I am honoured to be invited to participate in the opening of the Clark Centre for Peace Research and Action on this day of thanksgiving for the founding of Clark Theological College. I understand the theme this year is Renewing Our Foundation, reflecting your concern that this pioneering theological institution launched by ABAM will go deeper into its values and calling to guide our floundering society.
The thought and care that has obviously gone into the creation of this historic College, the resources sought for and given for it, speak powerfully of the conviction, sacrifice and commitment of its pioneers and those who have sustained it up to this day, specially the teachers and the administrators.
My mother passed away when she was 106. I came home once to take part in a seminar in Kohima when she was in her late 90s. While preparing my talk I asked her “Mother you are one of the oldest persons in Kohima now. What according to you is the most serious weakness of our people today?”
After a while she said, “God cannot be holding the hands of all the people in the world at the same time to guide them. But he has put the amazing human mind and heart inside each one of us for a very special purpose. He means us to use them whenever we are in need of His wisdom and guidance. Our most serious weakness is we are not using our mind and heart to know how to live each day because we are living without thinking. Our problems are not getting solved, and they are increasing, because we are living as we like without using what God has given us …. If we will live and do things as God shows us, this world I am sure too can become quite like what heaven must be like …..”
I realized I had given very little importance to the priceless conclusions and evaluations my old mother was living with, obviously because I thought I knew best.
Our colleges and universities are meant to be seats of learning to ensure all-round growth for our society. But, impacted by unprecedented pressures of existence, our colleges are becoming anything but seats of proper learning and sound growth in our youth who will be the ones to produce the society they and their children will need. Is it not obvious our theological colleges and seminaries have now to play their fullest role, that is, mental, spiritual, philosophical and character development of our people for the sound social, cultural and economic growth of our society? It seems most of the university colleges are now being forced by society to consider this to be not part of their role and responsibility. The perception now seems to be that the universities and their colleges are meant to only produce graduates with degrees to get jobs, or who should be given jobs, not for the service to society during the months but for the salaries at the end of the months.
We do face a frightening crisis of mental and spiritual bankruptcy that is rendering our society irresponsible, directionless and impossible to develop. So we give heartfelt thanks for CTC for all that it has done , and the expanding role it is clearly called to play to help shape the thinking and meaning of life needed to steer our society forward to be the just, creative society it is meant to be for the fullest flowering of our people.
The Clark Centre for Peace Research and Action went out a few days ago with their latest dramatic production to reach the people out there beyond the bounds of the campus here. I regretted I could not come to see what they were staging when the troupe was in Kohima. I believe it was pioneering something institutions like this must do with urgency to identify the things going wrong and the price each one of us has to play to answer them. Such thought-through initiatives help to demonstrate that “wrong is wrong, even if everyone is doing it, and right is right, even if no one is doing it”, and it is possible to reject wrong and do what is right. This gives clarity and hope, something desperately needed at this time.
I venture here to go into what I believe God does say to us when we do use the listening, thinking and understanding equipment installed by Him inside every human being? It is certainly a “wonderfully and fearfully made” communication device as we all know. For sure He does not indulge in polite pleasantries about weather, health and all the other things that are so safe to be polite about.
A study of the Bible and history shows clearly that if we turn to God, not with our needs and demands only, but to also give Him a chance to tell us what He wants us to be and to do, what God says to us is always linked to the most pressing needs and problems of our society and our world. What He tells may at first sound too insignificant, not directly connected to the central problems of society. But He always, it seems, starts with the deepest, honest reasons for our unhappiness. I believe it is an illuminating truth that God meets us at the point where His clear call to us and the devil’s temptation pulling us away from it are clashing fiercely. I am going to refer to two great events. One happened recently, the other in the 18th century.
This morning I had the privilege of presenting a CD of the national apology speech Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered from the floor of the Australian Parliament, to the aboriginal people of Australia. His apology, the first official act of his Government after the Labor Party won the election, was for all the crimes the white people of Australia had committed on the first inhabitants of the Continent including attempts to suppress them to extinction. He made special mention of the Lost Generation survivors.
