It’s a good practice, I think, to read books about inspiring people who have lived remarkable lives. It’s a way of learning to see the world through the eyes of those who have most profoundly shaped it. For my part, I’ve made it a point to learn what I can from Nobel Peace Prize winners - folks like Martin Luther King, Jr., Wangari Maathai, Elie Wiesel, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Mother Teresa.

Another remarkably inspiring Nobel laureate for me is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who led the nonviolent anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and served as chair of  the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He just turned 80, and a new biography was published for the occasion: Tutu: Authorized (HarperOne), by South African journalist Allister Sparks and Tutu’s daughter, Mpho Tutu. The book also includes anecdotes and memories from a great variety of people who have known Tutu or have been impacted by him in different ways, and these perspectives give the book its intimate feel. I’d already read two of Tutu’s books, and did some research on him while I was at Eastern, but reading this new biography was a real treat.

While Tutu holds some theological views I fundamentally disagree with, he’s still someone I look to with tremendous gratitude and respect for all he has done to work for peace and reconciliation as a church leader. I hope he has paved the way for many who will follow in his footsteps. Most of us won’t shape history quite the way Tutu has, but I think all of us can learn from his example and consider the implications for our own spheres of influence, however great or small they may be.

Here are five things about Tutu that jumped out while reading the new biography.

1. Spiritual disciplines: time after time, those reflecting on Tutu’s life referred to the impact of his practice of spending hours every day in silence and prayer. While it could come across as snobbish or holier-than-thou for Tutu to leave a meeting or party or to sit silently in a car ride with a reporter and spend that time praying, no one seems to think he’s a spiritual snob. Rather, they see the rest of his life -- the calm, the joy, the perseverance, the humility - and they’re impressed. And many of them, for what it’s worth, don’t share Tutu’s faith.

2. Being fully present: Tutu recognizes that to give to others as he does so deeply and consistently, he needs to be nourished. The flip side of spending so much time alone and in prayer, then, is that when he’s with people, he’s with them fully. And he’s the same person, it seems, whether he’s with long-time friends, with a world leader for the first time, or with an ordinary person like you or me. He seems to have a humanizing effect on people even -- or perhaps especially -- in dehumanizing situations. This plays out in his belief in ubuntu, which roughly translates into “a person is a person through other people.”

3. Humor: an immensely important but largely overlooked quality among his fellow activists is Tutu’s sense of humor. He never seems to take himself too seriously, and his humor is often self-deprecating. It’s evident that his sense of humor had a lot to do with dispelling a number of quite tense situations during the apartheid era when there wasn’t much to laugh about. By putting his audiences at ease, it made his costly message of peace and reconciliation a lot easier to swallow.

4. Humility: one never gets the sense that Tutu considers himself better than anyone else. He was constantly present with poor, angry black South Africans when it would have been much safer to champion their cause from a distance. He didn't allow his international fame to go to his head or to distract him from the reality on the ground. Also, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Tutu quietly stepped away from his temporary role as political leader of the movement, happy to see someone else take the lead. This kind of humility is beautiful because it is rare.

5. Civility: at a time when pressure was mounting among black South Africans to take up arms against the apartheid government, Tutu did what he could to seek nonviolent alternatives and to urge restraint on both sides. Rather than pitting himself against white South Africans or demonizing them, he sought to show that everyone desperately needed a new way forward. In a world of terrifying religious extremism, Tutu’s civility is a breath of fresh air. While his vision for a “rainbow people of God” and his affirmation of the equal goodness of all religions leads him, in my estimation, into theological relativism and universalism, he has nonetheless led one of the most remarkable nonviolent movements in history -- and for that example and legacy we can all be grateful.

What are your thoughts on Desmond Tutu? What have you learned from him? In your own sphere of influence, how have you been able to put into practice what you’ve learned?

[Photo credit: Getty Images via TIME.com]

It should come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I’m a big fan of John Perkins. He’s one of my favorite go-to guys for all things community development, civil rights, racial reconciliation and urban ministry. Last week I read one of his more recent books, Welcoming Justice: God's Movement Toward Beloved Community, which he co-wrote with Charles Marsh, a religion professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Project on Lived Theology. By way of introduction, Perkins is black, Marsh is white, and the book is about “beloved community” -- the guiding vision for Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement in the American South where both Marsh and Perkins grew up. I’m not sure I’m entirely qualified to do that vision justice, but I understand it to be more or less the vision King articulates in his timeless “I Have A Dream” speech.

Marsh is a scholar of the Civil Rights movement, Perkins is a veteran of it, and their thesis is that what kept the Civil Rights movement grounded and creative and redemptive was its roots in the Christian faith. Marsh writes:

The Civil Rights movement teaches us that faith is authentic when it stays close to the ground. And it reminds us of faith’s essential affirmations: showing hospitality to strangers and outcasts; affirming the dignity of created life; reclaiming the ideals of love, honesty and truth; embracing the preferential option of nonviolence; and practicing justice and mercy... Only as long as the Civil Rights movement remained anchored in the church -- in the energies, convictions and images of the biblical narrative and the worshiping community -- did the movement have a vision.

At some point after the assassination of King, the movement lost touch with its roots, they say, and that’s when it splintered and degenerated. They want to call us back to the roots of the movement and consider what it can teach us about a twenty-first century embodiment of that vision of beloved community. A big part of that is understanding Christian discipleship through the lens of reconciliation -- reconciliation between people and God, and reconciliation among people across various boundaries, including race.

