We are all
living in the world where identity and origin have become a very emotive factor
of understanding and comprehending who we are and where we come from, leave
alone where we are and where we want to go. These are real factors which before
were not put in consideration and interest because we were sure there is something
new coming along with technological advancement, revolutions into the man world
where everything will have to be technologically sophisticated to the extent
that man will eventually get lost into the machines and technological world,
but it has not turned to be so. It looks like the more man becomes technologically
advanced, the more ignorant he sinks himself into oblivion of community life,
ethical values, religious beliefs and with little sense of brotherhood. These
are values grounded on African religion and post-modern Christianity paradigms that need to be
rediscovered in a very interdisciplinary approach.
Being African
today calls for all Africans in and out of the continent to be
truly human and truly African Christians in themselves, where concretely they have to enter into serious
contemplation of our own experiences and therefore fully owning up and tracing
back our roots in solving the challenges African continent is undergoing. this will come as a result of pulling
together the Harambe spirit (Swahili for coming together, to uplift ourselves
and our communities) building up the Ubuntu spirit of brotherhood with a deep
profound slogan of I am because you are and you are because I am. This is a
call to consciousness hence delving into the religious and ancestral reality of
being qua being. This has to create space for contemplation.
The question to
be asked is: Did Africans practice contemplation , if yes, then which form did it
take? Today, in the world is fluid in it's globalized common home how is it
being expressed? What has changed and by what magnitude? Africa is part of this
common home that compromises of many cultures, religions, and traditions, this
in its very vast coverage poses a challenge when we have to talk of African
Religion and contemplation.
African
religion and contemplation should be contextualized and with the view of unlocking
its potentiality in Africa will be based on the African value system of
community, religion, ethics and role of man in the Christian community in the
context of Kenya, basing on the role of elders as custodians and contemplative
interpreter of the lived experience. Many would like to call African religion
and contemplation as part of African animism, spirit-filled, way of life, what
in the Christian world we could call the Spirit of the Father. This will also
tackle the issues of African mysticism, the contribution of African Father to the
Synod, where we shall single out a few prominent authority in this field Like
John Mbiti, Magesa, Orabotor. This will have to give us a sense of piety versus
paganism. All this will be connected to the man in his being of generosity,
community, welcome.
Contemplation
in an African context is a sense in which the elders help the community and
society to confront their challenges lived, natural disasters, wars,
emergencies, and catastrophes both natural and man-made. Africans are known as
very resilience amidst the harsh realities, like do we think of this as a
contemplative lived experience. For a long time has been isolated and left to
the mercies of its ancestors and even used to be called a dark continent, a
virgin land not until the partition of African in 1885 in Berlin in search of
raw materials, which ended into slave trade and complete rape of Africa and
robbed of her dignity and resources by the western world powers. African
religion and contemplation will have to enter into just enter into these realities,
not to solve the problems created but to know where we have come from, where we
are and where we want to go, a concerted effort that will not be done by anyone
else except the African sons and daughters.
Contemplation
is something that was done by most African elders, hence Mbiti building it up
into the famous phrase “Africans are notoriously religious. This should help us
to have the continuity by retaliating that if Africans are notorious religious
then they also must be contemplatively resilient par excellence. African region
can be traced right from the African Sahara deserts, monasteries in Egypt where
hierographic discovery and civilization took place. This can be witnessed by
the pyramids which were built, with River Nile being the sources and fount of
supply, and agricultural methods, dunes became the true places to confront and
fight the devil, the real battle place to combat the devil in his territory, a
place where body mortification, detachment from the world possessions was
tested.
This type of
life was never taught to one to become a contemplative, except individual
breakthrough into solitude as a means of reaching sanctity and listening to the
voice of God, it became a revolutionary turning point into a personal and
community life of searching for holiness and God in the daily lived experience
of struggling with evil spirits and demonic powers through contemplation and
prayer and adoration. It is not about a magical power but interior life and
convictions.
Sometimes much
associate contemplative life with Catholic religious congregational orders, ab Initio contemplation is an experience
for all in their understanding and personal religious encounters. It's not much
about intellectual prowess, great theological slogans or big jargons but a
lived experience of simple people in the village, parish community who can be
helped to enter properly in their hearts of their religious understanding.
Almost
everything has to be evaluated with an intellectual and spiritual scale. Many
due to the hindsight of ignorance tend to live in the utter darkness of the
past, stereotype and failure of reasoning and their spiritual enlightenment
never took over and as such their actions remained in mere wishes and
admiration and never went beyond that line of thought and encounter. As T.
Merton states that:
Man’s intellectual
and spiritual life is life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that
it is alive…the awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source,
obscurely, inexplicably, but with certitude that goes beyond reason and faith
aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain
incomplete.
