Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
A pillar of strength and grace
Oom Chris Wessels left us with a beaming legacy that will forever be treasured
REVEREND Chris Wessels passed away this week. The Moravian Church in South Africa and abroad has gifted us with a saint in the person of Oom Chris.
As a people, our hearts reach out to his family – Nabs, his spouse and brave comrade; Uta, Thandi, Christopher and Katerina, Esther and Mortimer and the grandchildren – embrace them in prayer and in a spirit of gratitude for sharing this son of the soil with us. Oom Chris, on Sunday evening I could only stammer a flood of names in an attempt to express love and appreciation of so many of us who found in you a kiblah of faith and a prophetic fortitude.
On Tuesday, the bells on Kerkplein tolled your passing, sounding over the heights of the Riviersonderend Mountains, along fynbos-covered ravines and the narrow lanes and back streets of Genadendal, the paradise of your days. To us who knew you up close or from an admiring distance, you were an exemplary and caring pastor burning bright with the flame of the gospel. You led – a tried-and-tested disciple of our Lord – by word and deed.
Three years ago I arrived, one hot morning in January, at the front door of your Genadendal home. Your enthusiastic welcome encouraged me to stay long beyond my intended, “Hello Oom Chris, You spoke, there in the confessional shade of the stoep, with tender affection of Father Barney Pityana, your fellow detainee in the mid-1970s.
And of how, when you were served with a banning order, the Security Policeman, in response to your question about how long you would be banned for, replied, “
Well, our Cubanistas eventually got as far as Cuito Cuanavale, and today they would’ve surely been part of the multitude of martyrs and confessors of our time who gathered at your benedictory gradual from the side of eternity.
And heaven has become more beautiful, and its cause of love and justice has been reinforced by your presence. We believe, as Mahmoud Darwish emphasises, in the presence of absence and as such you are as distant as the cry of an eagle in flight, as close as the koer-koer of a in the valleys and dales of your shades of mercy and peace.
Your place at the Liefdesmaal will be filled with the laughter of your grandchildren. The conversation of heart and mind with Nabawaya née Benjamin, your “Sweets” will refrain in the evening scent of the
your calm, gentle presence known in the bloom of freesias in the fields of your valley and the Blue Cranes of the Overberg. You will be there in the soft rain misting Elim and Mamre.
There in the fields of Goedverwacht, in the agtertjaarts of Elsies River, Tamatievlei, on Highfield Road in Korsten and all the places where you held aloft the flame of the gospel, thoughts of you will flood forth from Augustinian palaces of memory.
Your warm, gravelly voice will be heard in every cry of “Freedom Now!” And your heart, beating in every patriot stationed on points of solidarity with the wretched everywhere, will not cease in its questing fervour for the dawn of the days of the Kingdom where the poor are no more, the sorrowful consoled and the gentle possess the land and the heavens, the eternal cosmos, the dwelling place of the pure in heart. Your scars, O son of the soil, of the wounds of battle waged in will and flesh, will herald your passage into the realm of the familiar mystery of Paradise, yet you are forever ours till the Kingdom comes.
Great Spirit of the Khoikhoi, progeny of the Moravian, Bohemian imagination, stay with us in our quest for a place for all at the table of love and justice.