The country truly belongs to all the people who live in it

THERE are two items of furniture in our cathedral, St George’s, that are symbols of how we South Africans can engage each other in the matters of the public square.

The best known of the two is the pulpit. The preacher, before entering it, is encouraged to pray, as did Saint Anselm of Canterbury, for an eloquent and gentle wisdom. A mouth proclaiming, “words of consolation, edification, and exhortation, that I may encourage the good to better things”.

The more often honoured temptation is to preach at people.

We are less inclined to affirm more splendidly how God believes in their ability to bless the world with their gifts and commitment.

Then there is the bishop’s chair, occupied on occasions of solemn rectitude.

It is suggestive of listening and speaking in the manner of conversation; being silent and engaging in spirit and the will to understand how we are different. To explore within adversarial encounters the possibilities of finding new beginnings informed by common interests.

South Africa belongs to all who live in it. These words inscribed in the constitution of our republic embrace the conflicts of our history.

They affirm that those who belong with us in this portion of our continent, Africa, include the Van Riebeecks. Our country is home also to those who feel compelled to remember and honour the place of Commander Jan in our history.

The constitution emphasises the lived-in present and recognises the dialogic nature of belonging.

Everybody, even the Khoi and the San, journeyed here from somewhere else.

The title deed of the land is written in the blood that covered the soil of defeat. And all that is sacred, human beings and the land which we are called to walk lightly on, can never be owned or possessed. It must be shared.

We who belong include the aban- doned poor of Holland on the ships under the command of Jan van Riebeeck; the settlers who sought the promises of the Eastern Cape; the enslaved shackled on the slaveships from the East Indies; refugees from the pogroms of Russia; survivors of the Nazi-flamed Holocaust.

These are the constituents, reasoned Albert Luthuli, with which we build a New South Africa: “From the ruins of the old narrow groups, a synthesis of the rich cultural strains which we have inherited.”

The chief evoked a descriptive vision of a future, “a civilisation, a culture, which will take its place in the parade of God’s history beside other great human syntheses”.

Dorothy Day suggests that we love God as much as we love the person we love the least.

That, this neglected and challenging love, must guide our conversations with each other in our homes and all the public spaces of life.

And when we have recourse to the rhetoric of pulpit and Parliament, civility must be the benchmark of the privilege of leadership.

Can we truly live with the consequences of privileging rights above responsibility?