One who prepared the universe?

are you the son of two senior citizens laughing at your first word spoken―A-b-b-a?

are you the adulterous caravan who missed the right turn-off from Egypt 2078 times?

are you the amnesiacs dancing on the edge of a fiery furnace with thunder rolling down the hill?

are you the screaming refugees who raided the Middle-East deserts under constant shade?

are you the new tenants of twelve fully furnished states with instant crops and running cisterns?

are you the fat farmers who refused to let the soil rest insisting on a visible sovereign instead?

are you the mighty men fighting for a murderer who married too many wives in the end?

are you the silent singers crying rivers in a foreign land where you finally began to remember?

are you the seed from which all creation came who grew inside a teenage virgin?

are you the perplexed fathers who sat learning from a boy twelve months before His bar mitzvah?

are you the desperate followers of a vegetarian hermit who showed up from nowhere to preach?

are you the proletariat guarded by Latin mercenaries and Greek philosophy who saw the dove on His head?

are you the angry militia waving palm leafs and throwing rocks in the same week?

are you the faithful few baking bread and drinking wine while fighting over His crown again?

are you the generation who saw dead people walking around for three hours during an earthquake?

are you the group locked away on top of the roof dispelling rumors and seeing Him holes and all eating fish?

are you the enemies of the Roman State who made peace and order impossible to maintain?

are you the illegal aliens stowed away on ships between purple cloth and Turkish Delight?

are you the secret societies hiding in tombs and singing on the inside hearing Paul’s letters read?

are you the family who designed the world’s first printing press?

are you the tragic victims of the Reformers’ Arian insanity?

are you the brave chameleons blending in to every tribe and tongue across the globe?

are you the clever merchants, eating Chinese take-aways and pizzas once a week in New York?

are you the defending Rottweilers who were forced to become lap-dogs to Allied colonialists?

are you the unspoken envy of every aspiring scientist dreaming about apples and relativity?

are you the genius behind science fiction and merchandized action heroes?

are you the forgotten first-born who is running out of land?

are you the icon of hopelessness violated by journalists, archeologists and seminarians?

are you the point of my heart, the centre of their prayers, the choice of our Father?

Amen


Monday, March 27, 2006

how old is a soul?

your unwavering stare dissects my heart
eyes concede, baring my repaired soul for your inspection
shamelessness at last
when I least expect comfort, your grace untangles my defenses
bearded smiles dissolve my fears


your patient ears draw crowds into the room
hugging, kissing, praying against your hairy chest
old and young find solace in your counsel
maturing a youthful spirit beyond your earthly years


innocence radiate from your palms
every creature crosses your path
drenched in generous blessings


your quiet confidence tests me
shy


jugling excuses yet secure in our unusual companionship

Friday, March 24, 2006

original praise

I will praise You forever, Lord of my life, my loves, my hurts.
I will praise You in this moment until the day I die.
You breathed me into existence from the commitment of my faithful parents,
they trained me in Your ways even before they knew You,
how Your grace amazes me Lord.
They have revealed Your face in loving one another through death, health, and sickness.
Let all who have ears to hear and eyes to see, discover You in their enduring marriage!


I will praise You forever, Keeper of my body, my heart, my tears.
I will praise You in this moment until the day I die.
You formed my solid bones from daily plates of healthy blessings,
You strengthened my heart through tragedies,
how Your mercy protects me Lord.
I have discovered Your faithfulness when I had much, less and just enough.
Let all who can read, discover Your love for them in my words!


I will praise You forever, Author of my story, my song, my memories.
I will praise You in this moment until I die.
You intended my dreams to bring me to this country full of surprises,
how your generosity sustains me Lord.
You have uncovered my thirst for conversation, my need for human companionship, my hope.
Let all who can speak―shout,
Let all who can walk―dance,
Let all who can love―surrender to You!


Wednesday, March 22, 2006

the flood


Reading I Will Praise Him played an unexpected part in resolving one of my most difficult weeks during my studies here at DTS. Experiencing my first flash flood in Dallas, Texas at the same time probably engraved this revelation in my memory for the rest of my life.

As an African, I grew up with a lot of vivid impressions connected to particular emotions. In my culture we laugh, cry and argue loudly. When we feel happy or angry, we dance. When we mourn or remember, we sing.

Ironically, in coming to America to study Yahweh’s Word and search for more of His personhood, I systematically had to close my ears to the deafening silence of my Christian colleagues whom endure a crisis, loss, or even happiness without an outward sign. Apparently it was none of my business.

