Images from a scrapyard

I met Willie Bester when he was still a young, developing artist. At the time he used to take me along to the townships to meet his friends and to take some photos, which he used in some of his amazing collages. These collages, which he carefully constructed by shaping together different elements, mostly small pieces of metal, cardboard or paper, always against the backdrop of some gripping photos and newspaper headings, became Willie’s very special hallmark. They brought him international fame. Through them he documented the history, colour and liveliness of township life of the 1980s and 1990s. In these collages you could see and touch the bumpers of old lorries, double storied shacks, buzzing shops, corrugated roofs, rusted bicycles and moving trains.

Later when the painting and putting together of collages became almost second nature and less challenging, Willie switched to making smaller paintings. Through them he depicted at close range people of different walks in the township - an innocent child playing, an old man smoking a pipe, a woman toiling away at her daily tasks. Alongside these collages and paintings he also portrayed the dehumanizing effects of the political system of the day by building majestic structures, even whole laboratories, layered with guns, wheels, clocks and pipes and always a bible somewhere to remind us of how religion was often used to justify an intricate and oppressive ideology.

During the past few years Willie has been focussing more on creating life size sculptures, mostly from pieces of waste iron and car parts that he collects in scrap yards. People watching these rough but true to life images, are suddenly confronted by a rare talent - the ability to recognise in the jungle of scrap yard rubble the image of a growling dog, a gallant horse, a smiling harp player, a child carrying a gun, or a dignified old woman. This is Willie Bester’s rare achievement: to give new life to cast aside and forgotten waste by transforming it into lively images which, when closely observed, stir the heart and imagination, and leave you in awe and wonder.

Looking again at some of Willie’s startling images of child soldiers and missing children at a recent exhibition, I was reminded of the way God deals with us humans. In many ways our lives, though they do also carry reflections of God, so easily become skewed, depressed, out of hand, inhuman - to the extent that we suffer, lose our confidence, feel miserable, unworthy, dumped, almost like rubble on a scrap yard. How well do we all know this feeling, especially when we find that we repeatedly make the wrong choices, lose our discipline, give in to temptations and allow ourselves to be swept away by our darker and destructive impulses. Often only our belief in God’s constant grace, in God’s resurrecting and all renewing power, can save us. In the words of Paul: “You used to be in the darkness, but now in the Lord you are light” (Ephes 5:8).

Today we may count again on this amazing fact that God can transform what seems to be a mere piece of scrap into an image of beauty and wonder. Also, that bewildering piece of my life that I am experiencing and looking at right now.

Carel Anthonissen

The honesty shop

About 80 kilometers beyond Laingsburg in the heart of the Klein Swartberge and close to the Gamtoosdam there is an amazing little shop. It contains all kind of local products from preserved jams and fruit rolls to hand made articles like handbags and purses. For the tired traveller there is also the usual stock of coke and chocolates, but they are not the main items. These are all locally produced. However what makes the little shop particularly unique is not its local features, but its name and the special ethos it represents. It is called the honesty shop. Which means that there are no shop attendants, nobody to serve or look after you, nobody to check that you have paid. It is up to the customers to make their choice, check the price and then to leave the correct amount in a bottle put out for that purpose on one of the tables.

Many years ago while visiting Vienna in Austria I came upon a similar custom. There you could buy some of the city’s main newspapers on the street without anyone attending or checking. As at the Gamtoosdam you could take the magazine of your choice and then leave the right amount in an attached container. Apparently there are other cities and places in the world where the same principle is applied. The wonderful thing is that in all these places honesty appears to be a way of life, a spontaneous act, a honoured tradition. People don’t even think about or consider the possibility of cheating or stealing. They just do what is right and asked for.

While visiting the honesty shop at the Gamtoosdam some other visitors remarked that it is only the remoteness of the place and the fact that criminals don’t usually go there, which makes such an experiment possible. Perhaps this is true, but then still it remains a brave and extraordinary venture, especially in a country where we have come to expect the opposite. For me the honesty shop at Gamtoosdam, however small and obscure, today represents a tremendous sign of hope. While it remains a monument to courage and trust, it is also an appeal to seek and express the very best that is in all of us. In fact after taking the items of my choice I had this strange inclination to leave behind more than the asked price. And I was certainly not the only one. It truly shows us what faith and a little trust in our neighbour can do.

Carel Anthonissen

Consider your hands

Five years ago, at the Centre for Christian Spirituality, I made the acquaintance of a delightful nun, Sister Winifred O’Brien. She was one of The Little Sisters of the Assumption, and a team member at the Centre. As I recall, she worked as a caregiver for the carers of those ill with HIV and AIDS, which might account for the theme of her meditation one morning. She spoke movingly about the role hands play in people’s lives - their own and those of others - and then asked that we hold one another’s hands and lovingly explore them, touching and stroking every ridge, every callous, every knuckle thickened by age or arthritis. She encouraged us to put ourselves, in a manner of speaking, into someone else’s hands….

