To Rwanda and Back – Liberation spirituality and reconciliation By Mary Grey Darton, Longman and Todd, 2007, ISBN 139780232526646, pp 228, rrp $39.95

Reviewed by Maggie Helass

Rwanda is to Africa what Cambodia is to Asia or the Holocaust to Europe. Genocide is not uncommon in human affairs. This book makes an heroic attempt to analyse the phenomenon with a view to discover a way back to wholeness for a nation which has murdered children and mothers, fathers and neighbours.

Professor Mary Grey is a feminist theologian who was faced with the churches’ complicity in genocide when she visited Rwanda as part of a World Council of Churches visit in 2004.

The experience forced her to rethink her understanding of justice and reconciliation (researched in many books by this author).

This read is interesting for exposing some of the risks of applied theology – of praxis

– and weaves together narrative, scholarship and speculation.

The author describes her first visit to Africa, although she works in an impoverished part of India and has extensive cross-cultural experience. Her personal journey as an Irish woman growing up in England is a glowing ember in the narrative.

The bald statistic of a hundred days of killing a million people turned out to be the “tip of the iceberg” for the WCC visitors to Rwanda thirteen years after the genocide.

Colonialism had sown the seeds in this most Christianised African country, and a long war had preceded the actual genocide – which had confused perceptions in the international community, which in turn led to its abandonment of Rwanda during the killing.

The phenomenon of structural amnesia was identified by the WCC visitors – where the context for remembering is deliberately made impossible. This experience is common around the world – refugees, migrant workers, asylum-seekers, peoples with disabilities etc are often silenced by the dominant discourse.

In the case of Rwanda silence was often induced by memories too horrible to recall.

Liberation theology, influenced by the Exodus story, honours the process of ‘dangerous memory’ that allows an oppressed people to remember origins. But this author introduces a concern that liberation theology’s understanding of memory is not adequate to the fact that we have not always been innocent victims of history.

This introduces the subject of the silence over the damage and exploitation done to the planet – a core theme in this book.

Feminist spirituality stresses the interconnections between personal, political, psychological and spiritual. Sometimes this attempt at integrity causes the discourse to balloon into distant skies outside the reasonable competence of a couple of hundred pages.

There are salutary points of connection with our own lives as members of a human race with a history – and particularly for Australians faced with the conundrum of an apology to Aboriginal peoples.

Re-membering in this case is painful because it involves coping with the claims of guilt. The author refers to this as metanoic memory, a remembering that needs humility and a willingness to bear witness to the truth.

The area of reconciliation and justice is fraught with difficulties because of countless attempts to barge through forgiveness at any price.A subject the author explores at length, with restorative justice as an aspect of the atonement.

“It is within this vision of structural justice of right relation that forgiveness finds meaning.” (p.7)

A radical message of this book is a call for an overhaul of church ecclesiology, which puts the emphasis not on the cross as sacrifice and expiation but as symbol of identity in love, and a readiness to share the same vulnerability that afflicted the people Jesus loved.

Similarly, the author suggests that social transformation needs transformed consciousness and a new symbol system that inspires different ways of relating to the earth – away from a privatised notion of salvation – and a recovery of the Common Good.

This text is not well-polished but provides an interesting insight into the struggle of researching “the embodied spirituality of reconciliation” which the author is developing. As such it is a good example of praxis.