I became more isolated by the meaninglessness of polite conversation that avoids any vulnerability or access to my searching eyes when I know the person speaking to me carries frustrating pain inside but will not allow me to care for him or her.

Equally disappointing and theologically far more disrespectful is our lack of sharing God’s faithfulness or timely intervention during circumstances where we would have had no chance otherwise, sucked me into this isolating cycle of living a hermit’s life.

Three days before the flood, I wrote my own psalm of lament. Crying as I typed the hurting truth to myself. I saw my dear friend who began this scary journey to the USA as a single international student alongside me twenty months ago, prepare for her wedding seven weeks from now. Her consistent friendship confronted me about lying to myself if I thought that I was truly content with my single-hood.

The next day I fled from this zip code and took refuge in the warm home of a Jewish family in Plano. For two days I loved on their pets, pot-plants and home-cooked meals. Dr. Allen’s being the only book I read while the other seats in the family room were covered under Hebrew charts, vocabulary cards, and nervous Labradors frightened by the growling thunder.

On the evening before the flood, I sat outside under the verandah with a huge ginger cat named Caleb on my lap just staring at the rain falling on the plants and grass. We spent close to an hour listening to God’s drumming omnipresence and smelling His faithful love as the heavens did not relent in their chorus. When I closed my eyes, I could imagine David sitting at the mouth of a cave thousands of years ago, watching the ancient desert drink in the heavy rains, sighing in relief. Knowing that Saul’s men would not pursue him this night as they were somewhere waiting out this storm too. Praying that by the time it ends that they might have come to their senses and realize that he is not trying to kill Israel’s king.

Getting permission from this humble little book to shout out when I am reminded that everything is going to work out well because my God stays the same, was an equally special gift I received under the dripping roof edge on Saturday night. On Sunday morning I worshipped in an unfamiliar congregation with my surrogate family. Rocking and smiling to the rhythmic tunes when the same David’s words were repeated endorsed the importance of sharing the details of how I see God’s character revealed in simple ways every day.

I saw God provide for my needs once again when I was prevented from returning to my apartment overlooking the campus, unless I posed for a photo with the whole family. This gave me another reason to praise God and tell you in this piece that God is good and that He loves us and that He hears our prayers; I might not have my own mom and dad near to me and both my siblings are already dancing before Christ’s throne in heaven but after this weekend I know that I belong to four loving people who live passionately in their home with a verandah overlooking a garden on which God poured out His love for me.

And today I can declare with joy to everybody who reads these words that as for me and my house, we will praise the Lord who made heaven and earth while we are still alive on this beautiful planet!

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

original lament

Oh God who made the universe and crocheted DNA,

why did You fashion these moulds of mud to still long for another?

My Lord and my Commander, whose orders direct my lifeline,

will these ever include the duties of a wife and maybe even a mother?

Have you forgotten me?


I wake to see toddlers carried off to day-care on the sidewalk below my window.

I drink my tea at ten when the spring grass swarms under blankets and strollers.

I hear schoolyard stories retold to parents rushing past my front door in time for lunch.

I smell aftershave in the empty elevator after sunset as the temperatures pick up.

You know I desire to please You, yet fused to my core―remains this taste of emptiness.


Selfish sustainability drowns out the screams of bath and bed time rituals next door.

Christianized contentment justify my loneliness, cementing my heart in cynical self-denial.

Blind beliefs that You delight in this type of suffering feeds my pride, nurtures contempt.

Faking faith in Your provision when the last of my friends flaunts that dreaded ring.

I remember your Words―a high calling indeed.


They joke about saving the costs of the first wedding and later divorce settlements.

They preach about Your community in becoming one flesh and the joys of matrimony.

They patronize my nomadic life for Your sake, preventing him from catching me.

They hurt me with words and judging looks when I choose Your bearing across the sea.

Have You just been keeping me from the wrong choices, I came so close to making?


O Father of my fledgling offspring and Lover of my forgotten continent,

why must I struggle in a foreign land without one human that knows my language?

You who turned nothing into paradise and brought life from death,

why do You hear all my prayers except this one?

But You do hear it! You have filled my heart with a fullness of just loving You alone.

You have wedded me to Your faithful work and divorced me from my past mistakes.

You have surrounded me with caring friends and shown me the unity of Your body.

You have protected me through countless adventures snatching me from harmful men.

You have rocked me in Your arms, cradled by day and by night on boats and planes and trains.