Our hands are programmed to do almost anything. They can comfort and nurture, create and clean and cook. They can sew and knit and write and hold and hug. They can be folded in prayer or cupped for a blessing. They can make a cross on the body - or on a ballot paper. But hands can also resist being held, they can hurt and hit or make an angry fist. They can withdraw coldly from this world of politics, poverty and pain.

I was reminded of Sister Win’s meditation when I heard Barack Obama’s summary of America’s new foreign policy: We will extend the hand of friendship to every nation which does not hold out a clenched fist…

How we use our hands, these miraculous, intricate, God-given objects, is our own choice. Their function is governed by our hearts and our minds, making them instruments of love or of discord. As always, on the eve of an election, it is fitting that we keep that in mind.

Cecile Cilliers

It is you!

In his recently published memoirs South African author Andre P Brink recounts his own journey through life and love. He attends specifically to what he had learnt about love, this most central aspect of our lives, over many years and through different relationships. He recalls one moment when he had what he called the most intense awareness of the other. In his own words: “I had never before experienced this!”

It happened when he went for a walk with his beloved one evening through the woods above Grahamstown. It became an unbelievable, almost magical night where everything started to glitter with the light of thousands of fireflies around them. At that moment they briefly stopped among the dark trees and then, with the moon above them, he took her face in his hands and whispered, just this one simple phrase: “It is you!”

Reading this moving episode from his life I realised that this little phrase, however simple and brief, does indeed suggest in a very powerful way, what love is really about. Because by saying this we say that we have recognised the other, that we are willing to accept and embrace him or her as a unique human being. Through this simple statement, which can also be seen as a confession, we acknowledge that the other has a face, a name, an own identity and that we fully grant and offer it to them - thereby creating the space in which they may also experience themselves as unique, special, human.

Is this not the very essence of the Biblical message? Is this not what God said to each one of us when he entered our world through Christ: “It is you”! Or in the words of Isaiah 43:1 “Do not be afraid, I will save you. I have called you by name, you are mine”.

May we hear these words again during this coming Easter. And may it inspire us to say the same to others. As we claim a space in which we can ourselves be recognised for who we are, we need to grant the same to each other. So many of our own difficulties could become less if we could start by seeing the other, recognising who they are, saying “It is you”! The people of our country, yes of the whole world, need to hear it constantly: “It is you”.

Carel Anthonissen

On the meaning of grafitti and the Dalai Lama

Not long ago Basil Manning, who was an exile in Botswana during the 1980s, gave me an interesting perspective on the role and meaning of grafitti. Apparently his son picked this up while studying in America where grafitti can be found on numerous buses, trains and the walls of certain neighbourhoods.

According to him the painting of grafitti represents a way of making your presence felt, of stating that you also have a place and a right in a particular place, neighbourhood or area, of saying: “I was here and I belong here!”

Of course, grafitti is often also used by hooligans to shock people by confronting them with their own vulgar and obscene impulses in public spaces. But in most instances, according to my friend, it is an act of protest, a way of standing up against the more powerful who, for whatever reason, discriminate against others by not even noticing them, thus excluding those they count as less significant from certain places and denying them freedom of movement and expression. In essence it is a bold statement (“Hello, I’m here as well, you know!”) and even an honest cry for acceptance.

Against this background, it is a great pity when these or similar signs of human struggle, such traces of the need and suffering of relatively marginalised people, are deliberately and blatantly ignored, scorned or carelessly removed. This was part of the sad discovery of the author Andre P Brink after his visit to the scant remains of the concentration camp at Dachau in the south of Germany - there is not even the slightest reminder left of the former inhabitants; their captors had not allowed, in fact severely punished, any attempt at scribbling a message how ever cursory and anonymous, thus one finds no initials scratched into wood or paint, no last message, no grafitti on a wall. This discovery not only drove Brink to tears, it also brought him to write in his latest Memoirs: Nobody should ever be denied the right to cry out: I was here. I am!

Is this not to some extent what happened to the Dalai Lama during the past week? The denial of a visa is also a denial of the opportunity to make any kind of contribution. Sadly, such limitation comes from people, from a government, who should have known better; who during a period of our own history also had to struggle for recognition, for a space in which to be heard, for the right to be. And now they have obviously forgotten, have denied that same right to a figure of undisputed integrity, a man who has become a symbol of peaceful resistance to unchecked, ruthless authority. And that in exchange for financial gain! How sad can it still become?

Carel Anthonissen

On projections and honest confrontations

The other evening I took our dog, a tiny Maltese, for a walk in the neighbourhood. On leaving the house she suddenly took off and started chasing and barking after a neighbour who was on a similar stroll. Contrary to ours, the neighbour’s dog was on a respectable lead. It was obvious that this unsolicited interruption had disturbed the neighbour’s evening peace and irritated him. He deliberately ignored the commotion behind him and just walked on with an air of indifference.

