The Book of Joy

While the racist apartheid government in South Africa imprisoned
Nelson Mandela and so many other political leaders, the Archbishop
became the de facto ambassador of the anti-apartheid struggle. Protected
by his Anglican robes and the Nobel Prize that he received in 1984, he
was able to campaign for an end to the oppression of blacks and other
people of color in South Africa. During that bloody struggle, he buried
countless men, women, and children, and tirelessly preached peace and
forgiveness at their funerals.
After the release of Nelson Mandela and his election as the first
president of a free South Africa, the Archbishop was asked to create the
famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission to try to find a peaceful way
to confront the atrocities of apartheid and pioneer a new future without
revenge and retribution.
“And, in a kind of paradoxical way,” the Archbishop continued, “it is
how we face all of the things that seem to be negative in our lives that
determines the kind of person we become. If we regard all of this as
frustrating, we’re going to come out squeezed and tight and just angry
and wishing to smash everything.
“When I spoke about mothers and childbirth, it seems to be a
wonderful metaphor, actually, that nothing beautiful in the end comes
without a measure of some pain, some frustration, some suffering. This is
the nature of things. This is how our universe has been made up.”
Later I was amazed to hear from prenatal researcher Pathik Wadhwa
that there is indeed a kind of biological law at work in these situations.
Stress and opposition turn out to be exactly what initiate our development
in utero. Our stem cells do not differentiate and become us if there is not
enough biological stress to encourage them to do so. Without stress and
opposition, complex life like ours would never have developed. We
would never have come into being.
“If you want to be a good writer,” the Archbishop concluded, “you are
not going to become one by always going to the movies and eating
bonbons. You have to sit down and write, which can be very frustrating,
and yet without that you would not get that good result.”