Another world, or two

We all tend to live our lives in our usual boxes, coming and going about our usual business, family, work, school, sports, shopping and all the other many activities that fill our days and nights. Some events in the last few weeks have opened up for me some more unusual boxes; in exposing me to some different life situations within and beyond my family I was reminded once again how different our worlds can be.

I was involved in preparations for last month’s Pastoral Forum in KwaZulu-Natal. Much time and energy was spent by the team for this event where bishops and laity with diocesan priest delegates engaged in dialogue on evangelisation, the role of the laity and how to manage the world in which we live. We were conscious of course that the place where laity experience God’s presence and witness to Jesus Christ is in the ordinary events of their everyday lives, with the ups and downs that face them there.
But the ups and downs can differ vastly too.

Various speakers at the forum addressed different aspects of life in the world: the economic, political, social and cultural elements. Archbishop Jabulani Nxumalo of Bloemfontein spoke on culture as the way humans live and the need for us as people to humanise our environment.

Protas Madlala, in addressing economic issues, claimed that in South Africa at present the government has failed the people in light of the growing gap between rich and poor. He called on the Church to continue its support for the poor, continue development projects, perhaps, for example, by reintroducing the credit unions which were a feature in the 1980s.

The reflection and discussion times during the day after the inputs were linked loosely with the upcoming elections in 2009 when all of us will need to exercise our civic responsibilities as we judge best for the good of the country, but of course that means also for ourselves and our families.

Meeting other members of my family in rural KwaZulu-Natal on a small nut farm exposed me to realities other than what I am used to, in their own life and their work. One of these is the great divide between farm owners who farm and labour, and those who mainly just labour. What is it that makes people, sometimes shrewdly and even possibly dishonestly, submit land claims but, in spite of years of work on a farm, not have enough skill and initiative to make farming themselves and independently a success? Why is the way of life, the culture one could say, of many simple rural people so basic and humanly impoverished that life seems to consist of work, sex and alcohol, with the quite likely consequence of HIV/Aids?

Nuts, nuts and more nuts in a whole cycle of life reminded me strongly of that cycle of planting, feeding, pruning, fertilising and harvesting before the cycle begins anew. Much of the cycle of life happens naturally, almost automatically, or should I say it happens through the providence of God, assisted by the farmer and his team.

On my way back to Gauteng very early one morning, as I joined the highway, I passed a marquee church. “Highway to Holiness” it called itself. The church or the road, I wondered – and what way to holiness was being advocated? Down the hill towards Port Shepstone I passed literally hundreds of men and women, young and old, workers, walking up or down on their way to work. Strangely, at that early hour there were no more than a handful of schoolchildren on the road, not the hundreds I had seen the afternoon before. Clearly the parents of those children have to leave them to themselves every day to get up and off – hopefully – a little later.

Other children in more affluent places are taxied to school in mom’s or dad’s taxi. Others yet, from all kinds of economic backgrounds, worry about which home they belong to – is it mom’s, stepmom’s or dad’s, a grandparent’s, aunt’s or does an older sibling make the home?

With these thoughts, which really just touch the fringes of the diversity of family life, I went on my way. And the blood-red sun, breaking through the smokehaze of the early morning sugarcane fires, told me another day had begun in another world.