I felt rather embarrassed at first and while mumbling an apology, started to run after my dog, trying to get her back into our garden. Noticing the neighbour’s indifferent and almost arrogant attitude I became upset, in fact slightly angry, with him. I felt that it would have been polite of him at least to greet me, or pay some attention to the barking dogs in an attempt to settle them. But with a stiff neck (and upper lip) he just walked on. Instead of acting in accordance with my real feelings, which meant that I should have spoken to him, I directed my frustration at my own dog. Ignoring the neighbour, I started to talk more loudly at my dog, shooing her back into the house.

It was the psychologist Jung who first made us aware of this strange tendency in our psyche when, reluctant to face the real source of our own fears, shame, anger and other similar natural instincts, the so-called shadow, we tend to shift or blame it on others. He called it projection and signified this as one of the interesting manoeuvres of the unconscious self, which prevent us from being completely honest and open. Rather than admitting to and confronting our shadow side, we unconsciously find another and expect that person to carry the shadow, to take responsibility for those things we struggle to abide in ourselves. In the little confrontation I refer to here, my poor dog had to suffer my suppressed and brewing anger at the unfriendly neighbour.

Projections occur daily in our relationships with one another and with groups of people, and in many instances they are relatively harmless. But they can become unhelpful and even destructive when they give us an excuse for bad behaviour towards others - when they move the guilt or anger away from ourselves and set the innocent other up as an offender. In fact, at the root of many negative emotions that we carry within ourselves and that are potentially damaging to others, lies the inability to recognise and confront our own, often unconscious and unintegrated, fears and prejudices. This is also recognisable in the way that irrational behaviour rooted in xenophobia or homophobia, is founded on unattended racial and sexual fears and prejudices.

In South Africa it has become crucial, especially for the sake of more transparent governance and a peaceful society that individuals and groups acknowledge and confront their fears and prejudices and especially the projections they effect. However difficult and painful it may be, the victims of such projections are called upon to resist and unmask these hidden agendas. For Christians this can be a way of serving and furthering the Kingdom of God in our society. In confronting the unwarranted negative projections that are so evident and addressing them with integrity, we can remember the words of Jesus when he said: “Happy are those whose hearts are pure, because they shall see God.”

Carel Anthonissen

The empty moments

We all have our empty moments, those days or hours when our best plans or efforts come to nothing; when we are constantly interrupted or simply struggle to finish our allotted tasks, and then end the day feeling totally unproductive, frustrated, regretful and empty - as if our whole day, all the energy and effort we spent on it, has been a complete waste.

Such moments are bearable when they pass quickly. But they can last too long, overwhelm us, even become a lifetime of boredom, shame and regret, creating in us an enduring sense of emptiness and a nagging doubt about the overall meaning of our life. This week again I met someone who was trapped in a false and artificial life for many years, discovering only now for the first time who she really is and what she ought to have done, but never did. What a shame, what a waste, what regret - these are the feelings that often plague her today.

Another person told me the sad story of her father, a highly talented and creative person who for different reasons never managed to fulfill his real potential. Returning from work in the late afternoon he would often go into a passive mode, have a drink and then retire to bed early. It was as if, in her words, at this specific hour, an empty space, almost like a dark gaping hole, suddenly appeared in his life - one which he struggled to fill with meaningful activity and which often left him restless, frustrated and moody.

How do we cope with these feelings of emptiness and waste? How do we overcome a lifetime of shame, guilt and regret?

In a wonderful meditation on the Kingdom, Anthony de Mello first of all invites us not to deny or shy away from this fragile part of life, but to constantly see and embrace life in all its brokenness, uselessness and wastage. In his words:
“Contemplate this - all those seeds that never germinate; the wasted struggles of millions who aspire to be actors, writers, statesmen, saints and fail; the wasted hours of boredom, useless conversations, unproductive planning, fruitless undertakings, neglected talents, etc. - not with sadness, not with guilt, but with patient understanding, because you wish to love life as much in its failure as in its success”.
Recalling the parable of the sower (Mark 4:1-20), De Mello also reminds us that something of the brokenness and apparent wastage is part of and visible in the way God’s Kingdom operates in the world. In fact Jesus himself, as the vital sign of God’s reign, was also broken, so that our wasted lives can be redeemed and restored. It is from this belief that De Mello finally invites us:

“Look at the saviour on the Cross, symbolising in his broken body and his unsuccessful mission the drama of life in general and my life in particular... Love Him too and as you press Him to your heart, understand that somewhere, somehow, all of this has meaning, all of it is redeemed and made beautiful and resurrected”.

This must surely be one of the most profound and consoling thoughts during this time of Lent. No wonder that someone also remarked that since the coming of God’s Kingdom through Christ we may live with the assured knowledge that time is no longer empty…because it is now permanently filled with the loving and forgiving presence of God.

Carel Anthonissen