Emily Graves spoke with freedom fighter and healer Fr. Michael Lapsley

Father Michael Lapsley (Photo by Russ Cusick)

In 1990, Fr. Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest and monastic from New Zealand, exiled to Zimbabwe because of his anti-apartheid work in South Africa, opened a package and was immediately struck by the blast of an explosion. The bomb suspected to be the work of the apartheid-era South African secret police blasted away both his hands and one of his eyes.

His recently released memoir tells the story of this horrendous event, backing up to recount the journey that led him there, particularly his rising awareness of the radical social implications of the gospel and his identification with the liberation struggle and then the subsequent journey of the last two decades.

Returning to South Africa, Lapsley saw a whole nation damaged by the apartheid era. So he discovered his new vocation to become a wounded healer, drawing on his own experience to promote the healing of other victims of violence and trauma.

Fr. Lapsley has received commendations from Nelson Mandela and the prime minister of New Zealand for his work. Emily Graves spoke with him to find out more.

Emily: Please could you begin by telling us about your upbringing and how you came to be a priest?

Father Michael Lapsley: I was born and brought up in New Zealand. From a very young age I thought of becoming a priest. I often tell the funny story that when I was four years old I couldn't decide whether to be a priest in a church or a clown in a circus and when I became a priest my brother said, "Well, now you've succeeded at both!" But for me it was a way of taking the Christian gospel to its logical conclusion, in terms of, as I saw it, the radical demands of Jesus to follow Him. I went further and didn't simply train to be a priest, I joined an Anglican religious order; a community of brothers and priests. At the age of 17 I travelled to Australia to join that community and to begin my training as a priest.

Emily: You then ended up in South Africa?

Father Michael Lapsley: Yes, just after I'd finished my training. I'd done five years of theology and the question was what was I going to do next? I'd been ordained as a priest and my community, the Society Of The Sacred Mission, decided that they would send me to South Africa to do further studies. I went to South Africa initially to be a university student. My community was responsible for university chaplaincy for two black and one white university campus. I often say that the day I arrived in South Africa I stopped being a human being and became a white man, because suddenly every single aspect of my life was decided by the colour of my skin.

Emily: Please could you tell us about the South African apartheid?

Father Michael Lapsley: One way of describing it was constitutionalised racism. The actual constitution of South Africa under apartheid denied political power to all people of colour and reserved it to white people, but it permeated every single aspect of South African life. Some people have described apartheid in three levels: one is what they call macro-apartheid where under laws that go back to 1913 and 1936, African people, black people, were left with only 13% of the land. Then there was the middle level of apartheid, which was the division of the suburbs. The residential areas were divided according to race. Then there was what was called petty apartheid and that referred to the huge number of signs, like on park benches; signs on toilets and lifts and beaches that defined who could enter them. The first day I arrived in South Africa I went to the local post office to post a letter to my mother and there were two entrances: one said 'whites only' and the other didn't say 'black' it said 'non-whites', so we who were white were the minority and had an extraordinary level of power, privilege and wealth that was part of the legal system and black people were denied fundamental rights in the land of their birth and because they were voteless, they had no non-violent method by which they could get rid of the government that oppressed them so much.

Emily: In seeing this, how did this cause you to act?

Father Michael Lapsley: I suppose in a crude sense when I first arrived in South Africa, I guess I had two choices: beat them or join them. In my heart of hearts I decided to beat them. Not long after I'd been in South Africa I said to a young black medical student, "I don't believe in apartheid," and he said, "Well, Father, that's very nice: where are you going to sleep tonight?" and of course I was going to return to my white suburb. A black priest said to me, "But you're quite nice now - but give you six months," because he'd seen people come from other places and behave like normal human beings, but gradually get eaten by the dominant ideology.

In terms of my own journey, I became a university chaplain; a pastor to black and white students and one of the central issues for white students was that they were forced by law to go to the South African army to become the defenders of apartheid. Some then chose to leave the country and a few decided that they would go to prison. With black students there was this question: should they join the arms struggle? Should they pick up arms to free their country? What happened in my case: 1976 was the turning point for me and my generation because that's when black schoolchildren began to be shot on the streets of South Africa. The thing that shook my Christian faith was realising that those who shot children read the Bible every day and went to church on Sunday and shot kids. I had been a totally convinced pacifist until then, but in the face of the killing of schoolchildren I came to the very painful and reluctant conclusion that in our context and with our history, people had a right to defend themselves and so that was a journey that led me - I also became in 1976 the national chaplain for Anglican students, black and white, English-speaking, Afrikaans-speaking, so I began to speak out against the killing of school children and against the widespread use of torture and detention without trial.

In September of 1976 I was expelled from South Africa and I went to live in the mountain kingdom of Lesotho, which is a tiny, tiny country completely surrounded by South Africa, but an independent country. It was there that I made the decision that I would join the liberation movement, the organisation of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress of South Africa. I was then to spend 16 years away from South Africa and as a member and as one of the chaplains within the African National Congress, which of course had been struggling since 1912 for freedom for black people and since 1960 had also opted for the use of arms. My own role was pastoral, theological and educational. I was involved in assisting young exiles from universities with their educational needs. I was also a pastor caring for people in exile and doing the normal things a priest does when it comes to baptisms and weddings and then sadly too many funerals. Also my work was theological because the apartheid state claimed to be Christian, but what they were doing was the very opposite of Christianity, so part of my work was the work of unmasking and delegitimizing their claim to be Christian and seeking to mobilise people in faith communities across the world to say that in South Africa there wasn't just the justice issue or a human rights issue, there was also a faith issue, because it was our faith that was being used as an ideological weapon to defend racism, to defend apartheid.