The British colonized the Australian Continent in the 17th and 18th centuries declaring it ‘terra nullius’, uninhabited earth. This led to treating the first inhabitants of the land as sub-human, and adoption of policies aimed at eventual racial genocide. Of course the unhappiness coming from the guilt in the conscience of many individuals was where the battle to totally reverse the attitude and the policy started. About two centuries later the battle resulted in acts of Parliament that restored vast tracts of land back to the various tribes, and the right of the children of all first nation people of Australia to be taught in their own mother tongues, making it the obligation of the State to implement the laws. The climax of the battle in legal and political terms was the apology speech from the floor of the national Parliament by Kevin Rudd. Watched in amazement by the whole world, Australia as a nation experienced the happiness and satisfaction of going deep and far enough to the roots of a wrong that had become an evil by being condoned for generations.
The discovery and colonization of the Americas in the 15th century soon led to the start of the slave trade in the 16th century. The trade was legalized in Britain by Royal Charters and an act of Parliament in the 17th century. By the 18th Century Britain became the leading slave trading power. It was justified and defended as essential for the security and steady development of the Britain and her Empire. Indeed it had become the economic backbone of Britain. It also provided the field of action and training that gradually developed the Royal Navy to become the greatest navy in the world.
It was estimated that ships from Liverpool and Bristol alone collected and carried more than 3 million African slaves to the West Indies and the Americas. But rejection of the rationalized justifications of the trade on grounds of economic prosperity and national security that had been ruthlessly upheld by the rich and powerful for generations started in the conscience and soul of many individuals. The Quakers were the first to totally condemn and reject slavery and its trade. It was followed by the revival movement led by the Wesley brothers. John Wesley called it “the execrable sum of all villainy”.
The depth of the inner battle raging across Britain was revealed in conversions that took place in erstwhile supporters such as John Newton. He was a slave ship captain who became a priest. From his tiny parish church in an obscure part of London he played a significant role to strengthen the movement for abolition. He wrote “Amazing Grace”. His greatest contribution was probably the help he gave William Wilberforce to become a committed Christian.
Entering parliament at the age of 21 Wilberforce was one of the two youngest MPs of the British House of Commons. The other MP was William Pitt the Younger, also 21, his best friend to whom he became the trusted confidante. Pitt, like his father, became Prime Minister. He was 23! It was widely held as certain that Wilberforce would succeed him as the next Prime Minister.
A different destiny was beckoning Wilberforce. The experience of change in him was so fundamental that he said God had called him to take on the “suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners” (of British Society) as the two main tasks of his life. His leadership of the battle inside the House of Commons was so demanding of his “mind, soul and strength” that he did not become the Prime Minister. But after 20 years of the national crusade inside and outside the Parliament, the slave trade and slavery were abolished by an Act of Parliament. When his colleagues brought him the news that the Abolition Bill had been passed in Parliament Wilberforce was on his death bed. He looked up and replied, “What do we abolish next?” He died soon after.
British historian G. M. Trevelyan assessed the triumph as “one of the turning events in the history of the world”. According to him the timing was amazing as far as Africa was concerned, “It was only just in time. If slavery had not been abolished before the greater commercial exploitation of the Tropics began, Africa would have been turned by the world’s capitalists into a slave farm so enormous that it must eventually have corrupted and destroyed Europe herself, as surely as the world conquest under conditions of slavery destroyed the Roman Empire”.
In the first scripture passage read earlier, God asked, “Cain, why are you angry? Why is your countenance fallen?” The son of Adam and Eve was facing the first crisis in his life. Cain’s self-centred view was that God had unfairly declared his younger brother to be a better farmer whose offering He preferred. And no one should be interested in how he was to handle his disappointment. It was a matter between him and his brother. God saw it differently. So He went all-out to battle for his soul, character and meaning of his life. He came to the bitter, complaining third human being and challenged him to see beyond his personal jealousy and hurt pride to the widest perspectives of the issues at stake. In God’s mind Cain’s part in the building of His kingdom on earth that He had launched with his parents was the most important thing requiring His attention just then. He came all the way to the self-pitying young man and put the highest challenge to him.
Down the years individual Australians became aware of God requiring them to take on the task of their society and nation putting things right with the aboriginal people. Those who understood it were unhappy, fearful and poor in spirit contemplating the price they were called to pay. Hadn’t God done the same thing with Wilberforce and his fellow fighters earlier to end the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire? In both instances of great changes being achieved it was at the points of deepest discernment and personal spiritual needs that God came to individuals with His calling and vision.
That has been true in my own inner journey of trying to follow what I understood in my heart and conscience. I was the shyest, most backward student in my class in Madras Christian College in 1955. I had read only editorials of Assam Tribune, The Statesman, Reader’s Digest articles and some simple High School level English poems and essays before coming to do English Honours! In my class were budding scholars who could already discuss Shakespeare, Milton, and any of the others with ease.
