Haere ra, Madiba

 

The cost of being dead is that we are made into whatever image those who survive us desire. I have sat through a eulogy or two in my time, but one of the first I ever heard was for a friend who died on my motorbike back in 1978. At least I think it was: the angelic creature who was laid to rest according to the celebrant bore no resemblance to the hard living, petty criminalizing, womanising, chemically enhanced friend I knew. Although I was an atheist at the time I swore I would never give a eulogy so false and empty—never expecting it would one day become my day job (though rightly or wrongly these days the celebrant doesn’t often give the eulogy). I swore too that the eulogy at my funeral would be honest: the trouble is I can’t do much about that one.

Nor could Nelson Mandela. He cannot control now what image he is recreated into. Saint? Socialist radical? Terrorist? Freedom fighter? I have  read those descriptions and a myriad more in recent days, as the entire world it seems (except North Korea, which has other worries) attempts to recreate Madiba in its own chosen image. We all do it: I like to emphasize Mandela’s faith and courage, but I bet when pushed he, like all prophets, could be unpleasant, cranky, doubt-filled: all the things we don’t want a saint to be. I suspect saints and prophets are the people we most don’t want to share or lives with: Mother Theresa, when once a woman was complaining to her about the person’s husband, replied “you should try being married to God.”

I’ve met a few genuine saints. The best of them made me feel bigger, better, more complete for their passing through my life: they focussed on me in such a way that I felt enriched, enlivened, invigorated. In many cases I never met them again. My life though had received new impetus, a new imprint of the breathings of God.

I have no idea what Mandela was like. I know though that he touched and transformed a nation that might otherwise have descended into brutality and bloodshed. Of course his legacy is not perfect: as I will often remind myself and you, we are as yet, as theologians liked to say, “caught between the already and the not yet.” The lives that pass through and enrich ours, whether we know them for ten minutes or a lifetime, are lent to us from God’s future, lent as it were to remind us of the magnificences of the eternities that dwell ahead, where lion shall lay down with lamb, and we shall learn war no more. In theological languages they are beatific glimpses, signposts to the road ahead.

I have no idea what Mandela was like. I know though that my life has been enriched because I lived in two centuries in which he lived. For that I am deeply thankful to God.