when introduced as a speaker or being awarded some prize, I have been embarrassingly described in terms that exceed what I actually did. In honestly trying to understand who I am, it does not help to believe everything that others say about me – except acknowledging criticism and accepting affirmation where appropriate.
My children might well have asked, “What did you do in the struggle, Dad?”
Their mother provided the words for my reply:
I added my stitch or two and the tapestry
would not be diminished if I had not.
But I would. And as the work was hung
for all to see, I was glad that my few stitches
were part of the whole.2
I was not a radical activist fighting in the trenches. Compared to those who were banned, detained, tortured, exiled and murdered, most of us should remain silent. Yet I can at least say that, from the 1960s through to the end of apartheid, I added my voice in support of those who were leading the fight. I suppose I was, as has been said of me, “a leading voice in the church struggle against apartheid”. But I have no right to claim more, or look back to the past with nostalgic satisfaction. The struggle continues, and a new generation is rightly challenging the adequacy of what some of us tried to do.
Writing an autobiography is a risky undertaking, which requires self-examination filtered through hindsight; much must remain unrecorded and some purposively hidden. It is not only impossible to tell everything; it is also unwise. I owe it to family and friends to respect their privacy, revealing chiefly that which helps document my life as I have come to own it in relation to them. You can be certain that they are somewhere on most pages, even if not always mentioned. This is especially true of Isobel, to whom I have now been married for fifty-five years and whose poetry frequently finds a place in these pages.
Carl Jung described his outer life as “hollow and insubstantial”, and tells us he could only understand himself “in the light of inner happenings”.3 But there can be no separation of the inner and outer journey; they belong together, informing and feeding each other. My “soul” is who I am in my body, in relationship to others and the world in which I live with them. My greatest struggle through the years has been to ensure that the inner and outer, the emotional and the cerebral, are creatively meshed. And nothing has more traumatically galvanised me in doing so than Steve’s tragic death in 2010 – something that pervades my story as I now tell it. I would have told it differently otherwise, if I had told it at all.
I sometimes wonder how it would have been if, at some critical junctures, I had chosen differently. It is not good to brood over what might have been, though. The truth is I don’t regret the choices I made, am grateful for the many doors that opened, and even for some that slammed shut in my face. Not everything that has happened to me, however, has been the result of my choosing. I did not choose grief and deep darkness; that comes uninvited. But what I have done with such experiences has depended on choices I have made.
I have long moved away from academic writing in which the subject is “we”, a device that has enabled me to hide behind scholarly pretension. I have written many articles in scholarly journals that have conformed to such conventions, but about fifteen years ago I was encouraged to break with tradition and rid myself of the habit. Despite the dangers of egocentricity, I wrote myself into the text, blending the academic with the personal, enclosing my reflections within the narrative of my life. I began to find my voice especially in Being Human: Confessions of a Christian Humanist (2006), and most notably in Led into Mystery (2013) in which I owned my grief over the death of Steve.
Those who are interested to know more about what I personally believe as a Christian should read these books in particular. But it was, in part, the reader response to them that encouraged me to tell my story less constrained by the need for peer reviews. This led me to write two semi-autobiographical books during 2014. The first was A Theological Odyssey: My Life in Writing, published in conjunction with a conference hosted by Stellenbosch University honouring my seventy-fifth birthday. The second was Sawdust and Soul: A Conversation about Woodworking and Spirituality. Co-authored with Bill Everett, a friend of many years, the book tells my story through the lens of my working with wood.
As writing books and essays has been so much a part of my life, I cannot avoid referring to these in passing, so I suggest that those who would like more information should consult A Theological Odyssey. My life-long engagement with the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and martyr, is also a strong thread running through my story, so I cannot refrain from mentioning conferences, lectures and books related to my journey in dialogue with him. The details can be found elsewhere.
Life’s complexity refuses to be condensed into the framework that literary convention requires, but its telling needs to be anchored within a manageable timeline. I have divided my story into four chronologically determined sections. In the first part, I trace my ancestry and formative years from my birth in 1939 to my years as a young pastor in Durban, and then to my time as an ecumenical activist working for the South African Council of Churches (SACC). In the second part, I tell the story of how I became an academic at the University of Cape Town, starting in 1973. I conclude this part in 1990 when Mandela was released and South Africa emerged from the dark night of apartheid into a new day of hope and possibility. In the third part, my story is set within the context of a country in transition and a rapidly changing global society, ending with the birth of a new millennium and my formal retirement from the university in 2003. In the fourth part, I recount the last twelve years spent as a member of the Volmoed community and draw a line at the end of my seventy-fifth year.
There is a mixture of ways in which I tell my story. There are the anecdotes of age that have come to mind as I have remembered the past. I have not found the need to search for illustrations; I have more than enough stories of my own residing in what Dante called my “cargo of experience”.4 Then there are what I think of as snapshots: events that I have tried to capture as though I was still operating the Brownie camera I got as a teenager, pointing at and shooting things that were interesting and important in passing.
Insofar as an autobiography – perhaps especially one of an academic – recounts the history of ideas as they have evolved in the mind, I cannot but share reflections along the way about concerns and issues that have shaped my journey. In order to give each chapter some coherence and direction, I have highlighted these in the title and in a quotation that leads into the text. But the chapters proceed chronologically, giving an account of the passing years and using dates as signposts.
Lapse of memory is undoubtedly a problem in writing one’s autobiography at the end of a long journey. Fortunately I have considerable data at my disposal, which I have accumulated over the years and Isobel has kept detailed diaries, photo albums and journals of our travels and family life. With her scientific eye for detail, I have been kept on my toes. We also have comprehensive family archives; in fact, the De Gruchy side has a complete genealogy from the fourteenth to the present century.
It is impossible to thank everyone by name who has helped to write my story over the past seventy-five years, among them many colleagues and students, but I can and must thank those who have helped me bring it together between the two covers of this book. I am most grateful to Rosemary Townsend and Mary Bock whose language and literary skills helped fine-tune what I had written; Susan Jordaan, the commissioning editor at Lux Verbi, who did not hesitate to support the project and guide me through it; and Isobel above all, for coming this long way with me, and making sure that I got the details right in committing the story to print. Archbishop Desmond Tutu readily agreed to write the foreword despite his many commitments, even though he has retired several times. He has been a remarkable friend over many years, and has never declined a request to commend my work. Then there is the Volmoed community, especially Bernhard and Jane Turkstra, Mike
