Madiba welcomes the world

It is too early to sing of the wise men—Gaspar (Sheba), Melchor (Arabia), and Balthazar (Egypt)—who visited the infant child of Bethlehem in the Christmas story of the season, but we could not avoid the thought as I learned that Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Jimmy Carter (US), Cameron, Brown, Blair, and John Majors (UK) are descending on South Africa to attend Mandela’s scheduled memorial service.

The first batch were dignitaries paying homage to a messianic royal (Matthew and Luke gospels are not meant to be history), while the second batch consisted of three ex-presidents and a sitting top executive of the only superpower of the world, the United States of America, joined by the four living prime ministers of Britain, and a host of world leaders and dignitaries around the world confident enough not to have a local coup in their absence!

Of the U.S. in the second group, they came to pay tribute to an ex-felon who was considered a terrorist until 2008, who spent 27 years behind bars but managed to keep a country from civil war, and let the world know through his being that the value of one’s skin color is not even that deep compared to compassion and grace.

A methodological side trip: the triune mindset is an occidental Hegelian heritage of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The yin-yang of the taiji focuses on the center pivot point holding the balance of the whole, while the feng shui’s east-west-north-south axis is made whole by the fifth area, the wu fang, the center. The essence of oriental balancing center and harmonizing middle counts a lot. Madiba straddled the gamut of both methods, plus.

In the history of South Africa that came into being through the imperial designs of Europe, it brought India and China into the picture, mixed into the Bantu underpinnings, the influences of Arabic North Africa and the Middle East, the dominance of the Teutonic-Slavic mindset, and the rapacious fingers of corporate capitalism of London-New York-Tokyo-Singapore. We have the various strands that came into play in the vaunted Madiba unifying “magic.”

Massive changes wracked the previous century. It went through two upheavals unprecedented in scope and intensity in the history of humankind. Violent as the two World Wars were, the more intense disturbance is in the depth of human consciousness itself. Its radicalness matches only the vastness of its scope. For the human race is challenged to invent anew what it means to be human. This defines the revolutionary character of our time.

Nelson Mandela is preeminently one of our revolutionaries whose personal existence wrestled with the civilizational convulsion occurring. Taking the tensions of a material-centered economy and the political strife of a multiracial constituency, he resolved in his being the crisis of human identity and vocation, and transformed the revolutionary bent on destruction to the authentic old sage of the bush that only had simple grace and common compassion to share with fellow human beings. He showed in his being a new fabric of humanness that began a work in progress now operating in many lives around the world. We number with the window washers among the servants in that entourage.

Many in the world are overwhelmed to the point of collective trauma, a failure of nerve, expressed in such outbursts as recently seen in Kiev and Bangkok, and not too long ago, in Syria. Hoping to retain the ennui of the familiar, many hang on to the illusory comfort of more sophisticated arsenals in home closets, or more statutes to bar entry of the stranger into the town’s square. Many engage in frantic activism pitting groups against each other for the therapy of little gains and momentary reliefs.

But the malaise of our time is not revolution itself; it is the fear-filled refusal to embrace radical change that maintains human economies based on sustainable survival rather than profit for the few, that meet needs before obeisance to the altar of hyped wants. Its cousin is the denial that there is such a malaise at all.

There is no escape for individuals or for humankind. We are all in this together. That is why a Mandela is such glaring demonstration of what is possible. The man had the resource, the reason, and the skill to be an instrument of mass destruction, but instead he offered the proverbial other cheek to those who despised what he stood for and proceeded to construct in a delicate balancing and unifying manner the structures of care and the services of compassion that a world in pain sorely needed.

That the United States and the UK deigned to send their preeminent leaders to join the world whose secretary-generals, presidents, prime ministers, and reigning monarchs are attending to bid this old grandpa adieu on his way to his grave may just start the process to forge new patterns of social relations, to create new symbols of personal meaning, to harness the deeper level of human consciousness, and to release new tides of creativity into the total human process.

Madiba’s life triggered our hope. In there, we’ll stay a long while.