Despite my diffidence I was captivated by the idea of “Remaking the world, starting with yourself” that I encountered when I met the people of Moral Re-Armament, now called Initiatives of Change. The first part I could push aside as crazy but to ignore the second part was dishonest. I could not deny that the two were complimentary parts. The first thought I wrote down in my first tentative experiment with “listening to the still small voice within” was “You are a very selfish man. You don’t love any one. You only have jealousies…” As I continued with the experiment it became clear I needed to start with my father. I wrote a letter telling him the honest truth about myself including the money I was spending wrongly which he was sending at great sacrifice. I asked him to forgive me. His response appreciating my simple honesty with him, telling me he regretted the way he had treated our mother at times and promising to treat her differently, moved me deeply. He wrote from Tezpur Central Jail where he was a “political prisoner” for a year. I had no idea my honesty with him would help my father to see where he too needed to change! I realized God used my little step of obedience to help my parents who were so important to me. I sensed I was being led to something I should not treat casually. As I look back I have no doubt God came to me at the moment of my greatest insecurity, and poverty and rebellion of spirit as I faced His calling and the temptation of the Adversary. My unhappiness was coming from my inclination to accept the easier option.
In the second scripture reading of the two verses of Job 7, Job in exasperation and astonishment asked God “What is man that you make so much of him, that you give him so much attention, that you visit him every morning, and test him every moment? ”
I too have found giving God sufficient time early in the morning is decisively important. I suggest that there are two Nagalands but most are familiar with only one of them. The Nagaland before 6 am is totally different from the Nagaland that takes over our lives and our senses after 6 am. We need to discover this and get the two Nagalands to help each other. Getting to know the Nagaland between 4 and 6 am, even earlier, will transform your life, to start with! If He visits you also in the mornings as Job of old says He does, you are a VIP. Do not treat Him and yourself casually.
NB: The last part of this talk starting from Kevin Rudd’s apology I delivered by referring to points that had been jotted down. The completed, typed out version above is not exactly the same as the one heard on the occasion on November 10th. No points not made in the original talk have been added. NI
(A speech delivered on Clark Theological College
Thanksgiving Day, November 10, 2011 by Niketu Iralu)
The thought and care that has obviously gone into the creation of this historic College, the resources sought for and given for it, speak powerfully of the conviction, sacrifice and commitment of its pioneers and those who have sustained it up to this day, specially the teachers and the administrators.
My mother passed away when she was 106. I came home once to take part in a seminar in Kohima when she was in her late 90s. While preparing my talk I asked her “Mother you are one of the oldest persons in Kohima now. What according to you is the most serious weakness of our people today?”
After a while she said, “God cannot be holding the hands of all the people in the world at the same time to guide them. But he has put the amazing human mind and heart inside each one of us for a very special purpose. He means us to use them whenever we are in need of His wisdom and guidance. Our most serious weakness is we are not using our mind and heart to know how to live each day because we are living without thinking. Our problems are not getting solved, and they are increasing, because we are living as we like without using what God has given us …. If we will live and do things as God shows us, this world I am sure too can become quite like what heaven must be like …..”
I realized I had given very little importance to the priceless conclusions and evaluations my old mother was living with, obviously because I thought I knew best.
Our colleges and universities are meant to be seats of learning to ensure all-round growth for our society. But, impacted by unprecedented pressures of existence, our colleges are becoming anything but seats of proper learning and sound growth in our youth who will be the ones to produce the society they and their children will need. Is it not obvious our theological colleges and seminaries have now to play their fullest role, that is, mental, spiritual, philosophical and character development of our people for the sound social, cultural and economic growth of our society? It seems most of the university colleges are now being forced by society to consider this to be not part of their role and responsibility. The perception now seems to be that the universities and their colleges are meant to only produce graduates with degrees to get jobs, or who should be given jobs, not for the service to society during the months but for the salaries at the end of the months.
We do face a frightening crisis of mental and spiritual bankruptcy that is rendering our society irresponsible, directionless and impossible to develop. So we give heartfelt thanks for CTC for all that it has done , and the expanding role it is clearly called to play to help shape the thinking and meaning of life needed to steer our society forward to be the just, creative society it is meant to be for the fullest flowering of our people.
