The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. [Psalms 19:1b]
Mweya Safari Lodge
Rwanda is a small country. Moving around did not take much effort. Yet our short visit was exhausting because it was emotionally draining. On our return to Uganda, our first stop was the Queen Elizabeth National Park. Various members in the group wanted a game park included in the itinerary. We could not schedule a time-and-cost-prohibitive detour to the world-renowned Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. But, from the bottom of our hearts we thanked God for the gift of the seriously beautiful Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park, and we thanked Fr. Emmanuel profusely for arranging for us to stay one night at the Mweya Safari Lodge on the Park.
In its publicity on the internet, the Lodge assures visitors “broader horizons guaranteed” and promises:
- Mweya Safari Lodge offers visitors an unforgettable experience. Located on a peninsula within the heart of the Queen Elizabeth National Park, Mweya Safari Lodge is surrounded by the magical Rwenzori Mountains aptly described as the ‘Mountains of the Moon’. To the east, lie the guardians of the birthplace of mankind, the Great Rift Valley hills, separated from the Mountains of the Moon by the meandering Kazinga Channel. Here the water flows endlessly into two giant lakes – Lake George and Lake Edward. We believe beyond doubt that unique encounters always begin off the beaten track…
After an excruciating few days in Rwanda, we experienced our brief stay on the Park as a tremendous gift of peace and rest in the scenic beauty of God’s creation. Those in the group who loved to see wild animals were able to feast their eyes with an afternoon lake-cruise and an early morning game-drive in search of a wide variety of animals. Key species include buffalo, elephant, hippopotamus and lion, and a huge range of birds. Those of us, and that probably included all in the group, who longed for superb hotel facilities and food, especially after that painful trip to Rwanda, really felt pampered at Mweya. Where water often flows but hesitantly in many hotels in Rwanda and Uganda, here at the Myeya Safari Lodge, water pours down like no tomorrow from a huge shower-head in every room, making every visitor feel like a happy hippo that they see on the river cruise. And the view from the room is just out of this world.
On our part, the Book of Wisdom served well as our entry point for a grateful reflection. The sacred author elevated our vision Godward, articulating what we felt in our hearts, that from the greatness and the beauty of created things, their original author, by analogy, was seen [Wisdom 13:1-9].
The wisdom of Archbishop Desmond Tutu added to our vision of things:
- “The first law of our being is that we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation.”
We have been brought to an elevated location to see that what happened in the Rwandan genocide was a serious forgetfulness of the Creator God. Nestled in a scenic land of a thousand rolling hills, the Rwandans had forgotten the “God, the Father the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth”. Superficially enjoying the distinction of being the most Christian African nation, the Rwandans had forgotten about co-humanity, solidarity and interdependence with fellow human beings and the rest of God’s creation.
Myeya also opened our eyes to a larger tragedy. Looking across the lake at God’s creation from our hotel room balcony, we realized that this Rwandan “forgetfulness” of God mirrored all too closely our frequent amnesia of our Christian identity and all that it entails. In Christ, St Paul insists, there is supposed to be neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, and neither male nor female [Galatians 3:28]. And yet, everywhere we turn, within ourselves and around us, walls of separation are erected and strenuously defended, just as surely as hierarchical distinctions are vehemently enforced, all for the purposes of protecting privileged positions and ideological high horses. Created free by the Almighty, we are so “un-free” wherever we see the reality of the “colonizer” and the “colonized” manifested in myriad forms in world politics just as much as within nations, in global as in local trade and commerce, at work, at home and, worst of all, in the Church that claims to know better.
Against all this, the Queen Elizabeth National Park became for us an uplifting re-affirmation of God’s goodness and God’s good and free gifts in creation. The inspired author of the first creation story in the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis suggests that after creating the first man and woman, and after inspecting all that He had made, the Creator-God declared His wholesome creation as being “very good”. And yet, against the Almighty Creator who declared the human race – the crown of creation – as part and parcel of his “very good” creation, a half nation of “Christians” dared single out an integral part of it – in this case a race called the Tutsis – and called it abhorrent, unfit to live, but fit for extermination. In all this, some people had decided to play “God”. We must see genocide as discrimination at its worst possible degree; it is racial hatred gone utterly mad. Left unattended, that hatred festered like a bad sore into extreme violence.
But, we must surely know, discrimination comes in different forms and is cleverly hidden under different hues and guises. Underneath all discriminations, however, is hatred. Left unattended, they fester like very bad sores. Underneath them all, violence simmers and is carried out under different guises. How does all this affect you? Is it in any way relevant to the life in your corner of the earth? Fr. Emmanuel Katongole in his book critically suggests that the violence in the Rwandan genocide is a Mirror to the Church. What manner of ugly “tribalism” and bad “theology” do you see in your church that is doing “violence” to the People of God? An adult Christian faith must compel us to ask many questions. To guide our reflections, it is well to remember what the Lord Jesus himself taught in the great Sermon on the Mount – that, at the deeper spiritual level, just as “adultery” is not limited to the physical act, “murder” is not restricted to physical killing [See Matthew 5 in today’s Gospel reading on the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time].
