Sunday Letter and Prayer for South Sudanese, Christian and Traditionalist alike
By Mark Francis, Canada
April 24, 2016 (SSB) — My perspective comes from being a convert to Christianity later in life at the age of 40, well past the age when most of the Christians reading this letter accepted Christ as the light of the world, and belief that Christ embodies our need to forgive others and also to be forgiven. Please forgive me for whatever below is not correct:
Amidst the suffering, one blessing of South Sudanese countrymen being dispersed over much of the world including Canada is that many of us here have had the pleasure and benefit of meeting a number of your countrymen, and learning first hand of your trials. My first awareness of your plight came from the Christian Science Monitor in 1990 or so which even then described what was happening to the peoples of South Sudan as a genocide and the largest since the Nazi holocaust of the Jews. Today Western media and governments, wanting to be caring, discuss tribal violence as the cause of South Sudan’s current agonies, but ignore the deeper cause of which the media will not speak.
This implicit denial of the genocide by both media and governments (and insistence that you keep a relationship with your former oppressors, forcing poor economic, employment, political and social bargains on you as an unjust extorted price for your deserved freedom) does not help you to address the human, psychological, and societal damage. In order to deal with the consequences of it, you must mark this genocide and name it for what it was, but also more: You must also examine historical examples of what worked to help bring positive change within societies similarly victimized.
The peoples of South Sudan are not the first to have suffered a great oppression only to find themselves, once free, unable to find their footing. The Hebrews wandered for 40 years in the desert, in part because their slavery to Pharaoh had undermined their value system, which Moses had to reinstitute but also change with what one might call some “new instructions”. Centuries later they struggled again when the Persian King Cyrus released them to return to Jerusalem, though many now known as Jews chose to remain scattered throughout the Persian Empire. Interestingly, critical changes also related to how individual people and families decided to live their lives –changes brought and wrought by good leaders were insufficient alone.
The South Koreans also suffered brutish violation over the last century, and especially during WW II, but have in such a short time built a strong country, and did so for the first 3 decades without the benefits of free trade access such as China has had. What did they do?
How can people trust enough in the future to have the faith to resume planting crops, even if they can afford seed, when so often in the last few decades it has been a formula for dissipating valuable resources? How can a person not respond to unfairness with violence, when for so many years not fighting back immediately meant one’s loved ones would be violated or killed? And how to let go of the only behaviour which worked under the stress of oppression, with what to replace it, and how?
But it gets even harder: To be blunt, peoples of many religions and countries have been severely disrupted by vehement Islamic assault, and have also struggled afterwards to repair their societies. You needed to fight not just for your independence but also freedom from the injustice of sharia law; however, the effects of having to fight such a vicious opponent for so long has affected both the fighters and their families and communities.
After 40 years of fighting as a response to brutish oppression, fighting is now the default response to a perception that another is attempting to dominate. Compromise always feels like giving in, and indeed against a demonstrated enemy of one’s family would be wrong to do. But within a community or family, or country, as Christ teaches us, forbearance and forgiveness are crucial. It is hard enough for any one person (me) to change a bad personal habit; how much harder for whole families and communities to change patterns that have been necessary for survival for 40 years!
And this is where Christ comes in. Christ does not reject the obligation of the strong to protect the vulnerable, as South Sudan’s freedom fighters did, but with freedom won the balm for the awful wounds, the salving of terrible suffering cannot come about with more of the same force, but only with forgiveness. During the US civil rights movement Martin Luther King wrote that unearned suffering is redemptive, but he also believed that for the suffering to come to a close, all Americans had to make difficult changes, different for each, in their behaviour, not just changes to laws, and he wrote and spoke about forgiveness being crucial.
The Dalai Lama talked about soldiers and how they had to change a part of their human selves in order to be good soldiers to defend the community, and that their psyches would never be the same, perhaps never at rest. The violence of the 2nd World War affected the minds and hearts of many of those who fought to defend the world from Hitler’s Nazis and the evils of the Axis Powers, and they struggled when they came home even when to lives of safety and security. Soldiers need to be loved as humans for a long time.