The Clark Centre for Peace Research and Action went out a few days ago with their latest dramatic production to reach the people out there beyond the bounds of the campus here. I regretted I could not come to see what they were staging when the troupe was in Kohima. I believe it was pioneering something institutions like this must do with urgency to identify the things going wrong and the price each one of us has to play to answer them. Such thought-through initiatives help to demonstrate that “wrong is wrong, even if everyone is doing it, and right is right, even if no one is doing it”, and it is possible to reject wrong and do what is right. This gives clarity and hope, something desperately needed at this time.
I venture here to go into what I believe God does say to us when we do use the listening, thinking and understanding equipment installed by Him inside every human being? It is certainly a “wonderfully and fearfully made” communication device as we all know. For sure He does not indulge in polite pleasantries about weather, health and all the other things that are so safe to be polite about.
A study of the Bible and history shows clearly that if we turn to God, not with our needs and demands only, but to also give Him a chance to tell us what He wants us to be and to do, what God says to us is always linked to the most pressing needs and problems of our society and our world. What He tells may at first sound too insignificant, not directly connected to the central problems of society. But He always, it seems, starts with the deepest, honest reasons for our unhappiness. I believe it is an illuminating truth that God meets us at the point where His clear call to us and the devil’s temptation pulling us away from it are clashing fiercely. I am going to refer to two great events. One happened recently, the other in the 18th century.
This morning I had the privilege of presenting a CD of the national apology speech Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered from the floor of the Australian Parliament, to the aboriginal people of Australia. His apology, the first official act of his Government after the Labor Party won the election, was for all the crimes the white people of Australia had committed on the first inhabitants of the Continent including attempts to suppress them to extinction. He made special mention of the Lost Generation survivors.
The British colonized the Australian Continent in the 17th and 18th centuries declaring it ‘terra nullius’, uninhabited earth. This led to treating the first inhabitants of the land as sub-human, and adoption of policies aimed at eventual racial genocide. Of course the unhappiness coming from the guilt in the conscience of many individuals was where the battle to totally reverse the attitude and the policy started. About two centuries later the battle resulted in acts of Parliament that restored vast tracts of land back to the various tribes, and the right of the children of all first nation people of Australia to be taught in their own mother tongues, making it the obligation of the State to implement the laws. The climax of the battle in legal and political terms was the apology speech from the floor of the national Parliament by Kevin Rudd. Watched in amazement by the whole world, Australia as a nation experienced the happiness and satisfaction of going deep and far enough to the roots of a wrong that had become an evil by being condoned for generations.
The discovery and colonization of the Americas in the 15th century soon led to the start of the slave trade in the 16th century. The trade was legalized in Britain by Royal Charters and an act of Parliament in the 17th century. By the 18th Century Britain became the leading slave trading power. It was justified and defended as essential for the security and steady development of the Britain and her Empire. Indeed it had become the economic backbone of Britain. It also provided the field of action and training that gradually developed the Royal Navy to become the greatest navy in the world.
It was estimated that ships from Liverpool and Bristol alone collected and carried more than 3 million African slaves to the West Indies and the Americas. But rejection of the rationalized justifications of the trade on grounds of economic prosperity and national security that had been ruthlessly upheld by the rich and powerful for generations started in the conscience and soul of many individuals. The Quakers were the first to totally condemn and reject slavery and its trade. It was followed by the revival movement led by the Wesley brothers. John Wesley called it “the execrable sum of all villainy”.
The depth of the inner battle raging across Britain was revealed in conversions that took place in erstwhile supporters such as John Newton. He was a slave ship captain who became a priest. From his tiny parish church in an obscure part of London he played a significant role to strengthen the movement for abolition. He wrote “Amazing Grace”. His greatest contribution was probably the help he gave William Wilberforce to become a committed Christian.
Entering parliament at the age of 21 Wilberforce was one of the two youngest MPs of the British House of Commons. The other MP was William Pitt the Younger, also 21, his best friend to whom he became the trusted confidante. Pitt, like his father, became Prime Minister. He was 23! It was widely held as certain that Wilberforce would succeed him as the next Prime Minister.
A different destiny was beckoning Wilberforce. The experience of change in him was so fundamental that he said God had called him to take on the “suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners” (of British Society) as the two main tasks of his life. His leadership of the battle inside the House of Commons was so demanding of his “mind, soul and strength” that he did not become the Prime Minister. But after 20 years of the national crusade inside and outside the Parliament, the slave trade and slavery were abolished by an Act of Parliament. When his colleagues brought him the news that the Abolition Bill had been passed in Parliament Wilberforce was on his death bed. He looked up and replied, “What do we abolish next?” He died soon after.
