African Time (and What It Might Mean for South Africa)

South Africa struggles with its tendency to operate on “African time.” Brother Timothy at Mariya uMama weThemba describes African time this way: whatever needs to be done, “it will happen, when it happens, if it happens.” Many South Africans (business people mostly, I suspect) are trying to push their country to move away from African time so it can meet the requirements of efficiency and productivity that drive Western businesses.

That is all well and good: South Africa’s standard of living depends on it. But I also think there are lessons to be learned from African time.

The personal lessons are clear enough. After just two weeks in a culture where things take extra time and often happen imperfectly, I’ve found myself learning to accept it with an easy grace. I’m not sure I would react the same way in the U.S. I know many Americans wouldn’t: we are, by culture, an impatient people.

Right now, so are many poor South Africans. It has been 12 years since the ANC took the reins of government, and the lot of the poor has improved little, if at all. Coping with poverty takes a terrible toll on one’s psyche, so the impatience is understandable—and leaders surely need to respond.

And yet I wonder whether African time, in another way, applies to South Africa itself. One thing I have begun to appreciate while here is just how slowly social change takes place. After the exhilaration of dramatic reversals—whether the end of apartheid or the fall of the Soviet Union—comes the hard, grinding work of making life better. Maybe the sheer immensity of the task makes the slow pace of change inevitable. Even the U.S. took a couple of decades after 1776 to get its government down pat.

So what’s the import of all this? How do you convince a people that social change “happens on African time”? Is it even moral to do so? Can you do it and still hold leaders strictly accountable to improve the lot of their people with all due speed? And how important is this balancing act of managing expectations to keep an entire nation on course?

In South Africa I Heard a Voice

The poor in South Africa walk everywhere. They really have no choice. Drive on any road, no matter how remote, and you’re bound to see people walking alongside it.

I believe God used that experience to impress something on my soul.

One day at Mariya uMama weThemba monastery, I went for a run down the rutted, pockmarked road that leads up the mountain. As usual, I tried to pray as I ran; as usual, I could not keep my mind on anything. The intense South African sun kept my eyes squarely on the hardscrabble road. Finally, in one of my bursts of mid-prayer-failure honesty, I just thought, “Forget it. I can’t pray. I can’t do anything, except stare at the damned road.”

And I could sense the voice of God saying to me, “It’s OK. I am in the road too. I must be, to support the feet of the poor as they walk and walk.”

I cannot escape that sense of panentheism—God in everything—as I travel through South Africa. The monastery chapel window commands a view over the veld on the big sweeping hills, and over and over I have sensed a deep closeness between that view and the God who made it. No wonder primitive humans, viewing their surroundings with awe, considered them the work of a local god.

Our worldview has grown larger, but the connection remains. Now, we see that all creation hums with the One who created it. Which makes everything alive in ways we cannot imagine.

And it makes God present in ways we cannot imagine. To desire such closeness with us that he even supports the poor as they walk—and gives hope to all of us. Love so close. This truly is a God worth knowing.

How Important Are You?

You don’t have to be important to be important.

As strange as that sounds, you can see the truth of it throughout the stories of the church. Take the famous passage from Ecclesiasticus 44:

Let us now praise famous people, our ancestors in their generations. The Lord gave them great glory, his majesty from the beginning….Of others there is no memory; they died as though they had never been born; and their children after them. But these also were godly people, whose good deeds have not been forgotten.

This kind of invisibility has, paradoxically, brought sainthood to some. The life’s work of St. Monica was, as the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, “to have literally wrestled with God for the soul of her son”—St. Augustine. While St. Willibrord, whom we celebrated November 7, helped convert the people of the Netherlands, he also paved the way for the tireless and more widespread evangelism of St. Boniface.

Clearly, for some people, a large part of the mission is simply to prepare the way for the full flowering of God’s action in a particular time and place. The contributions of others, however, are even more obscure—like yours and mine.

Which makes the words of Ecclesiasticus so profoundly comforting. Most of us are part of the teeming masses whose lives will not appear in any history book. And yet that should not stop us from living faithfully—for those faithful actions, however small they seem, might just resound through the ages.

I Have a Religious Objection to Cellphones

One day, after lunch at the Calabash in Grahamstown, South Africa, we held a door open for another couple. As we did, they asked us where we were from. That chance question led to a 45-minute conversation about crime in South Africa, the current government, their children’s struggles with boarding school, their current lifestyle (he has left the 80-hour weeks behind to work part-time and live here), etc. Who knows? Maybe they needed to express a lot of that, and the conversation did them good. In any event, we learned even more about the extraordinary place that South Africa is.

