Rwanda Dispatches – Wayne Northey

 

Wayne Northey: The idea of “Rwanda Dispatches” came from my friend Flyn Ritchie, editor of the online journal, Church for Vancouver, who asked me to reflect a bit on our trip to Rwanda.

Once we decided to attend the 2018 International CURE Conference described in my first reflection below, we thought that a 25-hour trip from Vancouver Canada warranted not returning almost immediately at the conclusion of the Conference.

The details of our stay unfolded from the initial choice to fly to Kigali:

• Stay until July 12.
• Contact three Church-based agencies in Rwanda that work with the poor and marginalized of which two responded: Good News of Peace and Development for Rwanda (GNPDR), and Prison Fellowship Rwanda (PFR).
• Offer our volunteer services even if significantly circumscribed by language. (Kinyarwanda is the language spoken by all Rwandans. Swahili is an international trade language (lingua franca) spoken by 50 to 100 millions in the Great Lakes region of east/southeast Africa, namely Rwanda, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Somalia, Mozambique (mostly Mwani), Burundi, Uganda, Comoros, Mayotte, Zambia, Malawi, and Madagascar. Before the 1994 genocide, French was taught in all the schools, and I have used it widely enough with older people. But post-genocide schools have compulsory English classes – language immersion therefore. Of interest is a very widespread use of French first names for children born, a practice that continues into the present.
• Attempt to see through the eyes of the agencies, and in turn see through the eyes of the poor and marginalized to whom the agencies reach out.

As it turned out, we did in fact become involved with one other Church-based ministry, Transformational Ministries, subject of the first reflection below, “Rwanda Bound”.

Before continuing, it is worth airing dirty laundry first, by quoting top Irish literary critic Terry Eagleton, that

Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs.  For the most part, it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive ideology (Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, Terry Eagleton, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, p. xi). My (long) interactive book review is here.)

If one disputes this (well, maybe legitimately “for the most part”), one is hopelessly naïve and uninformed. Or just plain doctrinaire.

On the other hand (there is always a dialectic) one can cite award-winning, retired Canadian journalist Brian Stewart of the Canadian Broadcasting Commission (CBC), who in “On The Front Lines” remarks:

“I’ve found there is NO movement, or force, closer to the raw truth of war, famines, crises, and the vast human predicament, than organized Christianity in Action.”; and again: “I don’t slight any of the hard work done by other religions or those wonderful secular NGO’s I’ve dealt with so much over the years…  But no, so often in desperate areas it is Christian groups there first, that labor heroically during the crisis and continue on long after all the media, and the visiting celebrities have left.

It seems that “religion” when it is bad can be as evil as it gets. When it is good however, it produces towering saints as good as they get, such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Teresa – to choose some 20^th-century examples. There are myriad others, one of whom you will meet if you read on, is retired Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana of Rwanda; and a vast multitude of the self-deprecating unsung to whom Brian Stewart alludes.

It is, of course, ludicrous to dismiss the Bible/Christianity or any other holy book/religion based on its worst exemplars, as Eagleton observes:

Besides, critics of the most enduring form of popular culture in human history [i.e. religion] have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream Christian theology I have outlined here may well be false; but anyone who holds to it is in my view deserving of respect…  Ditchkins [conflation of atheists Christopher Hitchins and Richard Dawkins, whose writings he playfully lampoons repeatedly], by contrast, considers that no religious belief, anywhere or anytime, is worthy of any respect whatsoever.  And this, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism.

Insofar as the faith I have described is neither stupid nor vicious, then I believe it is worth putting in a word for it against the enormous condescension of those like Ditchkins, who in a fine equipoise of arrogance and ignorance assert that all religious belief is repulsive (pp. 33 & 34).

I thought to get that out of the way first.

To the point: my wife and I have been profoundly impacted by the dedication, creativity, and as Brian Stewart paraphrased puts it, sheer “love in action” of the Church-based agencies with which we work here in Rwanda. Stewart said this just before the above quote:

For many years I’ve been struck by the rather blithe notion, spread in many circles including the media, and taken up by a rather large section of our younger population that organized, mainstream Christianity has been reduced to a musty, dimly lit backwater of contemporary life, a fading force. Well, I’m here to tell you from what I’ve seen from my “ring-side seat” at events over decades that there is nothing that is further from the truth. That notion is a serious distortion of reality.

And freelance Canadian Columnist Barbara Kay wrote this on June 22, 2005 in Canada’s National Post:

The Christian faith, uniquely among the world’s religions, has inspired an awesome tradition of ministering to the lepers most of us cannot bear to look at.

Again, in an April 21, 2005 article in the National Post, in response to the willfully and woefully ignorant (of academic studies about CoSA’s (see below) immense success) Harper government decision to discontinue what was shoe-string funding anyway, she wrote:

Most CoSA volunteers are Christian and see their work as a religious calling, although they scrupulously avoid evangelizing in their work with offenders.

What struck me about CoSA when I first ran across it some 10 years ago is the fact it is work only people of religious faith would do. There are some forms of public service that are so difficult they can only be motivated by the sincere belief that within all of us — even pedophiles — there is some divine grace that deserves forgiveness and nurturing. ‎Many progressives wish religion would disappear utterly from the public forum. But I daresay there are precious few secular progressives who would commit to “walk with” (as CoSA puts it) the men in the CoSA program for hours every week, year after year, to ensure they do not reoffend.