I will look into Your eyes one day and tell all the world that You made me choose wisely.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

remembering the rain...


“Something broke the place where the rain is born
Something stole the promise from the light of dawn”
Johnny Clegg and Savuka

I am an African and I am white.

I am the fifth or sixth generation of Afrikaners living in a unique land as one of eleven people-groups affectionately known amongst ourselves as The Rainbow Nation. When Americans see my braided blonde hair and hear my mother tongue they often insist on seeing me as either a Dutch, German or British immigrant but I am African. I know no other home than where the thundering summer rains envelope tall office blocks and rolling hills of grasveld alike in the late afternoons.

Walking home barefoot from our primary school to the same house where my parents live today, my brother and I were caught in just such a storm as we had the last ten of our thirty minute walk to go. Part of our public educational system included regular evacuation-drills in case of fire, bombs or terrorist attacks. Up until the early-nineties, two of the four countries which bordered us―Angola and Mozambique―had Marxist governments and our dad spent time away defending the border during the Bush War when we were much younger. At the age of four or five, Mom and I went to fetch him at an airport where I drank chocolate milk from a yellow plastic cup that looked like the head of a cow.

Seeing military vehicles on a regular basis wherever we drove to far places kept my innocent mind safe. I remember crying whenever I managed to stay up until midnight watching the television broadcast end with our country’s anthem playing while I saw the same bronze statue with our flag in the background. I must have been older then because I could recognize the endless words scrolling across the flickering screen as names of men or boys.

Dad showed us how to wave a special hand-sign to the uniformed soldiers to make them smile, as they walked with their big brown bags over their shoulders along the road on our way to visit my mom’s parents. They lived three hours’ drive from us half way to the Zimbabwean border. Grandpa Phil quit going to school in order to work and pay for his younger siblings’ education. When he married Granny Max he adopted her two disabled sons and took care of them at home for forty years. In this family, I learnt how to write stories, feed wild birds and speak English. When we were eating a meal at the dining table, she used to ring a little bell to call the black lady who helped her cook in the kitchen. When she died, that copper bell ended up in our kitchen cupboard but we have never used it.

My dad was a civil engineer and designed roads and bridges. In our family, we covered a lot of distance into all sorts of uncharted territories. For the first fourteen years of my life, I had never driven over a bridge crossing a river with any water in it. South Africa suffered its worse draught during the twentieth century from the mid seventies to the late eighties. We seriously needed some rain.

My dad’s dad was an important policeman―a giant with silver white hair and light blue eyes who solved murders and was one of the State President’s bodyguards. They lived in the same town as we did and we would visit them often. He used to play the piano and sing many songs about our forefathers and their folklore. He spoke Afrikaans, English, and two local black languages called Sotho and Zulu. Not even the black policemen could tell if it was a white man talking or not. As head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the country in the fifties, he had earlier arrested the leader of an underground, Pro-Nazi resistance group but after being involved in the Rivonia Trail during the sixties where Nelson Mandela was found guilty of treason, he resigned.

His wife wanted to become a lawyer but the university informed her after her first year that women were not allowed to learn anything except how to be a nurse or a teacher. So she became a teacher. After having her three boys she continued to study sociology and later rebelled against the system by means of her doctoral thesis in which she argued for working women to be taxed separately instead of keeping them from employment by adding their income to their husband’s, increasing their taxes.

Besides the weekly reminder to pray for rain, the reality of my childhood existed within the boundaries of international sanctions, living in houses where steel burglar bars covered all window-openings and remembering not ever to leave clothes outside at night on the washing-line to dry because it would be stolen. I was not shocked by black mothers nursing their babies in public or seeing black men relieve themselves against the neighbors’ walls because it happened all the time. But still, I have so many fond memories of sitting together on the grassy sidewalks outside our home listening to the foreign clicking-sounds and musical rhythms of our domestic servant visiting with her friends from the neighborhood. Feeling safe wherever I walked with her to the cafĂ© making sure we were back by five o’clock when she had to start preparing dinner for us.

The general impression in my mind of that time in our country was that everybody in the world hated us for some reason. This prevented us from participating in the Olympics and any international sport-team who visited us had some variation of the word rebels in their name.

A desert is a place without expectation.” – Nadine Gordimer

As a budding adolescent, I realized that something far more serious was wrong in my country when I discovered the reason why my favorite band―U2―did not want to tour our country at the time when they released their Joshua Tree album. Before that moment, I had never registered the word Apartheid.

