Forty
years is a very long time to be away from the faith into which
you were born and baptised, the faith in which you were
brought up
and confirmed. Yet it happened to me and I cannot really account
for it.
There was a period of about two years between leaving convent school
and going to university; because I matriculated at sixteen and could
not be accepted at London University until I was eighteen. During
this period, away from the convent, away from any familiar church,
because we had moved to a new area, I became very apathetic about
going to church and very spasmodic in my own devotions.
By the time I started at King's College in 1923, my faith had been
pushed to one side, where it remained for nearly forty years. I was
never an atheist and I do not think I could even have been called
an agnostic. It was complete indifference, although I would never
have denied the existence of God.
Once while I
was in India and a few times when I first came to South Africa,
I did go to church to please friends,
and it would have been
embarrassing not to accompany them. In church I would go through
the forms of prayer and make some sort of apology to a god in whom
I suppose I still claimed to believe. Thereafter, I made no further
effort towards any prayers nor to go to church on my own. Yet, probably
like many a "lapsed" Christian, I would pray desperately
in times of anxiety or distress, "please. God, help me to bear
this...", whatever it was.
Once I was married,
I moved into a new society in which I no longer met any practising
Christians and I moved even
further away from
my former faith. It took gaol to jolt me out of my indifference — gaol
and Hannah Stanton, even though we spoke only once of my lack of
faith.
It seems to me, in retrospect, that it would have been impossible
to share a cell, as I did, with a committed Christian like Hannah,
and not be moved by her example, almost to envy of the joy and strength
her faith brought her. I had to admit to myself emptiness in my life,
but I remained obdurate, behind the wall that I had built between
all things spiritual and myself.
Perhaps I had been more affected by those first weeks of solitary
confinement than I had realised at the time. Gaol indeed strips you
of everything that belongs to your normal life. If you are alone
it is worse and I had suddenly been removed from the daily close
contact of my fellow accused.
I know that Hannah's example brought me to the recognition of faith
as a real dimension of living. I always acknowledged it in the religious
life of a convent and also in the church congregational life. I did
not deny the value of the church ministry, but I deplored its failure
to go beyond this, to take up the struggle for freedom, for justice,
for the full recognition of human dignity.
I once, only
once, tried to express this feeling to Hannah, but it was with
bitter words about what I saw as the
failure of the church.
One day when Hannah and I were together in the exercise yard, the
commandant of the gaol came to us to inform Hannah that a priest
would be coming to give her Holy Communion. Turning to me he said, "Not
you! He says you're a heathen."
Quite unreasonably, I felt outraged and insulted though I said nothing
to Hannah about it. However, when the other women detainees arrived,
they wanted the padre to visit them on Sundays. I was amazed for
there wasn't a Christian amongst them but they still accepted his
visits even after Hannah had gone. I think mainly because it broke
the monotony of the gaol weekend and because they had established
a pleasant, if non-religious, relationship with the chaplain.
I was still smarting
under the epithet of heathen and refused to join the other women
for the chaplain's visit. For
this I was called
to the matron's office, where I gave my reason that since he had
said I was a heathen, I need have nothing to do with him, adding
defiantly that I would rather Fight on my feet than on my knees.
The matron informed me a few days later that the "heathen" had
been the commandant's touch, not the chaplain's, but I still would
not accept his visit.
Hannah was deported and left us. The other detainees went home after
a couple of months and I was alone again in the gaol except for going
to court most days for the trial. I was still in the great dormitory
where we had all been together. It seemed enormously empty, especially
at night and during the weekend. The matron told me that, despite
my earlier refusal to see him, the prison chaplain would like to
visit me on Sunday afternoons. I shrank from it at first but finally
agreed, partly out of relief at the idea of having someone to talk
to, even if only for half an hour.
