Thank you to an elder Desmond Tutu (7.10.1931 – 26.12.2021)

In the early hours of this morning Desmond Tutu died.

I sat with this news in the dark and dawn hour.

When she woke I told Jane, my wife. 

She cried.

I asked her, “who will take his place in our generation and the next?”

Silence.

“You?” she said.

“No”, I replied, “I haven’t suffered enough”

Like Mandela, I knew this day would come but it doesn’t make it easier when it happens, because in many ways I lived with denial of its pending arrival.

Tutu was a giant, a global giant of human rights. Defender of the defenceless. A man of deepest faith, who also embraced the living expressions of all the great faiths. A close friend of the Dalai Lama, with whom he had different theologies, yet spoke with one voice[1]. They loved as brothers. Fearless critic of injustice wherever he saw it. Courageous in speaking truth to power. Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – tirelessly pursuing both truth and reconciliation. Father of the visionary phrase Rainbow Nation. Living embodiment and advocate of Ubuntu – ‘I am, because we are’. Nobel Prize winner for peace. Chair of the Global Elders. Angry, tearful, courageous, wise, merciful……and the most infectious laughter on the planet. I only ever heard him speak once in person, at the Sheldonian in Oxford. He embodied all of these things.

And he did suffer enough.

Apartheid, sickness, exhaustion. He walked deeply through them all.

But what of the void?

What of the gap?

For years I have been asking, ‘where are the elders?’. Through To Plant A Walnut Tree and Becoming Mandela and The Youth Compass Project, I have sought to answer this question.

And of course, Jane was right.

It is me.

And it is you.

It is my time and your time now.

Time to embrace the deepest challenges of our own personal growth.

Time to wrestle with one of the greatest gear changes in our personal consciousness, from ego and tribal centredness, to global and universal centredness – we are one family on one finite planet.

Time to struggle with the most formative question of our generation – what does it mean to be human?

Time to speak truth to power.

Time to be courageous with our weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

Time to find our voice in the world.

Time not to shy away from our own suffering.

Time to plant a walnut tree – a legacy that we probably won’t see in our own life time.

Time to become Mandela – or rather our own unique version of him

……..and time to become Tutu – to embrace the calling, the need, the opportunity, to fill the gap, to become one answer to the question,

‘where are all the elders?’

[1] The Book Of Joy   Dalai Lama & Desmond Tutu  Hutchinson       2016