Sometimes we tend to live as if we don't
have any theology or simply not interested in theology altogether. The people
of God seem to be disillusioned and a bit mesmerized by what is happening in
the Catholic Church as a whole and disgusted by their local ordinaries and
people of the cloth at the local level. This if not so is a glim picture in
most African countries. The situation seems to be out of hand from pedophiles
crime, corruption, scandals, syncretism, murders, mismanagement, poor
leadership and lack of direction. These are challenges we in the two-thirds of
the world are being confronted with. Maybe let's call it third world countries,
maybe that is a more easy term our mind is accustomed to.
The pastors seem to be contented to
remain in the parishes waiting for the sheep rather than going out to look for
the one lost ones, the 99 sheep look worth enough that why bother to go out to look for
that other one which on its own volition decided to leave the group to look for
another route. How many times do we too find ourselves in this state in our day
to the Christian life? This is the kind of picture many people of God have of
the Church, a church self-sufficient, autonomous and self-actualized, no need
to go out because it's already out there, the brand is clear, no big deal.
For many years we can remember, we have
all depended on the priests, and bishops for all sorts of solution, because of we
have grown thinking that they are the ones whom God listens more than us, that
in itself shows that we have lived in that sin without confessing for a long
time sin of overdependence or call it parasitic attitude: economically,
spiritually, family, counsel management. It is now dawning on us that we need to
reclaim our rightful place and our called upon obligations as Christians
baptized and sent out. The bishops and priests have to allow professionalism to
take place and proper leadership and management skills applied in church
management.
The church is not for the world and
needs to be out of the world. The church is in the world and has to not only
use modern tools of the world but the same tools but a different form of approach,
this world which is globalized, fluid and politically perfumed. The church seems
to be lost in the busy commercial business centers and completely her voice
choked with the world demands and pressures. Today it's easy to get a stressed
priest than a happy and contented priest, why? The priests are also struggling
to make ends meet, the priest has business entrepreneurs, their own investments,
dress in ties instead of white collars, they are dressed in style, drive posh
cars and also swing themselves with modern smartphones and life is cool…The
churches are abandoned, how can you know when a priest has abandoned his church
post, look at the confession boxes, full of dust, dark, mosquito breeding
places, altar clothes dirty, chalices which have never seen Brasso cream, etc.,
but he drivers a new car for that matter.
This kind of status quo needs a complete
overhaul, rebranding, renewal, remembering African values and religious heritage.
This has to find itself in the core of African theology and philosophy, where harmony
has to be rediscovered within its diversity. The African church has been
seduced into socio-economic and political imperatives of development and her
challenges overwhelmingly mishandled by her pastors, the priests, and bishops. Politicians
are calling shots with a lot of big sums of money, where bishops are rewarded
with cars by the government of the day and we all know that politicians don't
give everything for free, selling the pulpit/ambo to the crooked politicians.
Every year episcopal conferences issue pastoral letters to the nation but these
letters seem written for others not for themselves to follow but their sheep.
The local ordinaries should believe in
what they write to their Christians, they can’t be in our eyes as special
people who do nothing except command and wait for offertory in their
residences. The bishops have to fold their sleeves and get into the vineyard to
work, weed, and harvest and carry the yields to the church. Paul says a bishop
who doesn’t pastor his sheep should not eat. For many years most dioceses and
Catholic Church has been managed by missionaries from abroad, but with time,
now we have African local sons of the soil. But these African bishops should be
Africans.
John Paul II on his first trip to Africa
he said: In Africa, there is certainly
maturity, a youthful maturity, a joyful maturity, a strong maturity, and the
maturity of being themselves, of finding themselves in the church as in their
church, not in the church imported from elsewhere. This is their church, the
church lived in an authentic, African way.
This is itself shows that African
bishops need space, freedom and creatively already in 1969, Paul VI speaking in
Kampala had proclaimed Africa’s right to create her Christianity. In the expression of a single faith,
pluralism is legitimate, even desirable, in this sense you may and you must
have an African Christianity.
This we see it being built up or
emphasized by John Paul II in 1980 when he said Not only is Christianity important to Africa, but Christ himself, in
his body is African. Sometimes we tend to enter into a western ideological
attitude of thinking that the mission, the African church has to be built by
the missionaries. The people should be helped to be self-reliance to face the
economic-financial challenges, enough is going on around that needs to be
tapped. Missionaries can only be guests who come from abroad and who are
welcomed among them, can at the best be of some assistance, at worst, you can
be an obstacle unless they help the people the missionaries work to no end but
demission.
African theology has to train
pastoral agents who are all surrounded and self-reliant without having the temptation of falling into the comfort of the sacristy and only waiting for
benefactors for doing many projects with little to do with spiritual renewal of
their people they serve. Most of the dioceses fall into the temptations of
ready-made consumers good parachuted from abroad. Our formation institutions
have to rediscover traditional values and reclaim the reflection of being truly
Christian, truly Africans to continue growing in cultural heritage. The
seminarians are to be helped to cultivate culture and hard work to build the
African church, for they are the force of the church for tomorrow. There should
be an awareness of what evangelization is all about. In the past the
seminarians would be sent to ask the people and then bring back the report,
they had the opportunity to talk to the people and question them on various
items and issues because the people of God were the protagonist, today it
remains the work of library and in the comforts of theological rooms and
debates about what may bedeviling the people of God, theology is done for the
people of God rather than doing theology together with the people of God.