The importance
is to be aware of the self before the concrete world out there. Contemplation
always goes beyond our knowledge, beyond our light, beyond systems, beyond our
self. This carries with it the connotation of death, to acquire higher life,
it's the death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we know or
treasures as life as thought, as experience. As St. Paul could reiterate in his
writings "It's not me who lives but the Christ who lives in me". We
can say that African religion and contemplation creates a complete abandonment
of our cultures, beliefs, belongs to acquire something more than the ordinary
physical. This is the context of African mode of thought is the presence of the
sacred, animation of spirits, infusion into extra-terrestrial reality. The real
communication with the ancestors in a new language which only one who can tap
that spirit of the ancestors can know what that world comprises of. It can also
manifest itself or reveal itself in messages which we become message carriers
and implementers of what is being wished by the ancestors. This comes with the
message and answer of life, not death, refreshing the planet, creation and in
the homesteads of the living. All this has to be considered within the here and
now where the underworld of the ancestors is fully connected with the spirit
world where man becomes the conduit and point of synergy.
African
religion and contemplation is a reality that should raise a question and at the
same time give the right answer to the question raised. The questions we need
to engage ourselves with is not whether it exists or not, but what experiences
can we share about it with other religions, what can we share with respect and
open-mindedness. As T. Merton puts it: "We awaken, not to find an answer
distinct from the question, but to realize that the question is its answer…And
summed up in one awareness not a proposition, but an experience: "I
AM".
As the African
adage would put it, "I am because you are, and you are because I am", properly infused
in there. To separate oneself is like separating blood and water, your backbone
is strong as long as you recognize where you get your force and reinforcement.
This T. Merton drives the point when he states: “Contemplation is the awareness
and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each Christian
obscurely believes, for it is now no longer I that live but Christ who lives in
me”. This should be the spirit that lives in us, that force that moves us. For
contemplation doesn’t simply “find” a clear idea of God and confine Him within
the limits of that idea, and hold Him there as a prisoner to whom it can always
return.
Contemplation
is about living the experience, it can't be taught. Contemplation cannot be a
function of this external self. Sometimes we portray our self-image as the true
self, but it's our individuality. There is a hidden self which we daily are
struggling to come to terms with, we cannot fully know ourselves, but through
Contemplation can we try to reach the hard question of who are we? The African
understanding of masking or using of masks has this cause why in most
celebrations we use a mask, not to know the hidden face behind the mask. These
represent the spirit of the ancestors, mythological heroes, moral values a sort
of honor to a person in a symbolic way. They are made out of wood pottery,
textiles, copper, and bronze. They could also be made from animal teeth, hair,
bones, and horns as well as feathers, seashells, and even straw and eggshells.
He who makes masks is believed to have contacts with a spirit world and making
masks is a craft passed down in the family. Africans cultures distinguish
between the outer look of something and its essence.
They represent
the spirit of an animal and one that bears the mask, becomes that animal
himself which allows for communication with that animal is a symbol of virtue.
The animals portrayed on most masks include buffalo, hyena, hawk, crocodile,
and antelope. This trance-like state is accomplished with specific music and
dance. Ceremonies as weddings, initiation rites and funerals have a masked
dance.
Contemplation
is not and cannot be a function of the external self, but it is a hidden and
mysterious person in who subsists before the eyes of God. There in silence do
we confront our secrets, worries, doubts, and experiences, not to solve all
problems but to start falling in love with them and abandoning everything to God
in those intimate moments. This is the reason we find that masks play a great
role in personal life that we feel comfortable in them, not until people start
poking through them hence deflating our egoism and pride and destroying the
image we had built of ourselves.
Contemplation
produces in the individual reality as subjective, not so much as in mine
mentality with an outlook view but the person in his concrete reality. This, in
the long run, should lead to self-unveiling before God. That inner center where
God dwells with infinite sweetness and unlimited power. Therefore contemplation
is something more than thoughtfulness or a taste for reflection. Contemplation
is not prayerfulness, or tendency to find peace and satisfaction in liturgical
rites, nothing to do with temperament. One who is passionate and fully awake
can contemplate without too much struggle but it cannot be an object of
calculated ambition. It is not something we plan to obtain with our practical
reason, but the living water of the spirit that we thirst for, like a hunted
deer thirsting after a river in the wilderness.
It is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God chooses to awaken
us.
Many may think
it is all about trance or ecstasy nor the hearing of sudden unutterable words,
nor the imagination of lights. It is not the emotional fire and sweetness that
comes with religious exaltation. Nor can we think contemplation in terms of the
gift of prophecy, nor does it imply the ability to read the secrets of men'
hearts. Contemplation is not also a time meant to escape from conflict, anguish
or from doubt. But it should be an experience that awakens a tragic anguish and
opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop
bleeding. These may be false definitions we carry along as we enter into
contemplation which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse
with "religion". To examine, to doubt and finally to reflect all the
prejudices and conventions that we have hitherto accepted as if they were dogmas.
