We can burn the fires high and dance as if in a trance to celebrate our freedom from the ignorance of our past and that we are free from the chains of inhumanity and the brutality that it caused. We are slow to get up the next morning after the euphoria of freedom to realise that we were freed for...
Freed for a new, whole humanity for all people; freed so that we can make sure all our neighbours have opportunities to grow into the potential that has been planted inside of them, freedom to create a new future...
As long as we just celebrate our freedom from...and as long as we misuse our freedom just to enrich ourselves as individuals - we are not free. We remain the slaves of a value-system of the previous regime that preached, proclaimed and sanctified: we are not equal, some are superior, some deserve more, and some should be treated as objects for the comfort of others...
As long as we don’t take up the responsibility of freedom for...a new and whole humanity we are still infected with the cultural disease that the west so wrongly enslaved Africa to. As long as we don’t begin to ask the question what are we freed for we will lose the beauty and wisdom of Africa and the wealth of ubuntu!
An important footnote: I believe the church got stuck through an overdeveloped atonement-theology into the same dilemma. We sing and dance in a trance to celebrate our freedom with hands full of bread and wine...but we never turn the page to discover the fearful beauty of what we were freed for...so we stay slaves of the same system (religiosity) as before and through our cultic freedom-celebration we actually lose life!
No comments:
Post a Comment