The chaplain came. He knew of my attitude to the organised church,
of my abandonment of my early faith. He talked to me, but not about
religion, said a short prayer and gave me a prayer book. That was
all. I accepted the prayer book with hesitance, as I did not want
to hurt him by refusing. During the week that followed I began to
look at it. I also had a very small, carefully hidden transistor
radio, which I had smuggled into gaol one day, a gift from Bram Fischer
for us. I used to bring batteries from court, hidden in the knot
of hair on top of my head. I could listen to the radio through earphones,
always on the alert for the clanking of keys outside the door. The
reception wasn't very good but it was a precious link with the outside
world. I found myself listening to church services on Sundays, a
little at sea at first, then recognising more and more the familiar
phrases, hidden until then in my childhood memories. The psalms and
prayers I read in my prayer book were familiar too; it was almost
like coming home.
Soon I began to talk to the chaplain. At first I was almost too
ashamed to pray myself to the God I had neglected for two-thirds
of my life. Yet the priest convinced me that I would not be rejected,
so I began to pray again, very simply, often returning to my childhood
prayers.
When it became clear that the Emergency was dragging to its end
and we should soon be released from gaol, returning to our former
trial lives, I was full of doubt about what might happen to this
renewal of my faith. Would it be strong enough to survive?
It was as I had expected and feared. My faith and my prayers did
not survive my return to ordinary life. After a very few weeks the
flickering light of my faith was blown out by pressures of all kinds,
office and political. Then I would feel ashamed and pray again for
a week or two, making resolutions and forgetting them again. I once
went to a church service, but I did not feel part of it. I was only
on the outside, looking in. Yet I had love and respect for some of
the very few Christians I knew and especially for the priests of
the Community of the Resurrection who were supporting us so well
in our work for the banished people.
Then came house
arrest. From the beginning I received magnificent moral support,
both nationally and internationally,
for the Minister
of Justice had succeeded in making me famous. I was surrounded by
warm, concerned friends. All this had helped me to suppress to some
extent the feeling of loneliness. I used to say, defiantly. "I
may be alone, but 1 do not know what it means to be lonely!" That
was only partly true. I was becoming aware of a deeper level of need,
spiritual need, which I suppose was being brought a little nearer
to the surface by the enforced solitude of house arrest, just as
it had been in gaol.
I became deeply depressed over the major heart operation, which
Amina had had to undergo. I used to visit her almost daily during
my office lunch hour after reporting to the police, for she lived
nearby. I feared that she might not survive the operation and somehow
this forced me to acknowledge my isolation as nothing else had done.
Yet it was at this point that I also became conscious of some indefinable
concern and care over my personal agony, of a feeling that I was
not really alone, that I never would be, that there was help and
love for me if I would only reach out for it. I began to pray again,
as I had not done for the three years since I came out of gaol and
this time I found myself able to persevere with fewer lapses.
I had come a
little closer to my faith, but I was still outside the church.
I began to listen regularly to the religious
services
on the radio and as I listened, some of the voices became familiar,
almost personal. Once I heard the Dean of Cape Town say. "A
lonely Christian can't be a real Christian." I thought about
that a lot and realised how inadequate my own life was, how self-centred
my reaching out for faith. I had so often condemned the Christian
churches for keeping apart from political issues, but I had not bothered
to make Christian friends, apart from the priests of the Community
of the Resurrection.
I observed them in their Priory. Their concern and love for all
men was wonderful. I thought of Trevor Huddleston and his courageous
stand against apartheid and the Sophiatown removals, his commitment
to the struggle for freedom and justice. Such people seemed to be
the true essence of what I believed the Christian church ought to
be.
I realised that
if I were to come back fully to my faith, then I ought not willfully
to remain outside the church.
True, I was under
house arrest, but that did not prevent me from being a member of
a Christian church — unless it was to be included in that strange
definition of "Organisations that attack, defend, criticise
or discuss any principle or policy of the government of a state".
If that was so, then almost any church that ever there was must fall
into that prohibited category. I soon discarded that line of thinking
and decided that it was not for me to exclude myself from the church.
That could be left to the government if it wished to take action
against me.
I thought long
and seriously about what steps to take to return to the church.
I finally discussed it with Leo Rakale
of the Community
of the Resurrection, talking to him many times in the peaceful Priory
garden. I found that I could talk to Leo more easily than to anyone
else. Eventually I could say to him that if the church would have
me, then I wanted to come back, instead of standing aloof— even
after forty years of drifting and utter neglect. I wanted to go to
Mass again. I wanted the Sacrament of Holy Communion.
