Go and Light your World
A presentation at NWYM sessions 24-25 July 2007
By David Niyonzima
Part I—Tuesday
Amahoro, peace to you! It is so good to be here among you. I consider Oregon to be my second home, and it is always good to come home.
I am given the task this week of testifying to the active and working Light of Christ in our world. It is an important task and one that brings me joy. But I find I cannot talk about being the Light of Christ without talking about facing darkness. So, if you will permit me, tonight I will talk about facing darkness as children of the Light, and tomorrow night I will share more about being Light bearers.
I will start in the Gospel of John, the first chapter and the ninth verse.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it”.
I wonder what kind of darkness John was talking about.
I come from a part of the world that was once called “The Dark Continent.” It was not called this because of a lack of sunshine – Truly we have plenty of natural light in Burundi and our sun seems warmer than the one you have here in Oregon. No, the colonials called it the Dark Continent because it was large, and so much of it was unexplored by them and mysterious to them. It was never dark in that way to us. It has always been large and warm and familiar to us.
I am sure he did not mean the physical darkness as we define it naturally. It is not what I experience in Africa when I walk on a path through a banana plantation at night when there is no moon or stars in the sky. (Turn off the lights for a second). That is dark. When I was a boy, there was not much electricity in Burundi. If I was late coming home and had to go through the bush, it was dark, and we were told many scary stories about what lived in the dark – this to make sure we got home on time. When I was late and went through that forest I tell you, I RAN! We were afraid of the dark. But surely this is not what John was talking about I think he meant something else.
Maybe it is what people mean when, during a conversation with friends, they refer to hardship they have experienced and say: “the dark moments in my life were …” or “the darkest time I have ever gone through is…” We all have times in our lives that seem dark to us.
Yet, I think John is talking about more than even this. In my lifetime I have heard about, and seen with my own eyes, human moral darkness, intentional evil that seems unexplainable. Evil that is more than can be explained by poor choices and ignorance, evil assisted and promoted by the dark ones in the spiritual world. In Darfur, in Somalia, in Rwanda and in my homeland of Burundi, Darkness has at times ruled the land and the people. We have witnessed with our own eyes the worst evil that human beings can perpetrate. I do not want to shatter your ears with pictures of violence tonight, but I could, I could…
I think this is the darkness that John was writing about. Darkness as we have seen it in Burundi. John lived in days of great persecution and evil, as I have. Did he think of the darkness as just the actions of the perpetrators of war and violence, or did he see that the victims are also part of the darkness? That an entire landscape can be filled with a spiritual darkness?
In Burundi in the last decades darkness has come in the form of war. And the darkness of war affects every person who lives in it. I think living in war is literally “living in the valley of the shadow of death.”
In the War and the Nature of Ultimate Things: The Metaphysics of War Torn Worlds, Roberta Culbertson gives us what I could call a good description of what war is really like.
“At the end of the twentieth century, war seems in fact to know few boundaries. Ninety percent of the casualties of war are non-combatants; the majority of these are women and children. Soldiers conduct war across villages using families as hostages and shields. War does not end with cease-fires or treaties or even when the combatants are exhausted and impoverished… The survivor of war is fundamentally changed by his experience of the proximity of death, chance, and culpability, experienced not in everyday ways, but as atrocities, as horrible deaths and impossible choices or consequences. The events of war elude the frames of word or image.”
This is how we have experienced war in Burundi. Let me give you an example.
Eric is a child soldier who was found on the battlefield in Eastern Burundi. His parents were hacked to death by soldiers at night. Becoming an orphan at the age of 12, he went to the streets of Cankuzo provincial headquarters to beg. When rebels passed in the area en route from Tanzania to the Ruvubu forest, he and other boys were forced to carry their heavy ammunitions with a promise that they would be given food. He had no choice but do as commanded. In the bush he witnessed executions of disobedient comrades, he was forced to kill, and on numerous occasions he himself experienced proximity of death. After the cease-fire and when child solders were reintegrated back to normal life, his life was not the same. He was not normal. He had no home to go to, but because of the little money he received as part of the demobilizing process, his uncle welcomed him in.
Our staff was called in by UNICEF to do a mental diagnostic of demobilized child soldiers, Eric was part of one of the 15 boys focus groups. He did not speak. He behaved as someone living in another world. When asked why, he said had did not understand what was going on. Even when he was given a piece of paper and pen to draw whatever was in his mind, he said he had no picture, nor words to put on paper. This attitude is not uncommon in such situations.
This innocent boy was truly captured by the darkness, damaged by the darkness, and even when rescued, was still trapped in the darkness. I will tell you the ending of his story tomorrow night.
Fergal Keane, in his book Season for blood: a Rwanda Journey said: “I cannot write in terms of facts alone. So bear with me when the road runs down into the valley of the heart and mind and soul. For this is a diary of an encounter with evil beyond any scope of reference I might have had when the journey began.” This author speaks for me.
There are such terrible events out there in the world. Sometimes speaking about them and hearing about them makes one sick. Some say it is hopelessness. Some say there is nothing one can do. I have heard Christians quote in a desperate tone the scriptures: “There will be no peace in the world until sin and death will be removed and defeated.” They have given up. I have heard others in this country say: “What is wrong with those Africans, killing each other?” Africans themselves also say: “Why do we have to do this to each other?” But I do not think darkness is an African problem. And I do not believe that we should give up, not for a moment, not for any place, not for any child or person.
