Reflections On The Passing Of Desmond Tutu

Dear Reader,

The passing of Desmond Tutu is sad in its own way, but when I think of him I think of the smile and the sheer sense of honesty and courageous purpose that he portrayed. Those that knew him well have come forward and testified to what he did for South Africa in helping to bring the country out of apartheid and leading the population towards a sense of unity. His face and words were a galvanising force - but of peace, not anger.

That he was a man of deep faith seems to be beyond question. One witness to his behaviour actually said that in all (even dangerous) situations, Desmond Tutu knew only one way forward - and that was through prayer. It has even been said that when driving a car he would often be deeply in prayer while at the driving wheel, even with his eyes closed!

So, to those who would ask: "How can I be a Christian? How can I be a good man? How can I be the kind of man I want to be? How can I relate to my society and how can I carry out the way of life that I have accepted and that I believe to be right?", Desmond Tutu represents, surely, a fair example of what a good Christian might be.

The only drawback in his example was that he, as an appointed member of the established church, had to wear the clothes and regalia of office for people to take notice. It may be that in the situation in South Africa that was a necessary requirement for that time, but we surely all know that it does not take only a Desmond Tutu or Mother Theresa as officials of the church to be good Christians. The door is open to everyone.

Such a man was John Bennett, an Englishman, born in a privileged home and well educated at King's College, Wimbledon and then received military training. He was an officer in the British Army in the First World War and after, serving in the Middle East, latterly as a head of Britain's security services out there. But it was during WW1 and after being wounded that he had a life-turning experience when he found his true self out of his body. That caused him to open his eyes and seek answers to inner questions. He sought answers in various directions in the Middle East and at home.

After many years following closely the mystical teachings of a man named Gurdjieff who died at the end of the 1940s, Bennett developed his own perspective but very much based on what he had learnt in the foregoing years. The inscrutable Bennett was a man of deep learning and foresight.

In addition to all that, he was a Fellow of the Institute of Fuel, London, from 1938 onwards; Chairman, Conference of Research Associations, 1943–1945; Chairman, Solid Fuel Industry, British Standards Institution, 1937–1942; Chairman and Director, Institute for the comparative study of History, Philosophy, and the Sciences, Kingston upon Thames, 1946–1959. He was a near-contemporary in the fuel industry of Ernst Schumacher (1911-1977), famous for his Small Is Beautiful book of the 1970s and much more. An institute in Schumacher's name exists in 2021.

In 1971 Bennett launched a meditation and spiritual work centre (an academy) in Gloucestershire, and about this time (1971) he prophetically made a speech about the succeeding 50 years:

We have a time in front of us that we have to live through, and it is the next fifty years that will be critical. It is wise to look at the fifty years that are coming as a whole, whether it is for ourselves, for those who will have to face the world of 2020 or those who know that their children will have to face that world. There are some things that we can predict about it with confidence, and the most important is that it is going to be very different from the world that we are living in today. 

The environment of our life on the earth is changing very rapidly, at an accelerated pace, and it is not possible to conceive that any events other than major catastrophes will prevent accelerated change, so either we will have a catastrophic change which will leave the world having to pick up the bits and start again, or we shall have an explosive change that will leave us with a world that will be very difficult to live in, and it will be a world that will be progressively more difficult to live in because of the greater congestion, because of the more intensive interaction between people, the various consequences of the way we have lived on this earth especially in the first half of the present century which have left a very difficult legacy for those who have to live for the next fifty years.

He then said: 

I’m just reminding you of some of these things because I want to bring as strongly as possible this point that what is most needed at the present time is the know-how of living.

The answer to the question: how can I be a Christian? How can I be a good man? How can I be the kind of man I want to be? How can I relate to my society and how can I carry out the way of life that I have accepted and that I believe to be right.

Bennett - like Gurdjieff before him - wanted to do something to bring meaningful Christianity into people's lives, and he was convinced that attitudes were in need of change. Seeking support for his point of view, he said:

I’ve talked to well over 100 people individually and asked them to tell me what it was they were looking for, and I’ve also talked to professors of psychology in two different universities and other members of faculties and I’ve found that there is an all round agreement that what we require at the present time is a completely radical experimentation in education of the very kind that we were proposing, even among people who had never heard of Gurdjieff. For example, when I went to Washington University and talked to people in St. Louis, I found that people were saying to me, who is this man Gurdjieff you are talking about? And would you tell us what Sufis are? And so on.

The matter of education was and is so important, he thought. He continued:

There are various attempts to bring education forward into the New Age as it is said by going through interdisciplinary studies, by departing from any conventional methods of teaching; by abolishing the classroom and the lecture. But in spite of these apparently revolutionary or evolutionary changes in the educational system, the complete change-over so far as I know has not been attempted. That is, by complete change-over I mean an education that is based on what man is himself how, he is constructed, on his own potentialities and the possibility of developing these potentialities so as to produce what can be called the complete man. So, the theme of this new institution can be called developing the whole man, enabling or providing conditions for the whole man or the whole woman to develop themselves.

This brings me to the need for appropriate techniques. The kind of teaching that is suitable for teaching or conveying of knowledge and the acquisition of new skills are not appropriate for the development of man himself.

This then was the basis for his new academy in Gloucestershire, at Sherbourne House: an attempt at the education of man in finding the true essence of what Jesus taught to his inner circle. He said, "The kind of teaching that is suitable for teaching or conveying of knowledge and the acquisition of new skills are not appropriate for the development of man himself. ... And although all of us probably say we wish to live by conscience, we do not, for the most part, know how living by conscience is to be attained."

John Bennett died in 1976, and it was somewhat strange that Schumacher followed the year after, just at the time that the economic circumstances in the UK were becoming quite difficult, resulting in "the winter of discontent" in 1979. By this time the forces of recovery were put in the hands of the right-wing political parties of the USA and the UK and from then through the remainder of the "50 years" that Bennett alluded to from 1971, material forces strongly over-ruled any attempt by society to achieve a satisfactory and human medium. Everyone was 'sold' with the idea that economic growth was the ideal to aim for.

What tragedy!

The efforts of John Bennett, Schumacher and others in the UK (including Sir George Trevelyan, 1906-1996) were largely forgotten about - until the circumstances that started developing in 2008 and the financial crash, together with the Iraqi, Afghanistani, Syrian and Yemeni conflicts in which the west has participated so heavily, resulting in (and from troubles elsewhere) huge refugee issues.

All this, plus Climate Change and the Covid pandemic, now require the overdue application in the government of the very compassionate and holistic principles that John Bennett espoused. A significant medium now in existence for such change in the UK is the Schumacher Institute. Regrettably, the church offers little by way of psychological understanding to be able to address today's issues, remaining over-attached to its theology.

Thy Will be done, oh Lord!

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