For starters, we can take the pervasive phenomenon of prejudice against women in the Church. Prejudice against women in the Church is so objectionable because it is discrimination and violence at the same time. At its core, this prejudice works violence against women’s God-given dignity and their fundamental human right for equal respect. In a serious way, we need to reassess the cultural values in our church in order to comprehend more fully women’s powerlessness and silence. We need to confront the politics of violence.
In our local church – the Archdiocese of Kuching in Malaysia – women faithful, unlike their male half of the faith community, suffer more than their usual share of discrimination compared with their counterparts in the rest of this region. In Kuching, lay women are not permitted to distribute Communion during Mass, for they are somehow deemed by the hierarchy as being “unfit” to handle holy and sacred objects. This is doing violence, not in a physical way as in Rwanda, but in a spiritual way in a church setting. This is murder, not in the sense of snuffing out innocent human lives in Rwanda, but in robbing the God-given fundamental dignity and equality of women faithful in a faith community. Visitors from other dioceses of Malaysia-Singapore-Brunei invariably express shock after attending Mass at our cathedral. The very fact that they notice this discrimination and, unprompted, express their shock, is not altogether surprising, for such a blatant exclusion of the women faithful has been rectified many years ago and is no longer practiced in their local churches during liturgical celebrations. Visitors are aghast at the politics of violence so blatantly at play against Catholic women in Kuching. In years past, Malaysia was abuzz over the use of a word by an Australian prime minister on our own prime minister. The word was “recalcitrant”. We had a lot of fun talking about it then. But today, “fun” is the last thing on our minds as we realize that in the context of the Catholic Conference of Malaysia-Singapore-Brunei, as far as we know, Kuching alone wears that label when it comes to this lone-ranger persistence, obstinacy and arrogance in disqualifying women faithful from distributing Communion at Mass. As we all know, signs and symbols speak volumes when Christians gather in communal celebrations.
- Today, it is the dastardly reality, even as we call each other “brothers and sisters” [and some clergymen would say “sisters and brothers” like it would then make things “ok”] in communal gatherings where Christian discipleship is not only heard but seen, that we have the most segregated and male-dominated spaces on earth.
- These symbolic pointers burn deep in the psyche even though the people may not be very conscious of them, and are certainly quite unable to articulate them. There is no denying that from young, kids in the Catholic Church are being socialized into the official narrative that speaks loud and clear to an inequality of the genders as acceptable and an inferior dignity of the females as a matter of course.
- In whatever manner you may attempt to spin it, such a glaring exclusion of the women faithful during communal celebrations can only originate from a colonizer-mentality that has nothing to do with a servant-mentality. The colonizers are the ones telling the colonized who they are and what their proper places are. In Kuching, the women faithful are not told in so many words, but the message is loud and clear that they are deemed “unclean” and “unfit”. “We are the ones to decide,” the colonizers insist vehemently and pronounce loudly. From here, it does not require much imagination to figure out why the Holy Thursday foot-washing liturgy is so obstinately anti-women in its fierce exclusion of female-feet, thereby effectively reducing the social-justice-conscious Pope Francis to quite a heretic for washing, and kissing, female feet! Sitting behind bars in the Birmingham city jail fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. penned prophetic words in the margins of the newspaper that carried the racist white clergymen’s call for “law and order and common sense”. They were actually calling for unity against “outside agitators”. King’s response was: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
- A basic tenet in civil administrative law is that what is officially done is not necessarily the law; rather, what is officially done must be done in accordance with the law! Similarly, what is officially done in the church must not be confused with the will of God, for it is all too easy, especially in the religious domain where the concept of “obedience” is grossly abused, to equate the politics of men with the will of God. Rather, what ought to be the very basic understanding for all Christians is: what is officially done in the faith community, because it is a believing community and not a godless one, ought to be done in accordance with the will of God. But the Bible never asks the churches to treat women as second-class citizens in the kingdom of God. In the Church’s discrimination against women, the insolence towards God is quite unimaginable, let alone the blatant insult to the always fundamentally more faithful half of the believing community – the women faithful! Was Jesus not born of a woman? Do we each not have a mother? How does it help that we go round calling Jesus, “Lord, Lord”? Isn’t the pretty label “Word-centred community” an empty slogan quite vacuous of meaning and substance?
- Clearly, speaking up against this injustice and interrupting this unseemly violence against the basic rights of our “sisters” in faith is a basic duty of all in the faith community. That some ordained ministers would murmur to us in private against this state of affairs but would not openly raise the matter within the presbyterium, exposes a troubling reality – that, far too often, members of the ordained would embrace a culture of “silence”, and a culture of “obedience”, even when they know full well that this is contrary to the gospel. Is “Rwanda” all that far from here?
