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17 March 2019

Vigilance

Written by
Keith Johnston

Vigil

There is a vigil in my village tonight for the those murdered in the mosque attacks in Christchurch.  I live in Paekakariki, New Zealand.  Members of our small community will gather to remember the victims of this horrific slaughter.  Other communities in New Zealand are holding vigils, as are other groups around the world.  We come together to mourn, to connect and to be in solidarity. 

As New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, said in her first comment after the attack:

Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home.  They are us.”

The world needs a bigger sense of “us”, not a smaller one.  We at Cultivating Leadership, a global firm that began in Paekakariki, state our purpose as being, “to cultivate ideas, practices, and communities that release the world from simplistic thinking and enable progress on our most complex challenges.”  Implicit in this is a bigger sense of humanity and connection, a way that we realise that we are in this together on planet earth and all of our most pressing challenges require collaboration across different creeds and identities. As we know in our leadership work, such collaboration is not easy.  It requires us to be confident of ourselves and also able to be open and vulnerable with others.  Fears shut us down.

The word vigil comes from the Latin to be awake.  But there are many forms of being woke, it seems, and different words derive from this root.

Vigilantes

There is a wave of rejection in many countries of this need to be inter-connected and to celebrate both our diversity and our common humanity in constructive and creative ways.  There is a drumbeat of national or ethnic or religious purities.  This includes a rise in the expressions of white nationalism.  At its extreme, manufactured fears of “the other,” fanned in the intense feedback loops of social and other media creates meaning and belonging driven by hate and, ultimately, groups and individuals functioning as armed vigilantes.  The hero stories of these vigilantes are often that they are not “haters” but instead “protectors.”  Their stories are that they are protecting their nearest and dearest from invasions of foreigners or attacks on their values.  They are protecting against the “others.” 

Vigilance

We need vigilance on many fronts.  Mostly we need to be awake to the stories that we spin about our rightness and our superiority and our fear of others.  We need to watch for the ways these stories can have such a deep hold on us.  In New Zealand one of our stories has been that we lived a long distance away from many of the world’s threats.   In a way we did, and now we do not.  And yet, even in the faces of these malignant forces, there are things we can offer.  We are a small and open and tolerant society.  We have tried, however imperfectly, to begin righting the wrongs of our colonial “superiorities” and our dispossession of Maori.  We need to be vigilant to enable us to continue to be open and tolerant and secure.  Our vigils of deep grief and solidarity can also be ways to begin to make our worlds whole again and to stand for a bigger sense of us.  And we need to be awake to the layers of pain involved here.

As one of the halfbacks for the national rugby team, the All Blacks, T.J. Perenara, wrote yesterday: “While as cities and a nation we are all devastated by what happened yesterday, let’s not lose sight of the fact that yesterday’s terrorist attacks were targeted at the Muslim community. While it may have felt like it, we were not all at risk. We were not all unsafe. But we are all responsible for joining the wider conversation about racism, about white supremacy, about who we are as a country, and what’s actually going on.

“To our Muslim brothers and sisters – kei te heke ngā roimata, kei te ngākau pōuri au, ka aroha ki a koutou. I am so sorry this happened to you here. You should have been safe here, you should be safe everywhere. My heart is so heavy.”

10 thoughts on “Vigilance”

  1. Carolyn says:

    Thank you keith. This brought me to tears. Again

  2. Sue says:

    What a gift, Keith. Thank you.

  3. Diana says:

    Beautiful words Keith, I will attend Paraparaumu’s vigil on Friday.

  4. Felicity Nelson says:

    Keith, Thank you for sharing perspectives on how we can look at this tragedy.

  5. Anne says:

    Moved to tears Keith. We prayed for you and us and them today on st Patrick’s day in Ireland. An immigrant slave who made a huge impact that has lasted hundreds of years.

  6. Murray Hopkins says:

    Thank you Keith.

    “Mostly we need to be awake to the stories that we spin about our rightness and our superiority and our fear of others.”

    I would add that we need to be vigilant for where those stories have taken root and are growing in the minds of those whose life experience has created the fertile ground. We must be vigilant for the gardeners who have tilled that ground, sown the seeds and tended them for the harvest they hope to receive.

    As an Australian I could not help notice the contrast between your Prime Minister and ours as they spoke about this tragedy. Congruence from yours. Ours took a break from his gardening to utter platitudes and pretense – or perhaps it was simply unawareness of the fact that he had been in the garden at all.

    Thinking of you at your vigils.

  7. Nial O Reilly says:

    Thanks for writing this Keith, I was in Wales for the Rigby this weekend and the stillness and silence in the stadium when we stood to remember the victims in Christchurch moved me to tears, your writing has done the same. The act of senseless violence perpetrated in your lovely Country serves to point up the importance of the work you are doing, keep it up, though your heart must be heavy now, it is important work indeed.

  8. Edgar says:

    Thanks Keith-a helpful reflections. It’s amazing that an airport in a foreign land should stop and think of us. The world has caught up with us. We must use it for good.

  9. Ann Deaton says:

    Thank you, Keith. Remembering that there is an Us, and finding ways to grieve, and to vision a different future, is so important.

  10. Peter says:

    And so, sadly, we watch the grief of those in Sri Lanka and notice the connection to the Christchurch massacre. I really do wonder how the human race can transcend its tribalism. Historically we seem to go through cycles of conflict, reach a realisation that there must be a better way and vest this in institutions like the UN that then get mired in bureacracy rather than an expression of a higher form of power. There is much hope for a different future but hope is not a pathway to a different future.

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