Those who waited in anguish and often in starvation for the fighters to finally succeed – their families – suffered differently: Peoples driven by the unjust bombings and violence to seek safe harbor in the lands of other communities, putting pressure on all. Customs, family patterns, farming, economic activity, the little things that mothers and fathers do to help families grow harmoniously, all disrupted, much of it lost. One example would be the singing for which Dinka and Nuer were famous now being almost gone.
Perhaps also the ancient Jewish prophets whom Christ affirmed, and the Jewish rabbis throughout the Middle Ages who helped guide Jewish families to successful lives in the face of institutionalized prejudice, can provide clues as to daily behavior patterns the people of South Sudan might develop.
Consider those in power, without having their families at home each night, causing both them and their families to suffer: Might they forget the most important reason for why they are there to govern? The old rabbis were surely thinking of this when they created Jewish laws about men being required to make love to their wives regularly, even if it meant traveling home from abroad. And at home over dinner they would teach their children. Men and women and their children then acknowledge how much they need love, and that when they do allow themselves this richness they no longer feel as strong a need to gain power over others, though they will fight more determinedly and with greater discipline in order to defend them and the country’s borders – think of poor Abyei.
Traditional values are part of the answer. Take the belief in Nhialic as the godhead and that the godhead is expressed in all of living creation and that therefore all creation should be appreciated – how can believing that be a sin? Surely this leads to a respect for all life. Far worse to believe in preferential rights for those of one religion, or harsh physical penalties for moral sins.
And new patterns need to be blended in order to go forward. What are the behavior patterns that need to be changed and how does one as an individual and a community go about it? The psychology of a community in distress and agony does not reinforce positive change. For reasons relating to evolution, the human brain and those of animals too respond physiologically to distress by becoming resistant to trying new things. To attempt such change requires both a decision to try new patterns which will not feel natural and the leap of faith that Christ so inherently understood.
And what of Easter?
Well Christ was crucified partly because even his supporters abandoned him and would not speak for him. Christ could only be betrayed by his own supporters (one can only be betrayed by friends), and surely if I had been there I would have persecuted him, betrayed him or abandoned him, too. And in the face of this, Easter is truly the living promise of God’s forgiveness for all of us, even for betrayal.
The promise of God’s generous and immense forgiveness permits us to consider what we ourselves need to change without fear of harsh punishment or recrimination for self-honesty. For God wants us to have better, and here on this Earth.
My daily prayer until we celebrate again the birth of Christ at Christmas will be for the people of South Sudan as follows:
For all South Sudanese, and the world, to name and mark the genocide which has caused all South Sudanese to suffer so much;
For all the South Sudanese women still held in slavery in the North, and for all their families who also suffer, that they may find deliverance;
For young men to open themselves to ways other than violence;
For individual South Sudanese to undertake acts of reconciliation and ignore the acts of those seeking to sow discord and anger;
For husbands and wives to make love to one another and families to be restored;
For the leaders and the people to focus on the defence of the country and safety of all, so that the people can get on with building their lives;
For farmers to take the risk to plant their crops;
For the literate to teach the illiterate, and the numerate the innumerate;
For South Sudanese to summon their energy and intelligence to build businesses, and for my fellow Canadian business people to be willing to support them and help them succeed.
And as Christ died and suffered terribly for our sins, that Christ’s spirit may enter us all such that we may find foregiveness in our hearts for those who have wronged us, and others in their hearts for our sins even when we do not fully deserve such foregiveness.
For this is the only path to lasting productive peace.
Added notes:
An example might be the determination to keep their native tongues, Hebrew and Amaraic, alive, whilst learning the practical languages of the countries in which they lived, Persian, Greek, and in Europe German and other languages. The tribes of South Sudan should do so also with their own languages, if only to honour their ancestors.
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