IT IS PROBABLY SADDER FOR US than it is for Desmond Tutu that he has left us, one of the best and bravest and most moral people of his generation was ninety, I don't know many people who live into their nineties very far who are happy with their condition. I'm not regarding the prospect with joyous anticipation, myself. And he certainly would have known that death would not be the end of it for him, that he was dying into God, than which nothing could be more wished for.
I don't have any doubt that he is a saint, though, as Dorothy Day protested the attempt to make her one while she was still alive, the way we think about saints is really screwed up, making them pure, pristine and irrelevant to their work to bring justice and heal the earth makes the idea a problem.
I certainly hope that his words and ideas, what he fought against apartheid, climate change, economic and ethic injustice, etc. won't be disempowered behind the pay-wall that the children of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. have jailed his legacy for the world behind. That segregation of his legacy for money is a large part of how his enemies, the ones who attacked him, jailed him and killed him can set up a fake image of him with a few of his most well known words stripped of their context and meaning, effectively silencing his most radical statements and ideas to do that. If those who have control of his words and ideas allow the honest and full use of them Desmond Tutu might fill in that gap in the real radicalism that really endangers the oligarchs and gangsters. Maybe we should pray for that.
I'm sad that such a figure is gone form us now but I don't worry for him, given the people who are getting canonized these days, if they can make it to heaven he's certainly there. We're the ones who are worse off for it.
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