Leo handled me gently and with great understanding. He knew that
I must not be pushed into this important step, nor even persuaded
into it. I must come back at my own pace, in my own time. I do not
believe that it was just the loneliness of house arrest. I was a
prodigal returning to the father, to complete forgiveness and to
a loving welcome. In time of need, yes, but the need was the instrument
to satisfy a want, which had been suppressed for many years.
The friendship of the Community enriched my life. I was cut off
from many friends of former days. They were now in gaol, banned or
gone from South Africa. But here was a group of men living under
vows of poverty and obedience, having all things in common, inspired
and strengthened by their faith.
I became aware of the rhythm of their life. Sometimes when I was
working in the library there I could hear their voices in the little
chapel singing the cadences of their midday office. Theirs was a
life dedicated to God and also to the world. They did not shut themselves
away; all people were important to them as individuals.
It was in the fourth year of my house arrest that I at last opened
myself to what I hoped would be a new life and to new joys. I had
to find out whether I could go to Mass in the hours when I was not
under house arrest. The Minister of Justice, however, had declared
on an earlier occasion, I discovered, that banned people were not
prohibited from attending bona fide religious services.
Father Rakale
suggested that I should find myself more at home in the multiracial
cathedral in the centre of Johannesburg
than in the
local Anglican church of Norwood, where there would be an all-white
congregation. The Rev Gonville ffrench-Beytagh was then the Dean
of St Mary's Cathedral. He was famous for his "political" sermons
and for his forthrightness and courage on racial matters, both in
the pulpit and out of it.
The only Mass
I could attend was at seven o'clock on a working morning. I could
leave my house at six thirty and
then go on to work after
Mass and a quick coffee and toast with the Dean's friendly secretary
in her nearby flat. Sometimes I would go to the Priory in Rosettenville
for their early Mass and a "breakfast for two" with Father
Leo Rakale. My Sunday house arrest prevented me from going to the
High Mass in the Cathedral where there is always a large, totally
racially integrated congregation.
St Mary's congregation consists of blacks and white, coloured, Indians
and Chinese, worshipping together, singing together in the choir.
Black and white priests celebrate the Mass side by side. Holy Communion
may be received from a black or a white hand. It is a sad comment
on the Christian church in South Africa that this should be almost
unique.
The Dean asked me whether representations should be made for me
to have a couple of hours freedom on Sundays to go to Mass, but I
refused because I did not want it said, or even thought, that I had
returned to the church merely to get a couple of hours out on a Sunday
morning. I said I would reconsider it if the house arrest bans were
renewed when they expired the following year.
My second house arrest shocked people even more than the first.
Since I now belonged to the Anglican Church there were church protests
at all levels, from the Archbishop of Canterbury, who wrote me a
most concerned letter, to the congregation of St Mary's. I had not
yet met most of them, but they cook part in an all-night vigil of
prayer and protest on my behalf.
I agreed that the Dean should lead a deputation to the Minister
of Justice to apply for me to be given permission to leave my home
on Sundays so that I could attend High Mass at the Cathedral and
also attend the midnight Masses at Easter and Christmas. Permission
was granted and I was glad, but I realised that it recognised the
power of the Minister of Justice.
Two years later I learned from Winnie that when she was interrogated
about me. Colonel Coetzee had in fact said that I was not a sincere
Christian and that I only went back to the church so that I could
dodge part of my house arrest.
My return to the church brought me one very great honour. The Archbishop
of Canterbury came on a brief visit to the Anglican Church in South
Africa. He wanted to meet Helen Joseph, the Anglican under house
arrest. It had, of course to be a meeting of two people only. We
met for breakfast at the house of the Bishop of Johannesburg. I
don't think I have ever been so shy or so tongue-tied, despite
his genial kindness. After a few minutes it became easier to talk
and answer his interested questions.
The Archbishop
asked me what I intended to do with my theological knowledge when
I had completed my studies. I don't
know whether he
thought I might say, "become a woman priest", but I replied, "nothing,
it is an end in itself. He clapped his hands together in obvious
delight, exclaiming, "that is the only way to approach learning!"
