Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Me

Andrew Burt works for the Opinion Section of U.S. News.

I've been to a cathedral only a few times in my life. My first was on a Sunday in 1994 at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where I was raised. I was eight years old and had come to see a friend sing in the choir. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, just happened to be speaking that day. And when he walked down the aisle, he just happened to single me out, kiss me on the forehead, and say something like "God loves you."

On his way back down the aisle, Tutu stopped at my pew and kissed me again.

How I got the idea to write a letter to him I don't remember, and why he responded to my letters for the next half-decade I can't explain. I ended every letter with "I'm the kid who's forehead you kissed at the National Cathedral." His favorite ice cream, he would tell me more than once, is rum raisin.

In 1995, Tutu forgot my birthday. "Sorry I have become really decrepit and forgot!" he wrote.

In 1996, when I was 11, I sent him a 3-D postcard and told him that one of my brothers had just graduated from college. Then I asked what inspired him to stand up for his country.

The letter he sent back was two pages typed. Here are excerpts from what it said: 

You ask what inspired me to stand up for my country. I had, as a black boy, learnt from experience that we were somehow less important than white people, or not as good, perhaps rather like carbon copies. It seemed that, to many white people, we were not real people at all.

If we treat another person as something less than a real, loved human being, then we are not only hurting that person, but we are offending God, who made and loves that person just as he made and loves us.

The gist of what I realised was that the apartheid system was false, was wrong, was offensive, and had to be changed not only for the sake of black people but also for the sake of white people, because we were all trapped in it together.

This has become a long answer, and I am not sure that it will make sense to you. 

He was right. It made no sense to me. I was only 11. But his letters were fun to read, and so our correspondence continued.

Sometime in high school I stopped writing to him. I had my adolescence to worry about. And what the hell was I doing writing to Desmond Tutu anyway?

And then, this last March, I had the chance to meet the Archbishop again at the 2009 Reconciliation Forum hosted by the Americas Business Council, this time in front of the cameras. I explained to him who I was. He said he remembered me. I wasn't sure if I believed him. I asked him why he spent so much time writing to a kid when he had more important things to do with his time. He smiled and held out his fist:

Credit: Americas Business Council

And then he left. Maybe one of these days I'll put that question in a letter and send it his way.