If we had been on cellphones when we opened that door, we would have missed all that—and the door would have closed in their faces.

Multiply that by several hundred, and you might understand my eccentric objection. Through the habitual use of cellphones, we’re suddenly living our lives somewhere else, all the time. What’s more, it’s even difficult to pay full attention to the person on the other end of the line.

Paying attention to the here, and the now, that God has given us is a priority in many spiritual traditions. When we pay attention, we give our entire selves to the matter at hand. We might be surprised by what unfolds before us. Most important, we tune our heart to pay attention to God, wherever he might choose to encounter us. What better way to cultivate a friendship with God than to be prepared—at every moment—to hear his voice?

Accept What Is

It was my first day at Mariya uMama weThemba monastery in South Africa. I had gone there, as I posted earlier, to “live with people from another country and lend a hand where asked.”

To that point, no one had asked.

My wife was using her library science skills to help catalog the monks’ library. But there seemed to be no task for me. And all those feelings of uselessness came to the surface. “What will happen if I’m not ‘productive’ today? Why can’t they find me something to do? Why is doing so important anyway?”

Perhaps it isn’t.

As it turned out, that was part of the wisdom that the day held for me. It was enough to try to recover from a growing respiratory infection, to do what I could to rest and recuperate, perhaps even to write things whose value I could never comprehend.

It was, in truth, the same old lesson that I had heard a thousand times already. And I must hear it again and again and again, because I clearly haven’t learned it yet. It is such a simple lesson: accept what is.

Accept what is.

What Vocation Looks Like, or Why Am I Writing This Blog?

Way back when, in the very first post, I half-kiddingly wrote that “God told me to start a blog.”

Did he really?

I have many, many doubts about this call to write. Somehow my musings don’t seem useful (but in what sense of the word?). Sometimes I seem to be casting about for topics. Sometimes I’m not sure whether I’m “supposed” to write when I don’t “feel” the movement of the Spirit.

And yet…

Whenever I sit down to write an entry, I feel a verve running through me—an aliveness, if you will. A sense that this is precisely the right thing to do at precisely this stage of my life. I do not know where this is headed. I do not know whether a book will come out of it, or an avocation in spiritual writing, or nothing at all. I seem to have been left with nothing but the writing itself.

Perhaps this is what vocation looks like. You find out a little at a time. You feel your way in the dark. You remain faithful to what you’ve been asked to do, with no concern for results.

And who said “did he really?” in the first place? Was it not the serpent?

Why Silence?

My monastery has a practice called The Great Silence. From 9:00 at night till after Eucharist the next morning, no one speaks (except when necessary).

Why?

Perhaps most obviously, silence creates a home for the spiritual life. By silencing the sounds of the everyday—both our penchant for talk and the constant noise of our culture—it allows the voice of God to come through. As we settle into silence, we quite naturally listen more attentively, tilling the soil into which God sows his word.

When silence is practiced, it usually comes with a certain “sign language” that helps monastery visitors pass the butter at the breakfast table. I’ve wondered, though, what would happen if we didn’t use any means to communicate. We might miss out on the butter—and learn to enjoy our meal without it. We might not be able to communicate something important—only to find out it’s not that important after all.

We might, in short, accept what is in front of us as gift, no more, no less. It is only one short step from there to gratitude, which opens our heart in just the way God needs in order to do his work.

A Meditation for Thanksgiving (One Day Late)

This morning’s email included an eloquent Thanksgiving meditation from Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine. (I can’t find it on the Tikkun website; if you’d like a copy, email me.) He encouraged his readers to respond with their own meditations. Having just returned from South Africa—and seen the brutal poverty that still plagues so many of its people—I found the following response recurring in my thoughts during Thanksgiving Day.

To the One Who provides all things:

“Thank you for this food” is such a throwaway phrase. Yet here, now, on this Thanksgiving, I see the why behind it. I have met people who struggle to put even a daily meal on their tables, let alone “three squares.” I have seen the places where hunger haunts those who have so long felt the haunt of oppression. The memory of them makes the feast before me an embarrassment. Yet this feast is Your gift to me, just as their memory is Your gift to me. I bless you for both: the abundance You share with me and those I love, the common humanity that binds me with the hungry ones. May my remembrance of each—and my gratitude for both—never cease.