By Sara Pintilie/entertainment editor
During the past months, I frequented my local second-hand bookstore and stocked up on one of my addictions: magazines. As I sifted through the publications, I gravitated toward a July 2007 Vanity Fair.
This issue was unique; it covered only one subject, Africa, and it was guest-edited by Bono. Yeah, that Bono. Also the series of 20 different covers was photographed by one of my all-time idols, Annie Leibovitz.
As I flipped through it and read the contents, one particular article lodged in my mind … a Q&A piece with South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu interviewed by Brad Pitt.
He fought for the end of apartheid and racial injustice in South Africa in the ’70s.
In 1984, Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1996, Nelson Mandela appointed him chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a program to help heal the aftermath of apartheid.
He had many intriguing and insightful thoughts, but two things stuck with me.
Tutu told Pitt he couldn’t stay quiet about people being penalized for their sexual orientation and we should focus our energy on other issues.
“ I think God is weeping,” Tutu said in the article. “He is weeping that we should be spending so much energy, time, resources on this subject at a time when the world is aching.”
I admire him because he embraces all religions and doesn’t believe it matters if someone is gay.
You have to respect the guy. He has been going against the grain of society for the majority of his life and keeps his peace-loving aura intact.
In fact, he preaches restorative justice and turning the other cheek.
The other thing that really jumped out at me was actually an example of his restorative justice.
Tutu talked about a girl named Amy Biehl, killed in South Africa basically because she was white and in the wrong place. Her parents did something most wouldn’t even fathom doing.
They created the Amy Biehl Foundation to help aid children affected by violence and hired two of Amy’s murderers to work for the foundation.
It is amazing how they could turn the other cheek and make a horrible incident into something that can benefit others.
“It is in fact a universal characteristic, this human longing not for revenge but to seek reconciliation,” he said.
