Lit by the light of the Milky Way, the four of us held hands to find our way through and around the labyrinth. The Ramadan moon has not yet risen, and the African air was dry enough for the light to mark the sandstones against the dark gravel. We moved in toward the center, then to the left, followed the long loop and around before heading back in and around again. The pilgrims included myself, Marcellino, a South African community activist and researcher, and TC, my Bride of many years, as well as Bastienne. She is a Greek scholar who said that we should have been dancing as the Greeks did. We did well enough. Once at the center, we paused to look up with wonder at the thousands of stars, knowing there are billions beyond our sight and depth far beyond our capacity to imagine, much less grasp. We moved back out, turning, turning, seeking, seeking. Finding our way.
Most find the labyrinth a place of personal spiritual way-finding. Who and where am I in life? Holding hands, if not quite dancing, this was not personal; it was a hint of a greater whole moving in a social labyrinth. For today it is the whole that is seems needing to find a way. More likely to see that way by starlight instead of the stultifying glow of our screens and their chattering distraction.
I have been coming to Africa for nearly forty years, always amazed by the gritty tenacious people who simply won’t give up despite ever new complexities layered on historical traumas. I’ve sat with Thomas Sankara, the iconic young leader of Burkina Faso still seen as a wayfinder by youth today because of his fierce integrity. He renamed his country “land of upright people” and then made it real. Through the blowing red dust, he told of their victorious “commando vaccination” in which they mobilized the whole society to vaccinate every child in the country (and the thousands that were brought across the border by their mothers). Killed cynically, probably by the French, his life still resonates decades later with youth desperate for heroes who might show a way in and out, back and round, maybe even forward.
This particular labyrinth was on the grounds of Goedgedacht, a bold experiment in rural development an hour and a half north of Cape Town. The name means “good thinking,” and it is a good place to see clearly how much good thinking we will all need to find our way. Here we see radically different lives in a spectrum of whites, blacks and browns speaking far more than the eleven official languages. The local poor were already poor enough without the arrival of immigrant workers from all over Africa now competing for the scarce and difficult jobs. And the local rich were rich enough without finding new ways too exaggerate their privileges. Goedgedacht grows olives from the tough dry soil to finance the rural development efforts in the villages. But it can’t qualify for the valuable “organic” label because of the pesticides that drift from the farm next door, which is literally covered in plastic to shelter their luxury crops from the blazing sun. Their neighbor’s private dam shining like a jewel out of place in that bright sun is filled from a pipe drawing water from a river 15 kilometers away. All this bizarreness is possible because of the specialty grapes and clementines grown to be shipped abroad. Nothing local about it. Maybe I’ve had one of those clementines in the US.
Only a four-dimensional labyrinth could map the difficulties of navigating such complexity. But that is what the South Africans are doing by light of the Southern Cross. Shock after shock (AIDS after Apartheid, ‘state capture’ after freedom, then COVID, then ….). Layers of ironic betrayals that would shatter the heart of any lesser people left Mandela, Tutu and millions that hoped with them in tears. But the people do not quit. They do not stop putting one foot in front of the next finding the way by not stopping.
We were at Goedgedacht to convene some of the Fellows of the Leading Causes of Life Initiative. I once thought those words were too happy and American to even speak here in such a mystifyingly difficult place. The Africans taught me that life is the only thing tough enough to work here. No simplistic professionalism, no shallow plans, brittle schemes or mere interventions. Only life can live here. Only it can find the way.
And how does it do so? By what light? We gathered around the hunch that it might be fueled by something more like joy, let us dare to say dance. The English word “joy” falls so short, but still comes closer to the way we move with just enough light to see to the next turn on the path. Never one by one; always in small groups who would be lost entirely if not held by slender and improbably threads of trust.
One of these improbabilities that lights up the sky is the Christian Institute of Southern Africa, which Goedgedacht has honored with a peace grove of 28 olive trees for the founding giants who suffered with some dying in the bitter decades of struggle against Apartheid. Built with what we now see as the sinews of life, it defied the massive structures of Apartheid. Nobody involved had any clear thought as to how it could be ended. They gathered and spoke such vivid truth that the government banned them all, preventing them from being together or even be quoted in public. Tiny, nimble and fragile looking, they nonetheless persisted, gathering support all across the globe, creating channels for funds to flow into the struggles for justice, dignity and integrity. They won their day in ways that inspire us to struggle with very different demons in ours.
We walk in their light today because they kept weaving thin webs across borders, time zones, political snares, theological lines and impossibilities of every kind. Like the Milky Way constellations, the dozens whose names we know reflect millions who we do not know who also risked everything for a future that drew them beyond the possible. Most in the movement did not get an olive tree memorial garden or even a footnote.
What do we do with this light? Their specific answer and ways of struggling are not ours. It is unlikely they were any smarter than us. Or that they would be any better than we at figuring out how to move through the current labyrinth of collapsing climate with political systems so easily gamed and tamed by the cynical powers.
We are here now, not them. And we are in our struggle, which is not exactly theirs. Their problem was nationalwith some hope to be found abroad. Ours is planetary with no help on the way at all except for the next generation. They are rising quickly, but time is short.
What can we learn except like them to act as best we can; to risk as wisely and boldly as they did with those they trusted with their lives and with the life of their hopes.
Neither they nor we could know if our very best would be enough or in time. Who can ever know that?
Hold hands with a few you trust and put one step in front. Turn, move, turn again and yet again, grateful for the light of billions of stars.