I was so overcome by this accolade that when he said that he was
going to give me a blessing I forgot my ecclesiastical manners and
did not kneel for it. Fortunately he is an extremely tall man and
could place his hands upon my head without difficulty.
Today I know that I should not agree completely with his attitude
towards knowledge, for I am convinced that knowledge and service
to humanity are inseparable, that learning ought not to be an end
in itself.
The cancer operation
of 1971 brought at end to house arrest. I came out of hospital
to a "freedom" I had not
known for nine years and to full freedom of church worship, no
longer by favour
of the Minister of Justice.
I went to the Cathedral for the High Mass on the first Sunday I
was out of hospital. I took part in the Offertory procession bearing
the bread and wine to be consecrated for the Holy Communion. I walked
up the aisle, thankful to have a stalwart man beside me carrying
the bread in case I stumbled on the way. The Dean had not known I
was coming because I wanted to surprise him. When he saw me his face
broke into a broad smile of loving welcome, despite the solemnity
of the ritual. I walked back to my seat, this time by myself, but
not alone, for there were smiling faces on either side in the pews
to welcome me back to the cathedral, to life and to freedom. The
whole congregation seemed to come alive in greeting and in gratitude
to God.
It was in that same year that Father Cosmas Desmond publicly defied
his house arrest by attending a church service on Sunday, not once,
but every Sunday for six weeks. He had taken a courageous stand.
His banning orders did not prevent him from attending religious services,
but his house arrest did at the weekend. To violate house arrest
could invoke a gaol sentence of up to three years' imprisonment with
no option of a fine.
At first I found it difficult to decide whether Cos was politically
correct. I had accepted that individual defiance had minimal political
value. Mass defiance should be the goal. Cos's Christianity and his
priesthood brought a new dimension. He was deliberately confronting
the state, denying its right to interfere with his duty as an ordained
priest, to celebrate Mass, to conduct religious services on Sunday,
denying its right to dictate whether he should or should not worship
God in church on Sunday, as Christians are constrained to do.
I came to the conclusion that he had been right to refuse to ask
permission to break the house arrest. I realised that I had been
wrong earlier in allowing that deputation to approach the minister
on my behalf, for in the end I had had to make the application myself.
Cos had refused to do this and defied arrest and he was right.
Surprisingly, no police action was taken against him and he was
even given a relaxation of his ban to allow him to attend any church
services in Johannesburg on Sundays. He had indeed won a victory.
I had returned to the church in 1966, the same year that my second
book, Tomorrow's Sun, was published in England. I received a very
inspiring letter from an Anglican nun in England. Sister Angela of
the enclosed Anglican order of Poor Clares, explained that her order
was completely enclosed within its convent walls, having no physical
contact whatsoever with the outside world. Theirs was a life of contemplation
and prayer but also of intercession for the troubled world. They
had need, therefore, to keep themselves informed of what was going
on in the world by reading newspapers and books. They had no radio
or television.
Sister Angela had read my book and felt she wanted to know me. The
Mother Superior had given her special permission to write to me and
that was how it began, a close and deep relationship. It was at first
only by letter and then she was allowed to make tapes to send to
me. Legally I could not make tapes for her, for that would be reproducing
the statements of a banned person. However, occasionally I managed
to send one to her.
All this drew me right into the heart of the enclosed community
and it became, in a way, part of my own enforced enclosure. I had
photographs of the convent chapel and of their lovely garden. I felt
I knew every part of the convent from the kitchen and the nuns' cells
to the roofs onto which the nuns climbed by ladder to repair them.
I cannot find words to explain how it was that such a deep bond
of love and understanding grew between us. We had never met and never
thought we should meet, but our lives seemed intertwined. Later there
were also occasional brief telephone calls. We accepted our separation,
for she was enclosed in a convent and I was without a passport and
too stubborn to plead for one, even when I was no longer under house
arrest.
In 1973 the miracle happened. Angela was allowed to visit her seriously
ill mother lest she should not live to return to England to see her
daughter again. Angela left her English convent and flew to Sydney.
It was Angela, not I, who obtained travel brochures to work out that
it would cost no more for her to fly via Johannesburg than via Tel
Aviv. She obtained the permission of her Order to spend one day at
the Johannesburg airport before flying back to England, but she had
to remain at the airport. She was not allowed to come to my house
because our being together at all had to be part of her journey so
that it would not violate her enclosure.
