Cedric Mason
SPIRITLEVEL
South Africa suffers from spiritual malnutrition. Flood and drought have sapped physical strength and produced grim pictures of starving bodies and hopeless eyes.
Lack of spiritual strength causes the grim picture of crime and corruption, murder and rape, and poverty and violence that is sucking the hope out of our young nation.
Many are short on kindness. Justice is twisted to mean getting my own way. We sparkle with sex but have lost the skill of loving. We are ashamed of goodness. Humans often seem to have mutated into spiritual monsters.
This analysis is necessary because the disease must be correctly diagnosed to prescribe a cure.
If our national problems are spiritual, they will not yield to political, economic, legislative or ecclesiastical remedies alone. Aspirins don’t cure malaria, and enemas don’t work on ulcers.
Many visitors to London have been to Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery. Cut into the massive stone is his famous comment on Feuerbach which raises the crucial issue: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world: the point, however, is to change it.”
Politicians can produce an acclaimed constitution, but racists and cheats can subvert it. Good laws may be passed, but judges can still favour supporters of the old regime, lawyers can put known criminals back into crime, police can protect crooks. The spirit of the nation starts to stink.
Some blame the “criminal classes” but there is no such animal. Well-educated, well-connected, well-heeled, and gentle- mannered persons promote systems which hurl millions into a negative poverty-stricken existence.
When respectable people are ruled by pride and selfishness, a country is hell- bent and needs a spiritual dose of salts and a cultural heart transplant. Spiritual cooling is a bigger problem than global warming.
The problem is not crime – but criminals of greed or need.
The problem is not corruption – but fathers and mothers who accept dishonesty as a way of life.
The problem is not rape – but South African men who refuse responsibility for reforming the violence of their sex. They still blame everything on Eve or the snake.
The problem is not drunkenness, but magistrates and prosecutors, teachers or drivers, politicians or professionals or neighbours who are pissed in public.
Clergy can be prigs as proud as Lucifer, promoting beliefs and practices which are theologically and sociologically up to maggots, and they too need a profound spiritual check-up.
All these are spiritual problems which cannot be solved by political jargon.
There are structural aspects of spiritual malnutrition. We inherited a widely corrupted society in 1994.
The current context of poverty and joblessness which spatters the country with squatter camps, side by side with a context of affluence splurged on luxury houses and shopping malls, encourages a social climate which feeds spiritual disease. Only a major collective effort can establish a new public ethos of caring and responsibility.
But a spiritual revolution is within our grasp if we will go for it, whatever our brand of secular or religious spirituality.
Be honest with yourself: take a quiet spiritual X-ray when no-one is looking. Am I a spiritual burden to my country, my family, my friends, me too? Anti-black or anti-white? Greedy? Proud? Violent? Selfish? A drunken embarrassment?
Make a decision: to hell with it! How can I put things right? I can be good and enjoy it. What can I do to care for my neighbours? What can I give to others, regularly? How can I become a mature personality? Anchor it in specifics.
Stick to it. Everyone, but everyone, makes mistakes. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and win some.
It is not only religious freaks or mystical poets who find that meditation, like prayer, helps. A collective strength seems to be activated when we share our concern with others.
Nothing makes more hard-nosed realistic political sense than building a spiritually healthy society.