I make no claim about the accuracy of her first statement with reference to other religions, nor do only religious people work with such offenders. Many now with the programs she was commenting on in Canada and around the world belie that.

Kay was writing about a program first developed in Canada, designed to work with Canada’s still current ultimate pariahs – released high risk sex offenders – when rape and murder accomplice Karla Homolka, had asked for such a Circle. I can nonetheless vouch for the profoundly Christian origins of Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) in Canada, a highly successful Restorative Justice program (Restorative Justice in its use of mediation worldwide is another Canadian first, and also has profoundly Christian origins – long since with worldwide impact), based on numerous evidence-based studies in Canada and elsewhere.

I, in fact, sit on the national Board that last year received $7.5 million from Public Safety Canada for five years, to assist in the operation of 14 such programs spread out across Canada. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale in speaking at the national program’s official launch November 2017, cited those studies in part for his Department’s (through National Crime Prevention Strategy) granting that funding. A high percentage of those currently active in CoSA Canada and its related sites are “religious”: specifically, are motivated by Christian faith.

And yet I have friends to whom I have directed attention to the above (such) articles, not to mention having had many discussions with them over the years on this, who like the worst of religious fundamentalists, dogmatically dismiss the institutional Church. Perhaps they should read Terry Eagleton’s book (or my review/interactions with it) to see how rigidly and one-sidedly doctrinaire they sound, sadly (and all unawares) worthy indeed of Eagleton’s playfully conflated epithet about Hitchins and Dawkins: Ditchkins – that is to say in the end on this matter (my interpretation) brittle bumpkins.

Charles Dickens began his famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities, with:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Surely this speaks to the nature of human history and to the human condition! Universities and the brightest scientists split the atom, thereby unleashing on humanity and the planet permanent threat of utter annihilation… And with madman Trump, we came perilously close, remain so with him at the helm of the US stockpile of nuclear weapons capable of destroying all sentient life on the planet many times over. Hell, not just madman Trump, but madman Uncle Sam, and all other states prepared to use such beyond-the-pale evil weaponry.

And the same kinds of “honourable” family-loving and cultured scientists, like Nazi guards who committed horrors by day and came home, hugged their kids and went off to the Opera by night with their wives, have developed the most diabolical weapons known to humanity… I could go on and on… One need only read historian Alfred McCoy’s newest book about the witch’s brew of cyber horrors being concocted by those same kinds of Nazi-like scientists under the watchful eyes of the Nazi-like US government (that currently is dropping bombs on all manner of innocents somewhere outside America – so far – every 12 minutes) to get it about the leading current “democracy” (and we in the West deeply embedded with it) blithely carrying out mass slaughter on a  scale beyond diabolical – if that’s possible!

One should rightly rail against all Nazi Doctors of Death, and the brutal tens of thousands of Rwandan killers (and worse). Do we also then rail against all doctors, against all scientists? Against all universities? Against all governments? The point could be made in any number of ways.

Here is one more: Were a Martian to visit our Planet to study humanity, his report back home might be that humanity is hopelessly given to perpetual and horrific violence. And he would be right – as far as it goes.

But he, of course, would be wrong if he stopped there – beyond-the-pale wrong!

The Church and all religions participate in the human condition equally with the best and the worst of us, and of humanity’s institutions. Of course, there are exclusionary dynamics present in the Church! What human institution/collective/society/government does not have such?! Boundaries are the very stuff of the human enterprise. However, in the case of the Story of Jesus, anthropologist René Girard asserts that the human condition is across Time and Planet ubiquitously mimetic in its violence and scapegoating, to which the Jesus Narrative provides the Way out. In that Way, Jesus taught his followers (should-be imitators) to draw a Circle of Inclusion around enemy and friend/family alike, and ceaselessly (like God in Christ’s Atonement – see Romans 5:6 – 11; Ephesians 5:1 & 2) invite everyone in. Now that is world-shaking Good News!

Has the Church since Christ across all times and societies lived up to that? Hardly – emphatically No! Has anyone/religion/political party/you-name-it lived up to whatever ideals espoused? Hardly – emphatically No! So where does that leave one? Siding after all with that imaginary Martian? Hardly – emphatically No! It leaves one rather not a little humbled at the prospect before us of a long way to go before one could declare “Kingdom Come”. That’s why Jesus taught us ever to pray Thy Kingdom Come…

So back to the Church. 20^th-century mystic Simone Weil, who never joined the institutional Church, wrote that “The Church is a great totalitarian Beast with an irreducible kernel of Truth.” And of course, Jesus is that Truth! I can go with that – though my wife and I are gratefully part of a Mennonite Church.

And there is an African proverb that goes: “The Church is hopeless. The Church is the only Hope.” I can go with that too, thereby acknowledging the dialectic of human experience, not least of the very human institution – in often enough not-so-healthy myriad shards – called Church.

Caroline Casey (host of the “Visionary Activist” radio program on www.kpfa.org) remarked: “The church is an ordeal – Take the sacraments and run! ” I understand that sentiment too!

Maybe that is a sufficiently far-afield introduction to the Rwandan reflections below: glimpses indeed of believers caught up in the messy Story called Church; and seeing through Church-ministry eyes something of God’s amazing Grace at work in a land that is haunted everywhere by horror and tragedy – and will remain so for a long time to come.

CLICK HERE to continue to Wayne Northey's four-part Rwanda Dispatch