You may recognise the title from WB Yeats’ poem The Cold Heaven. It’s a phrase that has stuck with me since studying Yeats’ poetry many years ago.
The words capture the essence of my visit to Uganda and South Sudan. I was there for five weeks in April/May. There are lots of stories to tell and I still plan to write more in due course.
“Riddled with light” is a violent metaphor. For me it conjures images of a Gatling gun, hand-cranked, dealing out death, blowing holes in bodies and buildings. Light, of course, is characteristically a positive word. The inner conflict of the phrase recalls Yeats’ later refrain in the poem Easter 1916: “A terrible beauty is born.”
There is a terrible beauty to be seen in the camps in Northern Uganda, where nearly one million Sudanese refugees live. The camps are dark places but riddled with light. Life is a bit different in South Sudan, but its towns of Juba, Yei and Kajokeji all reveal the same oxymoronic reality.
In one sense, there’s nothing extraordinary about this. We’ve come to expect a drop of good news amidst great tragedies. Exceptional self-sacrificing bravery is often present and widely trumpeted when a disaster strikes. A person is rescued from under the rubble of a collapsed building or a mine, long after hope of finding survivors has vanished. Stories abound of how communities support one another amidst war, prejudice and poverty. All reflect Dickens’ rich opening to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ….”
How do people survive in a refugee camp for 30 years? How do people cope being unable to afford a desperately needed operation for their child? What is it like to miss years of school or have no hope of any qualification that might get you a job? Or have overcome so much deprivation to achieve qualifications and then not be able to find any work, eking out an impoverished existence at the house of an almost equally poor distant relative in a city such as Juba, so far from home?
To be honest, it’s hard to keep looking and not turn away, to listen to people’s stories and engage with their reality with an open heart. But when we do this, not only does it honour the humanity of the person or community, it prevents us lessening our own, or put another way, it makes us more fully human, because we are engaged with reality not shielding ourselves from it.
Learning how people survive and where they find light helps us not only to begin to understand (a little) their situation, but in doing this we too learn how to live. It is the path of wisdom, practical transferable wisdom. This is at the heart of our fellowship and the ground on which any true partnership is built. In fact it’s necessary to any good relationship at all not just cross-cultural and international outreach. We learn from each other. We share resources.
And resources are what my friends from Sudan have in abundance. Resources that are more important than the much-abused resources of oil, gas and minerals to be found in South Sudan. Resources that lighten the darkness in ways that gas and oil can never do.
I’m not sure I could identify all these resources for living, but I am sure they begin with thankfulness and active thanksgiving. Discerning, seeking out and celebrating everything for which we are thankful. A glass of clean water or a cup of tea, a conversation, a shared memory, a laugh, people to help you dig your plot or harvest it, an opportunity to help someone out, a community gathering, a story, the ripening of the mangoes on the trees, a prayer, a word of hope. Everyday things as well as major events. Any excuse for a celebration! A wedding obviously but also a funeral with all the comfort and practical help that family and friends provide. Etcetera!
Of course, almost all of these (and many more) are familiar to us, but we so easily take them for granted. We so often expect the good things and focus on what we don’t have and live in a permanent state of dissatisfaction.
Or we lose the importance of community. The ongoing and daily reality of community and commitment to the common good. The sense of belonging and responsibility that comes from community. For most Sudanese, survival depends on the give and take of community life, rooted in the belief that ‘who we are’ comes before ‘who I am’.
Most friends of mine from South Sudan (whether refugees in Uganda or living in South Sudan) live lives that feel much more vulnerable generally. Vulnerable to disease and death. Vulnerable to being unemployed. If working, they are vulnerable to losing their job and income. Vulnerable to accidents when they travel. Vulnerable to prejudice and criminality due to a non-existent or corrupt judicial system. Vulnerable to armed groups stealing their crops or trampling their land with large herds of cattle. And much more besides.
And yet, for the most part, people do not live their lives in fear of what may happen. There is an acceptance that these bad things can and do happen. They are part of life. There is extraordinary resilience. Of course planning happens, but people live much more ‘for today’. There is an acceptance that things don’t always work out. It accounts for the very frequent use of the Arabic word ‘inshallah’ meaning ‘God-willing’. We shall see you tomorrow inshallah. We will start a Nursery School inshallah. She will get better inshallah. It could be just a word, or even symptomatic of fatalistic resignation, but mostly it is an expression of real faith, real trust in God.
There is a trust that God and family and neighbours will get you though whatever happens. So we have bread for today and tomorrow will take care of itself. No use worrying.
I hope that thankfulness and community are a challenge to us and a hopeful opportunity to rediscover what they can mean in our context.
The last thing I want to do is idolise the people and communities I meet from South Sudan. They are as fallible as any other people. But they have wisdom to share from their situation.
We can’t simply transpose a Sudanese way of living back to Europe. But I think we can be inspired to think and live differently as individuals, as families, as Church communities etc.
And we can, perhaps must, ask the questions: how we can be more resilient? More thankful for what we do have? More community-minded? And hopefully through it all, more open to God and to his/her family who are our brothers and sisters across the world.
We face darkness in so many ways, but already our darkness is riddled with light if we have eyes to see it.
GBShaw Blog 