British historian G. M. Trevelyan assessed the triumph as “one of the turning events in the history of the world”. According to him the timing was amazing as far as Africa was concerned, “It was only just in time. If slavery had not been abolished before the greater commercial exploitation of the Tropics began, Africa would have been turned by the world’s capitalists into a slave farm so enormous that it must eventually have corrupted and destroyed Europe herself, as surely as the world conquest under conditions of slavery destroyed the Roman Empire”.
In the first scripture passage read earlier, God asked, “Cain, why are you angry? Why is your countenance fallen?” The son of Adam and Eve was facing the first crisis in his life. Cain’s self-centred view was that God had unfairly declared his younger brother to be a better farmer whose offering He preferred. And no one should be interested in how he was to handle his disappointment. It was a matter between him and his brother. God saw it differently. So He went all-out to battle for his soul, character and meaning of his life. He came to the bitter, complaining third human being and challenged him to see beyond his personal jealousy and hurt pride to the widest perspectives of the issues at stake. In God’s mind Cain’s part in the building of His kingdom on earth that He had launched with his parents was the most important thing requiring His attention just then. He came all the way to the self-pitying young man and put the highest challenge to him.
Down the years individual Australians became aware of God requiring them to take on the task of their society and nation putting things right with the aboriginal people. Those who understood it were unhappy, fearful and poor in spirit contemplating the price they were called to pay. Hadn’t God done the same thing with Wilberforce and his fellow fighters earlier to end the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire? In both instances of great changes being achieved it was at the points of deepest discernment and personal spiritual needs that God came to individuals with His calling and vision.
That has been true in my own inner journey of trying to follow what I understood in my heart and conscience. I was the shyest, most backward student in my class in Madras Christian College in 1955. I had read only editorials of Assam Tribune, The Statesman, Reader’s Digest articles and some simple High School level English poems and essays before coming to do English Honours! In my class were budding scholars who could already discuss Shakespeare, Milton, and any of the others with ease.
Despite my diffidence I was captivated by the idea of “Remaking the world, starting with yourself” that I encountered when I met the people of Moral Re-Armament, now called Initiatives of Change. The first part I could push aside as crazy but to ignore the second part was dishonest. I could not deny that the two were complimentary parts. The first thought I wrote down in my first tentative experiment with “listening to the still small voice within” was “You are a very selfish man. You don’t love any one. You only have jealousies…” As I continued with the experiment it became clear I needed to start with my father. I wrote a letter telling him the honest truth about myself including the money I was spending wrongly which he was sending at great sacrifice. I asked him to forgive me. His response appreciating my simple honesty with him, telling me he regretted the way he had treated our mother at times and promising to treat her differently, moved me deeply. He wrote from Tezpur Central Jail where he was a “political prisoner” for a year. I had no idea my honesty with him would help my father to see where he too needed to change! I realized God used my little step of obedience to help my parents who were so important to me. I sensed I was being led to something I should not treat casually. As I look back I have no doubt God came to me at the moment of my greatest insecurity, and poverty and rebellion of spirit as I faced His calling and the temptation of the Adversary. My unhappiness was coming from my inclination to accept the easier option.
In the second scripture reading of the two verses of Job 7, Job in exasperation and astonishment asked God “What is man that you make so much of him, that you give him so much attention, that you visit him every morning, and test him every moment? ”
I too have found giving God sufficient time early in the morning is decisively important. I suggest that there are two Nagalands but most are familiar with only one of them. The Nagaland before 6 am is totally different from the Nagaland that takes over our lives and our senses after 6 am. We need to discover this and get the two Nagalands to help each other. Getting to know the Nagaland between 4 and 6 am, even earlier, will transform your life, to start with! If He visits you also in the mornings as Job of old says He does, you are a VIP. Do not treat Him and yourself casually.
NB: The last part of this talk starting from Kevin Rudd’s apology I delivered by referring to points that had been jotted down. The completed, typed out version above is not exactly the same as the one heard on the occasion on November 10th. No points not made in the original talk have been added. NI
(A speech delivered on Clark Theological College
Thanksgiving Day, November 10, 2011 by Niketu Iralu)
