Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu announced Thursday he is retiring from public life later this year when he turns 79, saying “the time has now come to slow down” and spend more time with his family.
The former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town said after his birthday on Oct. 7 he will limit his time in the office to one day per week until February 2011.
“Instead of growing old gracefully, at home with my family reading and writing and praying and thinking too much of my time has been spent at airports and in hotels,” Tutu said in a statement Thursday. “The time has now come to slow down, to sip Rooibos tea with my beloved wife in the afternoons, to watch cricket, to travel to visit my children and grandchildren, rather than to conferences and conventions and university campuses.”
What will TEc do without him?
If he retires, can I have his frequent-flyer points? I doubt that he will be able to slow down much in the long run.
God Bless You Archbishop Tutu. Your fight against apartheid was inspirational, and changed my life in 1987.
Pieter-Dirk Uys is a well-known South African satirist with one-man shows. Desmond Tutu was one of the people he liked to take off. One day just before going on stage he heard that Archbishop Tutu was in the audience. A little apprehensive, he went ahead with his routine, including a skit about Tutu. Afterwards Tutu came to see him backstage. ‘Pieter’ he said ‘that was wonderful. Only one problem.’ (Holding up his hands, Tutu continues:) ‘Not enough rings!’ (Archbishop Tutu has a fondness for rings.) A truly gracious man, and one who can take the laugh. And oh yes, by the way, remember that Nelson Mandela and Graca Macel were partners, neither of them spring chickens, and thinking, perhaps, that formalities did not matter. It was Desmond Tutu who quietly encouraged them to set a better example by marrying, which they duly did.
I wish him well in his retirement.
“Newser) – Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu called on Africa’s Anglican church to let go of what he called its “extraordinary obsession” with gay priests and same-sex marriage. The church should, instead, be paying attention to the crises caused by AIDS, Darfur and Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe’s corruption.
“We’ve, it seems to me, been fiddling whilst as it were our Rome was burning. At a time when our continent has been groaning under the burden of HIV/Aids, of corruption,” said Tutu in a BBC interview. Tutu’s frustration with Africa’s bishops is but one manifestation of the tension within the worldwide Anglican communion over matters of sexuality.”
Read more: http://www.newser.com/story/2580/desmond-tutu-to-anglicans-get-over-it.html#ixzz0uROIdOtz