Stephen Lewis, Moral Giant

 

23 Take away from me the noise of your songs;
    I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
24 But let justice roll down like water
    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

                Amos 5 NRSVue 

I have been thinking quite a bit about Stephen Lewis in the past couple of days. Lewis died after dealing with cancer for the past eight at the age of 88. He was a Member of Parliament for the federal New Democratic Party from 1963 to 1978, and served as leader of the provincial NDP from 1970 to 1978. He would use self-deprecating humour to note his lack of success. 

He was a strong social democratic political voice in our country but I admired him most for his two decades working with the United Nations  between 1984 and 2006, including as Canadian ambassador, deputy director of UNICEF, and United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. In that latter role he constantly challenged Western nations to consider the immorality of spending billions on war when the humanitarian crisis in Africa was so pressing. In a speech at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006 he asked “What kind of a world do we live in when the life of an African child or an Asian child is worth so much less than the life of a Canadian child?”

There were politicians who mocked his oratorical style (lots of multisyllabic words they probably didn't understand) but he had an ability to stir his audiences when he spoke. While he had an incisive mind there was always passion, even to the point of shedding tears, and he was willing to challenge those who were sitting before him no matter what the setting.

 We have no way of knowing how the biblical prophets actually sounded as they preached but  Stephen Lewis had a rhythm, a cadence to his speech that was prophetic, in my estimation. His father, David, also a politician, was born a Russian Jew and Stephen's parents gave him the Hebrew name Sholem, a derivation of shalom, or peace.

There aren't many genuine and trustworthy orators around in this day of teleprompters and shallow slogans and gibbering narcissists. We need more of them in a time when the notions of moral and ethical choices seem to have faded into the background of society. Not long ago we lost Jesse Jackson, another speaker of remarkable ability. 

I came upon a tribute to Stephen Lewis on the site of the London Food Bank and I don't know who wrote it but here are a couple of paragraphs: 

His name — his true name, Sholem — meant peace. But we should understand what kind of peace he sought. Not the false peace of people who look away. Not the peace of the comfortable and the indifferent, those who refuse to speak up because they don’t want to cause trouble. He sought the peace that can only emerge from justice. The peace that requires us to see each other clearly - across continents, across races, across the long distances that separate the privileged from the abandoned - and to act on what we see. That is the hardest kind of peace to build, and it is the only kind that lasts.

Canada produces, every few generations, a figure who reminds us who we are at our best. Who holds a mirror up and says: this is what we could be, if we were braver and more generous and more honest than we usually manage. Stephen Lewis was one of those figures. He was our conscience made eloquent. He was proof that words used with precision and passion can still move the world.

His trumpet has been laid down this morning. The note it played still hangs in the air. 

We should do our best to be worthy of it.