Sometimes the darkness is so thick that you can almost feel it on your face. And it takes different forms. In addition to war we have injustice, poverty and corruption. These are all forms of darkness. I read in the Newspaper the East African of May 28, 2007 that Kenya is the most corrupt country in East Africa, the 144th out of 164 countries in the world, Burundi 131st, Rwanda 128. We will not heal if there is darkness not Light in our governments and business.
A year ago, a friend of mine sent me an e-mail that showed a map of the happiest places to live in the world; happiness being defined as access to health care, ability to work, and access to education, “healthy, wealthy and wise” as it were. In a subjective survey, The University of Leicester found that reported happiness was most closely associated with health, followed by wealth and then education. You wonder the number one happy country to live in? –Denmark, the USA was number 23!
I was shocked to find out that Burundi was the unhappiest place to live on Earth, number 178. It came after Zimbabwe 177! After the Democratic Republic of Congo 176!
You would not know this by visiting my church, Kamange Friends, on a Sunday morning. Yes, my people are poor, they have no health care, they few chances at education but they come and sing and praise God, and they help each other, and they have found the means to enlarge the church building 100%, and with their own funds, without outside help. I do not think they were interviewed for the survey. They do live in darkness, but they live as children of Light. They have found a power.
Stories of darkness can be found everywhere. Let me stop dwelling on it in my presentation as if I am praising it. Let me tell you how I see the children of Light that I know who are living and thriving and overcoming in this darkness.
I am grateful to God that I had access to education. That I have studied many topics, including the scriptures, that I was given the ability to study the Bible in the original Greek. My education has been a light to me. Because of this I can look carefully at what John says about the Light in the darkness.
He says that the Darkness has never overcome the Light. I know that the meaning is much richer than this simple true statement. The word ‘overcome’ has many meanings. It means that the darkness has never overpowered the Light, it has never outpaced or out distanced the Light, and it means that the darkness has not even understood the Light.
I know these things to be true by my own experience.
Darkness cannot, by simple strength or power, put out the Light. I have a torch (hold up a torch – have them turn off the lights again – shine the light on some people in the first row) here that can expel darkness. But you do not have a similar device that can send forth darkness and crush light. The natural law is that Light pushes dark away. It is like this with God’s light and the darkness of evil. One small bearer of Light can overcome much darkness. An advantage of size and numbers does not help darkness.
In the internally displaced people’s camp of Ruhororo, a Tutsi lady heard a mob of Tutsi youth asking soldiers to accompany them to go and kill and loot in a nearby village where the Hutu people lived. This woman was member of the local church in the area, she was a bearer of Light, and although it was very dangerous of her to try and intervene, she decided to go out quickly and tell the people to run away and hide. The people listened to her and crossed the river to the other side, which was another province. When the killers attacked the village, they were surprised to find it empty.
One woman stopped a great deal of evil that day. And we have hundreds of stories like this.
Darkness cannot outrun, out distance, outpace Light. We are told that the speed of Light is the fastest speed there is. What is the speed of darkness? It is only as fast as it can run away from the Light. We have found that evil can wash across a country with great speed. The Rwandan genocide killed 800,000 people in 100 days, and it was done with hand tools, on a person-to-person basis. Even Hitler did not match that efficiency of killing. But we also know this. It didn’t last. Evil does not have lasting strength. It is a sprinter not a long-distance runner. It’s strength fails soon, and then the ever-present Light comes again.
We know this. Darkness damages its own foot soldiers. It wounds its own troops making them less than what they were. And so the strength of its army is always shrinking.
And we know this. That Darkness does not understand the Light. This is a great weakness. To win against an enemy you must understand that enemy. Here is one of the greatest strengths of the Light. The Light understands darkness and its ways, but Darkness has never understood the ways of the Light. Our ways seem like foolishness to Darkness, and this confuses darkness and makes it weak.
I illustrate this with a story not from Burundi but from our shared Quaker history, I heard this story from my friend Roger Minthorne.
A Quaker businessman and his servants were returning from selling goods, on their way home, they were ambushed by bandits. The businessman had money in his pocket and had hid another amount of money under the seat of his wagon. They were stopped at gunpoint and the bandits threatened to kill them if they moved. The bandits searched their pockets and took all the money they could find, and asked if it was all they had. The Quaker businessman remembered what he was taught about telling the truth and he felt that hiding the money under the seat was not telling the truth about where money was. He told the chief bandit that he had more money under the seat. The chief bandit was stunned by this act of showing him where money was, and decided that this businessman was different from the others he had robbed. The bandit ordered his men to return all the money they have taken away from the business man and let him continue his way with all his servants.
And so we see that John was right. That the darkness is real, but the Light of God has always been shining in that darkness, is shining now in that darkness and will always shine in that darkness, and that the Light will prevail. This is our hope. This is our strength. This is our courage. This allows us to take action. To hold the Light within us and Go out into the world and change the world.
I have seen and lived through the darkest of nights, and I have seen the Light shining in that darkness and I have seen the triumph of the Light. I no longer fear dark, as I did when I was a boy. Not the dark of night, and not the dark of evil. I know that he that is within me is greater than that which is in the world, and so I can move with confidence in the darkest places, and so can you.
