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pastoral letter to the Zimbabwean churches
Allan Aubrey Boesak
May 16, 2008
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Dear Brothers and Sisters
in Christ:
Grace to you
and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the
Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us
in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who
are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves
are consoled by God". So writes Paul to the Corinthians, and
this is the deepest reason why I should dare to put pen to paper.
I write not as an outsider, but with the prophetic solidarity of
John of Patmos: "I, your brother who share with you in Jesus
the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance..."
And it is with a sense of humble awareness of the truth of these
words from the Word of God that this letter is written, in the hope
that my words may mean something to you in these times of trial
and tribulation.
Since I have been privileged
to be in Zimbabwe some weeks ago and saw with my own eyes the situation
in which you find yourselves, Zimbabwe has refused to let of me
in a way I have not experienced before. The images remain stark
and deeply disturbing: the empty shelves in shops and the greater
emptiness in the eyes of children, women and men; the sight of armed
soldiers and the spontaneous anxious wondering what they are up
to; the sense of betrayal inflicted upon a people whose only crime
seems to be the audacity of their hopes and aspirations; the absence
of the signs of life which we South Africans take for granted; the
helplessness on the faces of those who tell us of hunger and suffering;
of torture and death; the palpable fear that hangs like a miasma
in the air and permeates the very words we hear. At the same time
though, even as you spoke of these terrible and terrifying things,
you opened your hearts for us to see the hope that refuses to die,
the faith that clings to the promises of God and the expectation
that the God of the promise will be faithful; the patient forbearance
to which all of us are called and yet so few of us can muster; the
unspoken and spoken conviction that the fervent prayers of the righteous
shall be heard and answered. I have left your country shaken to
the core and with a sense of the righteous anger that I felt during
apartheid and more recently at the betrayal of our own poor, right
here in South Africa.
You have told
us many things and since my return you have kept me informed as
best as you could about the continuing situation in Zimbabwe. Your
words and what I have seen have shown just how wrong our president
was when he spoke of Zimbabwe as if there is no crisis, as if the
world-s concern for Zimbabwe is only because of the plight
of the white farmers. That might be true for a part of the world,
that world where political cynicism is the coinage of the realm,
where people-s lives do not matter but their death does, if
it fits some selfish, self-interested agenda; that world where smart
bombs make mistakes, where guided missiles are somehow misguided
and pulverised children become collateral damage; where hunger and
starvation, illness and the debilitation of poverty are devoid of
a human face and instead become an opportunity for political posturing,
easily replaced by the next point that cannot allow human suffering
to hold up the agenda.
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