breakfast with the archbishop wasn’t the first or last time that i had the opportunity to meet or speak with him, but it was the most i’ve interacted with him. i see him fairly regularly, mostly in the faculty-staff lounge, but i don’t disturb him because i know he’s there to deal with correspondence. he’s commented to me about the challenges of dealing with email - like the rest of us, the volume, spam etc. at breakfast we discussed his stay at oprah’s montecito estate, books, mrs. tutu’s (she’ll be joining us in cape town) recovery from knee replacement surgery, why he still keeps such a heavy schedule, why he wanted to do the entire voyage (he’s sailed partial voyages before as a guest lecturer) and nelson mandela’s health. in order to protect the archbishop’s privacy i’m not going to reveal the details of our conversation over the internet. the blog is intended for my friends, family and colleagues. because of that i forget that the whole world can read it too. i will say that i found it amusing that the archbishop prefaced his remarks about his stay at oprah’s with “i don’t want to drop names or anything, but….” in addition to enjoying oprah’s lavish accommodations (no surprise there), oprah made sure he had as many smoothies - the archbishop loves smoothies – as he wanted. the archbishop mostly keeps to himself, except for meals, when he has to access the internet, and for shipboard programs and media events, like when the governor of puerto rico came aboard to welcome us. he’s primarily here for down time. we’ve been instructed to address him as archbishop, father (the formal), or arch (the familiar). he is very paternal and puts one at ease immediately. walking with him, he tenderly, placed his hand in my lower back. i would love to follow him around just to hear all the crazy things people say to him. he passes the library on his way to and from the dining hall. once i heard a student say to him, “i think i have bed bugs, do you have bed bugs”? he relied, “no, I’m good”. another time, after getting his food from the buffet, i saw him sit down with a group of students in the dining hall. you should have seen the looks on their faces. they didn’t know what to say or do. i wish i could have stayed to watch. i’m sure he had them laughing at and at ease in no time.
i’m still working my way through rabble rouser for peace his biography. it’s my shipboard reading, and i’ve only recently been able to find time to read at length on the ship. it's too thick to travel with in port. i’ve been struck by how much loss the archbishop has experienced, seeing several of his communities destroyed. also, the resistance, and outright, and unapologetic opposition to his social justice work from within the church is amazing. one church authority wrote “There are clergy in South Africa who are toying with the sort of thing that Martin Luther King did in America – I want to tell them: Cut it out! Cut it out!” (rabble-rouser, 118). why is it that institutionalized religion often supports racist and oppressive social and public policies – apartheid, slavery, jim crow, eugenics. i’m sure the list is longer, if you can think of others, post them to the blog. the archbishop once wrote, “If the white man is so made that he finds it generally difficult to understand the meaning of apparently straightforward sentences… such as ‘God loves you,’ then perhaps the white theologian is justified in being concerned with Wittenstein, with verification principal et al…Black theology seeks to make sense of the life experience of the black man, which is largely black suffering at the hands of rampant white racism, and to understand this in the light of what God has said about himself, about man, and about the world is a very definitive Word…Black theology has to do with whether it is possible to be black and continue to be Christian; it is to ask on whose side is God; it is to be concerned about the humanisation of man, because those who ravage our humanity dehumanise themselves in the process; [it says] that the liberation of the black man is the other side of the coin of the liberation of the white man – so it is concerned with human liberation. It is a clarion call for man to align himself with the God who is the god of Exodus… the liberator… who leads his people, all his people, out of all kinds of bondage – political, economic, cultural, the bondage of sin and disease into the glorious liberty of the sons of God” (rabble-rouser, 138-139).
