By Gillian Schutte
Our young Kai was the sweetest soul. Gentle, loving, deeply affectionate towards animals, his family and the people he encountered along the way. He loved fiercely and lived with an intensity that was sometimes breathtaking. From a very young age we called him the ‘Minister of Justice’ because he simply could not tolerate injustice, whether directed at himself or anybody else.
The only time his anger erupted, sometimes explosively, was when he perceived an injustice. We soon came to recognise these eruptions as his Temple Tantrums.
The expression comes from the biblical account of Jesus entering the temple and overturning the tables of the money changers. Outraged by the corruption of a sacred space, he unleashed his anger against those who had turned it into a marketplace. I have always loved this image of righteous indignation. The moment when conscience overrides compliance and somebody decides that the tables simply have to go.
Psychologists call this disposition justice sensitivity. Although its prevalence worldwide has never been established, research recognises that some people experience injustice with extraordinary emotional intensity. They feel another person’s humiliation, suffering or mistreatment almost as though it were their own, and the impulse to intervene can become irresistible. In our family, we call them Temple Tantrumers.
Kai belonged firmly to this category.
Speak to a worker without respect, gossip maliciously about a friend or family member, treat somebody unkindly or humiliate another human being, and Kai would feel it deeply. It genuinely hurt him. He could not understand the casual cruelty with which people sometimes treated one another, nor could he simply ignore it. His compassion extended to animals and people alike, and he was particularly sensitive to the small, everyday indignities that others barely seemed to notice.
His gentleness and his fury were intimately connected. The little boy who could not bear to see an animal hurt was equally distressed by somebody being belittled, excluded or treated without dignity. His anger was an extension of his love.
My mother recognised this immediately. She often told me that she saw little Gillian in Kai’s behaviour. She even kept my nursery-school report, which stated quite unequivocally: “Gillian reacts very strongly when wrongly accused.”
And oh, did I ever.
Wrongly accuse me and you would meet the full force of my indignation. Hurt an animal, mistreat somebody vulnerable or humiliate another person, and you would encounter something considerably more formidable.
Years later, when Sipho and I, like two vibrating strings travelling through the fabric of space-time, finally encountered one another, there was an immediate and powerful recognition, as though we had always resonated at the same frequency.
We soon discovered that our childhood stories were remarkably similar.
We had both been the rebel children, the ones who challenged the system, questioned authority and confronted teachers when we perceived an injustice. Usually at the urging of the rest of the class.
The comedy, of course, was what happened once the confrontation began.
All those brave revolutionaries who had encouraged the uprising suddenly developed an intense fascination with their desks, their books or the scenery beyond the classroom windows. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had suggested anything. Nobody had participated in anything.
Unless, of course, the rebellion succeeded. Then everybody was delighted to enjoy the fruits of our insurrection.
Sipho and I recognised this pattern in each other immediately.
I have come to understand why people with this disposition often gravitate towards one another. We resonte with something familiar, sometimes even before we know the other’s history. A particular intolerance of cruelty. An instinct to defend the unprotected. An inability to watch injustice unfold while calculating whether intervening might be socially inconvenient.
And perhaps, above all, we recognise the loneliness of being the person prepared to overturn the tables while everybody else waits to see which way they fall.
Looking back, I see a beautiful thread running through our lives. My mother recognising her daughter in her grandson. Sipho and I recognising each other through stories of childhood rebellion. And Kai, our beautiful, fiercely loving boy, carrying that same instinct into his own extraordinary little life.
It also explains why so many of the people with whom we resonate most deeply are themselves temple tantrumers. People who feel the suffering of others as an affront to their own humanity. People who have spent their lives challenging authority/hegemony, frequently paying a price for doing so, because the alternative would be to betray something fundamental within themselves.
We are the table overturners. The children who spoke when the classroom fell silent. The adults who still find themselves confronting systems that others have learned to live with.
And my darling Kai was one of us.
Perhaps that is what I most want people to understand about him. His anger never contradicted his gentleness. Both came from the same enormous capacity to love. He cared so deeply about how people treated one another that even small acts of meanness wounded him. He understood, instinctively, that human dignity is upheld or violated as much in our everyday encounters as in the great injustices of the world.
A temple tantrum, in its purest form, is what happens when love encounters injustice and refuses to stand aside.
And some of us have been overturning tables since nursery school.
THE TEMPLE TANTRUMERS