Contemplation
is not a painkiller. In the end, the contemplative suffers the anguish of
realizing that he no longer knows what God is. God is not someone to associate
with "what", nor a "thing". At this point we can reach a
point of saying there is "no such a thing" as God because God is
neither a "what" nor a "thing" but a pure "who".
This should not be taken to mean that man has no valid concept of divine
nature. Yet in contemplation abstract notions of the divine essence no longer
play an important part since they are replaced by concrete intuition, based on
love, of God as a person, an object
of love, not a “nature” or a “thing” which would be the object of study or
possessive desire.
Seeds of Contemplation
As man exists
he should always realize that he is planting something in his soul. The
challenge is always is he aware of that reality. Coming to terms to germs of
spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of
men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost because men are not
prepared to receive them; for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere
except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity, and love. The seed is the word
of God, which we often if not as a message we hear from the gospels on Sunday
in our churches. But every expression of the will of God is in some sense a word of God and therefore a seed of new life. It's about the
dialogue of love and choice. A dialogue of deep wills. The will of God that
comes to us merely as an external dictate of impersonal law but above all as an
interior invitation of personal love. So much depends on our idea of God. Our
idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.
The love of God
seeks us in every situation and seeks our good. His inscrutable love seeks our
awakening. This awakening implies a kind of death to our exterior self, we
dread His coming in proportion as we are identified with this exterior self and
attached to it. Learning to let go of the familiar and the usual and consent to
what is new and unknown to me. It’s about learning to love the self in the
order of finding oneself and yielding to the love of God. This follows that
whatever you want to harvest should come as a result of what you have planted
and taken care of, you can’t harvest what you have not planted. In giving
oneself I should be risking myself into a new reality, hoping to find myself
there in that new reality.
The big
question is how can I know the will of God? Each situation always will bear
written into itself some indication of God's will. This will demand truth,
justice, and mercy. To consent to the will of God is all about what is true or
simply speaking the truth always, obeying God and above all expressed in the
need of another person, or at least to respect the rights of others. No man who
ignores the rights and needs of others can hope to walk in the light of
contemplation, because his way has turned from truth, from compassion and
therefore from God.
One has to be true to the task assigned to perform, doing it well, with
love and respect for the nature of my task and its purpose but above all to
unite everything to God's will in daily work. Our work should be an obstacle to
contemplation, even if the day may be as demanding as nothing else, but still,
you can find time to contemplate. We have to make the best of what we cannot
avoid. The contemplative must certainly be detached, but he can never allow
himself to become insensible to true human values, whether in society, in other
men or himself.
To many contemplation is mediation, or simply plain old “prayer” because
prayer is conscious conversion with God, but what is important is that in
contemplation you should be so imaginative with the senses to find new meaning
for example where do I come from, in contemplation God can surprise us with the
answer we get to this question. The interesting thing with contemplation is
like a love of a mother for his children, even when the children are asleep the
mother always loves. Therefore, in resting in the presence of God is a lovely
way to pray. It will involve our emotions, feelings, memories, desires, and
insights that arise. What might God be telling me in all these experiences? One
has to place himself in the place or scene of the Gospels. One has to ask
himself, what I am seeing, what am I hearing, what I am hearing, and what
feelings am I getting in the tastes and smells. This can come in the form of Lectio Divina . Reading quietly through
a text and see what God wants you to notice? Then see what all that will take
you.
In contemplation you should pray in your own way. It’s a profound
encounter with the living Christ. This Christ is the same who has risen and
alive and is present to us through the Spirit, who works through prayer. You
should truly feel encountering Christ. You have to make use of your imagination
in placing yourself in a scene from scripture or with Jesus or Mary or God the
Father. It may sound a heavy stuff but that is it. It asks you to compose
yourself, place, with clear structure, a systematized order, listening to the
natural orders of the body, environment and surroundings. You have to organize
your place of prayer. The prayer is not only that what is formed in your own head,
but closing your eyes and imagining your space with interior sense and allowing
the lord to take the lead. This can come with the help of daily readings of the
Holy Mass like the gospel reading, and then letting God take you where He
wants.
God works through your imaginations. But remember that not everything
that pops in your mind is from God, of course. It’s easy to tell. Anything that
draws you to God builds you up, helps you feel closer to God, or, as Ignatius say
“builds you up, encourages you, gives you hope, is probably coming from God”.
In contemplation you should not have many expectations, God will meet you where
you are. The best way to pray is the way that you feel that brings you closest
to God.
Good exercise!!!!