Perkins asserts that poverty and racism are interrelated, and are in fact part of a bigger web of social breakdown, with individual, family and community issues all at play. And the church, he says, needs to step up:

The issue we’re facing is the broken family and the broken community. It really is a single issue. The community is broken because families are broken, and families can’t get back together because the community is broken. This is why family values and social justice aren’t separate issues. The health of the community depends on the health of the family and the health of the family depends on the justice of the community. If the church is going to offer good news in our time, we have to give some alternative to the broken family and broken community that reflect the desperation of our culture... If the gospel of reconciliation is going to interrupt the brokenness in society, our churches are going to have to rethink their vocation... A community where men stand in the rain to beg is broken. There is no peace in that city. It’s that man’s problem, but it’s also our community’s problem. We’ve got to do something to make good work possible for healthy people like him. What does the church have to offer a community where healthy men beg on the street corner?

What indeed?

I wish churches spent more time thinking about how their members could love one another and share a common life by working together as a community. Part of the reason our churches are so individualistic is that we just accept the economic system of our culture without question. We assume that people who can get the good jobs should go wherever they have to and the people who can’t get the good jobs should just take what they can get. But churches that want to interrupt the brokenness of society ought to be about creating jobs in the community and giving neighbors an opportunity to work together. If we take our communities seriously as economic places, we’ll spend more time thinking about creating good work than we spend thinking about more relevant worship styles or bigger church buildings.

All in all, the book is a pretty quick read, but it's deep, because it gets at the very roots of that which stands in the way of reconciliation, and it’s cause for some soul searching among evangelicals, I think. I hope and pray that my tribe will become known as true ambassadors of reconciliation and that we’ll get to experience some of that beloved community too.

It’s not charity. Charity is rooted in good intentions, but as Perkins writes in the book, “acts of charity can be dangerous because givers can feel good about actions that actually accomplish very little, or even create dependency.” While charity has its place, it’s best seen as a starting point and never the finish line.

It’s not welfare. Too often, Perkins and others argue, government welfare programs are counterproductive by disincentivizing a healthy work ethic and family cohesiveness. While most would agree that there ought to be a safety net for those who truly come on hard times, it does seem clear that welfare-as-usual isn’t getting the job done.

It’s not a quick fix. There’s a big difference between organizing a clean-up day in a rough part of town and actually addressing the root causes that made it a rough part of town in need of cleaning up. Long term change requires trusting relationships to be established, which requires a lot of time.

So if CCD isn’t charity, welfare, or a quick fix scheme, what is it? Well, it has eight core components, which are articulated quite well here. But of those eight, the big three are these:

Relocation. This means “moving into a needy community so that its needs become our own needs.” It’s essentially saying that the city is not a lost cause and it means becoming actual neighbors to the urban poor. It’s rooted in the example of Jesus in the Incarnation, not loving us from a safe distance but becoming flesh and blood like us and moving into the neighborhood.

Reconciliation. There are all kinds of barriers in our world, but as Christians we are to be ambassadors of reconciliation. “The power of authentic reconciliation between us and God, and between people of every culture and race is an essential component of effective ministry in our hurting world.”

Redistribution. This is about far more than dollars. It’s about joyfully sharing all of who we are and all we have, recognizing that we are primarily stewards -- not owners -- of the gifts God has given us. When you think about it, this is the natural next step once we have relocated to a place of need and been reconciled with God and neighbor.

I hope you see the contrast between these two sets of three. Though all too often we act as if good intentions or massive top-down programs or quick fixes will work to bring people out of poverty, reality seldom supports such a view. Rather, it's going to take a lot of time, a lot of love, and in a lot of cases, relocation, reconciliation and redistribution. And if it is to be Christian, it requires not only a certain kind of person, but a certain kind of church. We’ll take a look at that next time.

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I remember watching Hotel Rwanda last winter for the third or fourth time, and I was struck by the power of words when used to dehumanize people who are different. Before decent law-abiding Hutus could begin systematically hacking Tutsis to pieces in broad daylight, the Tutsis had to be made to seem sub-human. You had radio personalities calling Tutsis ‘tall trees’ and ‘cockroaches’ rather than referring to them as people. When you hear this repeated often enough, and circumstances become desperate enough, it suddenly somehow becomes no problem to ‘cut down the tall trees’ and to ‘crush the cockroaches’.

I share that because I worry about the way we in the United States sometimes talk about Mexicans and Central Americans, and the way Costa Ricans talk about Nicaraguans. People in Rwanda never thought they were capable of what they did in 1994, but before they knew it 800,000 people had been slaughtered. I’m not saying the same thing is going to happen in the southwest U.S. or here in Costa Rica, and I certainly hope humanity has learned its lesson, but there’s something tragic about dehumanization in and of itself, long before it leads to genocide.

Ironically, in the memoir written by the real-life hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, he makes the point that it was the power of words that saved the lives of those 1268 people he harbored. Words can be powerful tools for good. Words can, in a sense, serve to humanize.

On Sunday I’m taking an early bus to Managua, where I’ll be staying for a few days, visiting different development projects and ministries for a writing project. My hope for this trip, when it’s all said and done, is that the words I put down on paper, in a magazine maybe, would be words that honor the dignity of those I meet. Words that serve as little instruments of peace, reweaving in some small way a bit of the shalom that God intends for the people made in his image.