MONTREAT, N.C. — “We’re just ordinary radicals,” Shane Claiborne told 800 young adults gathered at the College Conference at Montreat Conference Center in western North Carolina on January 4. With unassuming anecdotes and lots of humor, he told the students that the world could use a few more ordinary radicals.
On the next day, Ishmael Beah, author of the best-selling A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, showcased for the students how a wrecked child’s life has been turned from killer to humanitarian, thanks to the efforts of a few ordinary radicals.
Claiborne clarified that he is quite ordinary. Jesus, whom he loves and aims to follow, is the radical.
His story began with a search. “We were looking for people who think that Jesus really meant what he said,” he told the crowd. Mother Teresa seemed to be a good place to start. So, he visited her. “In India I began to see people differently. People with leprosy were totally outcast. Mother Teresa got them together and started a little clinic along the railroad tracks. … Even the doctors were lepers.”
Soon 9-11 happened, and it occurred to him that the best thing to do was to go to Iraq, not to bear arms but to carry God’s love. He wanted to see the Iraqi people the way God sees them. “I saw some of the hardest things during the bombing; the shock and awe campaign was unleashed while we were there in Baghdad. … It haunts me. But a strange thing happened. We could never lose hope. We sensed that life was more palatable than death.”
He returned to Philadelphia, and soon was getting arrested for breaking laws that deny basic human rights to the homeless. Holding his small Bible, he commented, “If you read this book it’s going to get you in trouble … I’m so in love with Jesus. But there’s a part of me where I ask, ‘What trouble is he going to get me in this time?'”
Pressing that point, he passed on to the audience a reminder given him by an Iraqi: “You didn’t invent Christianity in America. You only domesticated it.”
Beah also told his story — in two chapters: his old life and his new life. They couldn’t be more different. The old life took shape when a band of young rebels engaged in his nation’s civil war arrived in his small Sierra Leone town. Soon this 12-year- old was far away from his home and parents, toting an AK-47, taking drugs (marijuana, amphetamines, and a toxic mix of cocaine and gunpowder), and wandering around with a band of trained, teen and pre-teen hoodlums. He cannot count the number of people he killed in the ensuing two years. He had become a brutal killing machine.
That all began to change when he was rescued by some UNICEF fieldworkers and taken to a rehab center in Freetown. One worker, a nurse named Esther, overwhelmed Beah with care at the center. “I tried to tell her the most horrible stories, so she would be afraid of me, but that just made her more curious and wanted to be closer to me.” Reflecting on all the workers there, he said, “Their willingness to see us as children even though we had become such horrible people — that changed me. We would bite staff members and stab them. And the first thing they would say was, ‘It’s not your fault.'” He laughingly told the students that he and his fellows figured the workers there to be “really crazy, crazier than we were!”
Eventually, UNICEF took Beah to the United Nations to tell a stunned gathering of diplomats about the experience of child soldiers. He stayed in New York City, where he became a foster child to a woman he now calls “my mom.” He graduated from high school and Oberlin College. He concluded, “Go out. Make mistakes. But don’t make too many of them.”
Editor’s note: Shane Claiborne will return to the Montreat Conference Center to serve as keynote speaker for the “Church Unbound” conference, July 1-5, which is co-sponsored by Montreat, the Cross-Cultural Alliance of Ministries, and by The Presbyterian Outlook.
