AFRICAN RELIGION AND CONTEMPLATION

 

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!!!!