Considering the hostile history between Boer and British, perhaps my unusual mix of family lineage made me less sensitive to differences. Maybe becoming a teenager was just far more important than why black people were blowing up power lines, setting each other on fire in Soweto and going to work in separate busses every day.

Growing up under such social tension and militarism engrained in me a great respect for discipline, rules and general order. At the same time my rebellious gene pool stemmed from stubborn bloodlines running down into my heart all the way from Germany and Holland. Somehow Africa had seduced me more than what conservatist propaganda could frighten me with. I loved my country and wanted to behave like a patriot but it felt like I was missing out on something important.

The thunder had begun grumbling very softly in the distance but you could smell the rain in the air already.

By the time I turned eighteen, I had read several works of banned novelists that I dug up on my father’s bookshelves. I joined the editorial team of our campus newspaper as a first year architecture student at the University of Pretoria―a traditional white Afrikaans institution where both my parents had studied. As a press photographer I had access to many forums and public events where multi-racial interaction occurred. During one lunch hour we climbed up on to the roof of our building and watched a black student organization protest down below, terrified by the sound of pounding feet and ululating voices.

It was 1992 and the undeniable signs of a miracle shone everywhere. Mandela was free. Communism had failed. CODESAConvention for a Democratic South Africa was working. The Old South Africa stood divided about ceding white control to a volatile group existing of nine different black tribes. The result of the first election I participated in, gave all South Africans the right to vote. My tiny voice rang out in the 68.6 percent of white Afrikaners who wanted to be integrated with the rest of our countrymen and women who shared so many aspects of our daily lives, yet remained strangers, humiliated by our arrogance.

Two years later I felt God’s hand still working this miracle as I stood inline outside the gate of my primary school―side by side with many of the same black faces who visited with me as a little girl on our sidewalk―at our local voting station. Torn between mixed emotions of fearing radical sabotage and the euphoria of finally experiencing an unimaginable liberty in stepping into the unknown together as a newborn nation, we patiently stood sharing umbrellas and cold drinks. We felt proud but unaware that our separate hearts could endure far more extreme passions before they would be forged together into one.

This miracle continued as we celebrated President Nelson Mandela’s inauguration. I suspect that everybody secretly held their breath for the next four years to see if what was happening would last beyond the brightly colored ceremonies. We had a new flag and anthem: Nkosi Sikelele ‘I Afrika―God bless Africa. Each of its four verses sung in one of our nine official languages.

I think I finally exhaled in relief when South Africa won the Rugby World Cup in 1995. My new black president, wearing a green and gold rugby-jersey looked exactly like the most conservative Boerseun would, showing up for this sacred ritual in the Afrikaner culture. He danced over our victory with a smile that refused to leave his gentle face. He associated himself with the one part of the white culture where no black man had ever dared to go. Amidst the smell of spilt Castle Lager and boereworsrolls, he exemplified African community to every South African on that unforgettable winter afternoon, called UbuntuI know who I am because we know who we are.

We had become one people. Simunye―we are one. But our unity would soon endure a baptism of fire as The Truth and Reconciliation Commission induced a two year labor of confession, forgiveness, and an irreversible loss of ignorance.

I stayed on the sixth floor of our apartment building and my bedroom faced north toward the residence of the presidency and government―the Union Buildings. On one particular afternoon as the relentless African sun moved past my window into the west, I listened to the live court hearings over the radio. Hearing a Zulu mother beg a policeman to tell her what happened to her teenage son whom he had dragged from her arms many years ago, I stood staring at those buildings blur until there was no more orange light over the capital.

I believe that every South African mourned a loss of some kind during those years. If ever fallen humanity came close to looking evil straight in the eye, we did. In exposing the lie so many believed to be the truth behind government-indorsed policies and religiously-supported abuse, we took ownership of our sins. We stopped demanding rights and took up our responsibilities. We committed ourselves to one another as we started walking together―barefoot again, along a new road heading toward healing and hope.

A decade later I still watch films like In my Country and Red Dust weeping through most of their familiar sights and sounds. But now these tears are like the summer rains that fall while the sun shines. They are necessary to make the rainbows appear that remind me of my country and a promise never to allow such evil to ever destroy us again.

“And before your very eyes the sun breaks through. You see wild bushwillows bursting from banks and fluitjiesriet flittering out finches. In still hippo-pools, soundless rings slip from fish leaping into the sun. The rain clutches you tightly. It holds you. It hurts you. As if the rain has snipped the wire that draws your insides together.” – Antjie Krog

My name is Leani Wessels and I am South African.