Fresh from a painful and disturbing experience getting to grips with some history of the Rwandan genocide, the experience of the original beauty in God’s creation at Queen Elizabeth National Park elevated our thoughts to the experience of Peter, James and John up on the mountain of transfiguration. In a way like them, we too, had a glimpse of the sheer brilliance and beauty of God’s plan for a noble and beautiful human life. Again, in a way like them, we too, thought it was very good to be up at the Mweya Safari Lodge and wished that we could stay longer – like a week! – to rest, breathe, and reflect. We lamented that the stay was way too short.
And yet, our need to leave the Lodge and the Park so soon after that wonderful experience corresponded with the disciples having to descend at once from Mount Tabor right after witnessing Christ’s brilliance. But why did they have to leave so soon? The answer, of course, awaited them on the plain – a place of “no height”, a place of harsh human realities . The moment they got down to the real life setting on the plain, they had their work cut out for them. There to meet them was a great crowd with their pressing problems needing urgent pastoral help [Mark 9:2-29]. In other words, immediately after the fantastic scene on the mountain of transfiguration, where Peter said “It is good to be here, Lord,” and wanting to stay around building more tents for long stay, the gospel says Peter’s wrong vision had to be stopped, for he knew not what he was saying. The scene at the foot of the mountain was one of massive human needs that demanded massive and urgent pastoral attention which an extended stay on the mountain top could only deny. Raphael captured this contrast brilliantly in his painting, integrating the two contrasting scenes into one frame, and dividing the panel into two halves. The top half discloses God’s fantastic revelation on mountain top; the bottom half features the pressing needs of the real world here below. Again, in a way like the three chosen disciples up on Mount Tabor, we too realized with gratitude that the revelation of God’s grandeur at the Park was to strengthen us for the real work in the “kitchen” on the plain which the real world is.
Seeing all that, we realized the need to be grateful for the sights and sounds and the vision of God’s good gifts in creation. They constituted for us the “top half” in which God’s fantastic revelation is conveyed through the beauty of all that we can see and observe around us. They drew out a deep sense of fundamental gratefulness for the gift of all the conditions of possibility in life. At the same time, they pointed towards the “bottom half” of the picture that was yet to come for us. Truly, it dawned ever so clearly once again, that while we cannot change the past, we can improve the future. For we realized, too, that a gift is always a task and a call to respond appropriately. Everyone is “gifted” in some ways; in a deep sense, everyone is “called”. Hence, the gift of creation is at the same time a duty to flourish to the best extent we can and to promote the flourishing in others’ gifts.
And then, in ways which caught us by pleasant surprise, our thoughts took us to the writings of St Anselm of Canterbury [1033-1109] in Christological studies where he proposed what has become known as the “Satisfaction Model” for understanding how Jesus saved the world. Basically a penal vicarious atonement theory, St Anselm’s model brought something entirely new to theology and was massively influential throughout the Middle Ages and continues to be an important reference point in some quarters even in contemporary times. But the heavily legalistic slant in his approach, useful for his situation in life, coupled with a heavy emphasis on the penal requirement of divine justice, has rendered his model quite unacceptable to the majority of theologians today. Nevertheless, there is one point in his thesis which is of interest to us in the context of our reflection here. Anselm’s starting point was an assessment of sin and its effect.
- Sin, or human disobedience, has offended the divine honour. But, Anselm distinguished God’s honour in two ways: one is God’s honour “as it affects himself”; and the other is God’s honour “as far as it affects the creature”. God’s honour in Godself cannot be affected by human sin; God’s honour does not depend on what humans do or fail to do. When humanity sins, what needs repair is not God’s honour in Godself, but the dire consequences sin leaves behind in its trail within human lives and in human society. Beginning from the order of the universe, therefore, Anselm saw human sinfulness as having disturbed the harmonious order which God had created for the good and the benefit of creation. Shalom in creation has been disturbed. It is that disturbance to peace and wellness in creation which needs repair if humanity were to be brought back from madness and chaos to sanity and peace. Sinful humanity by itself could not repair the damage done. The bottom line is, only the sinless God-in-His-Son can do it. Incarnation, for St Anselm, is indispensable for salvation, for shalom to be restored to the created world.
From the mountain top, as it were, and the scenic beauty of Mweya, our consciousness will henceforth be marked by the horizon offered by St. Anselm some 900 years ago, that in and through human sin, the shalom in creation has been disturbed. God’s honour in the created universe, which is meant for the good and welfare of all creatures, can only be put right in our lives when we return to the way of Christ, the way of salvation. And Christ is inclusive, not exclusive.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, February 2014. All rights reserved.
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