It was Angela, not I, who thought of booking a room at the Airport
Holiday Inn rather than spending our precious time in empty airport
concourses. I am sure that never before was any Holiday Inn so blest,
for Father Leo brought Holy Communion for us and said Mass with a
makeshift altar on top of the central heating pipes. The time was
short for us but unforgettable as we laughed and talked all day,
Angela the enclosed nun and Helen, the political committed person.
Somehow I knew that our closeness would continue always, that she
would go on inspiring me with her eager faith and that I should always
be stumbling along behind her.
The congregation
of St Mary's Cathedral is completely integrated in form. The people,
the priests, the choir are black
and white together.
Yet every Sunday, when the Mass is over, only the memory of that
fellowship remains. The reality is dispersed and the people go their
ways again, to the white suburbs and the black suburbs, to the white
homes and the black homes, with the un-Christian disparity between
them. I realised that the very fact that the cathedral was in the
centre of a large city would militate against a completely integrated
congregation, both socially and politically. Those who come on Sundays
come from widely separate and different parts of Johannesburg, Africans
from Soweto, Indians from Lenasia, coloureds from their segregated
suburbs and the whites from the northern suburbs. I learned to accept
that the wonder lay in the very fact that Sunday after Sunday these
people of all races come from all areas to join together in worship,
to create, even if only for two hours, a unique togetherness. It
was that which Winnie had welcomed when she said, "In there
I have seen what we are fighting for." Nevertheless, I knew
a sense of disappointment that although my own involvement in the
church had brought me personal and spiritual peace, the cathedral
and its members were not prepared to walk along the road of involvement
with the suffering people of South Africa.
In 1977 there had been that all-night vigil to commemorate the Soweto
dead of 1976. That had brought people together for one night, yet
many of those at the vigil had come from other congregations or no
congregations. The cathedral worshippers had given little support.
Was it fear that had kept them away when the Minister of Justice
had interfered so ruthlessly? Would they have come otherwise?
Although the Cathedral shuts apartheid outside its doors, the struggle
for justice and freedom seems also to have been shut out. The non-involvement
of St Mary's congregation is equally true of the Anglican Church
in general. I have written about St Mary's because it is the church
to which I came back to hopefully and to which I still belong.
In the Anglican
Church and in other churches, there are outstanding committed Christians
whose care and concern for
the black people
of South Africa has taken them far along the costly road of sacrifice.
I think of Bishop Trevor Huddleston, of Bishop Tutu, of Father Cosmas
Desmond, of Dean ffrench-Beytagh, of the Rev Beyers Naude — and
of others. I pay tribute to them all. But there are not enough and
the masses in the pews are still silent.
Nevertheless I feel a strong bond of fellowship and communion with
St Mary's, its priests and its congregation, just as I do with the
priests of the Community of the Resurrection and with Sister Angela
and her enclosed community. It is true that I have not entered into
the usual activities of my church, nor is it likely that I shall
ever do so now. Age and physical disabilities make it difficult for
me even to attend Mass on Sundays. My loving friends of the Community
of the Resurrection often bring the Mass to me instead. The sacraments
and worship of my church are precious indeed.
Sometimes my atheist friends ask me what I really believe and I
find myself then most inarticulate. Gandhi has said part of it for
me:
God is that indefinable something which we all feel but which we
do not know. To me God is truth and love. God is ethics and morality.
God is fearlessness. God is the source of light and life and yet
He is above all these. He is even the atheism of the atheist. He
is personal God to those who need His touch.
The atheism of the atheists I have encountered is an utterly selfless
devotion to a cause, the cause of justice. Most of my friends are
professed atheists, they are dedicated people and they have made
immeasurable sacrifices. Christians claim to follow Christ. Atheists
make no such claim, but they set an example many a Christian could
follow.
I am among the millions of Christians who need God's personal touch.
I lost it and then found it again. It was God's touch that reached
me in gaol and during house arrest. That is what made it possible
for me to come back to the Christian faith. A faith I accept in its
totality, to which I try to witness as best I can in my personal
and political life.
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