Today the people of God should be helped
not to depend on priests nor missionaries but they should reorganize their christian community in such a way that portrays a true church that is alive and
well. The right place to start this renewal is in the area of liturgy as it
brings together the greatest number of ways of expressing faith. In this, we
need to rediscover the power of bodily expression, especially in terms of
gestures and rhythms, and rhythmic movement that can even become a dance. Artistic
creations bring outlines, shapes, symbols, and colors that have special meaning
for a particular community beats of drums, tonalities, that are in time with
the soul. The composers of these chants are not always priests or religious but
often laypeople.
The homilies during mass should bring
back the climate of dialogue as a means of community participation in the
thought of the preacher. These thoughts are tested and verified by the
community. The assembly expresses their reactions spontaneously and truly in
dialogue. The preacher receives direct feedback on his thoughts through these
reactions, and he will know whether he has been understood, and whether there
agreement or not. In the end the community sings the credo, this truly reflects
a consensus and expression of shared faith, and together they stand in the
light of the word of God. Direct contact with a word of God is what they ask
for, right there where the spirit breathes. This requires effort of interpretation.
Pope Paul VI got it right away when he landed on the African soil:
"You
remain sincerely African even in your interpretation of Christian life, you
will be able to formulate Catholicism in terms that are absolutely appropriate
to your culture, and you will be able to bring to the catholic church the
precious and original contributions as sons and daughters of Africa, which is
particularly in need at this hour of its history”.
Africans have to start a creative theology that seeks new ways to express their
faith in the liturgy. In any celebration, there are moments of welcome and
exchange of greetings. In the church, we need to think very well, where we can
offer a sign of peace in the Church, especially when we live in a church where
reconciliation is at the centre of the people's lives. To many, it would be
right and fitting after the penitential rite, and not after the Lord’s Prayer.
This doesn’t mean we want to change the liturgy, but try it out because we have
catholic groups who do it like the new catechumenates. As Pope Francis says, let’s
not through the Holy Spirit out of the hall during the Pan Amazonian Synod.
Sometimes we have to confront certain realities and contexts that we confront
every day of our lives on the road to holiness. We become reconciled and we
enter into the communal celebration with hearts pure and fresh.
But from the trend of things in the
Catholic Church, some of these changes need to be discussed by the heads of the
church, and yet the people who live the reality do not see the need for it once
it is brought back with a European tool kit. This is what the Pan Amazonian
synod is struggling within these days of October at the Vatican to respond to
the needs of the regions. With the scarcity of priests, that means there are
few celebrations of the Eucharist…the laypeople have to invent a way of
evangelization in this scarcity. From the look of things, nobody is so taken up
by the issue of whether theologically and politically.
In the African context, the family is the
true structure of understanding the African church, without this in mind we may
be doing evangelization in futility. It's not enough to just theorize about
development, but it's also essential that we have a good foundation of what we
are theorizing. The emergence of small Christian communities is reliable bases
from which to promote a holistic approach to development that will last. These
small communities should provide:
a) A
setting which the organic functions of traditional solidarity can expand a
sense of responsibility can be awakened, especially among the laity; a spirit
of relationship and sharing. This is a typically African culture that has to
be fostered and deepened.
b) We
need to build up an African spirit of evangelization, a new inspiration for a
new culture, not only for Christians but for non-Christians as well.
c) We
as Africans have to be mature to have our self-criticism. It's easy to
criticize others, but self-criticism is another ball game altogether. In any Christian community, it's inescapable as it is that of the family. We are being
faced with modern trends where we are picking up on traditional values and
rediscovering self-criticism in a group setting. We need to be responsible and
committed to our call to make sure that African catholicity is fully alive as a
church. This calls for a change of attitude in our thinking and to reflect
instead of expecting the priests to provide ready-made answers. Today the
people of God have to know that they are responsible for their church even to
the point of expressing appropriate opinions, and this gives them a desire for
information and formation (cf. the millennial generation epoch).
d) Our
ancestors like John S. Mbiti and the rest who have gone before us in faith to
the creator, whose writings and courage, remolded and rehabilitated the
bleeding African dignity, cultural and religious heritage that slavery and
western colonialism we are a celebration is what we have to own in the name of
ATR and to study it like any other religion on the globe, not a religion of
spirits, mixed with witchcraft which even they tell us is something good, the
western world are good at bullying Africans more so when they don’t understand
what an African mind is up to. We now need to speak out, shout out and they
have to listen. Mbiti and his colleagues taught us to see our African religions
and cultural heritage as valid ingredients for theologizing and authentic
inculturation of the gospel in Africa, form the context of African, and its
perspectives.
Ancestors
are mediators of life, of blessings and of virtues, all of which have their
sources in God. They are also models for taking responsibility for life. This
acceptance of responsibility concerning life brings us back to life and at the
same time transmitting the same life to others. This is our moral obligation as
Africans to state our case and presentation without fear of anything or anyone
or power. African ancestors are models of saints of the family, saints of the
clan. This has to be fully understood or reduced to a biological level alone.
It's just enough to make Jesus vibrant, entirely cared for, and secure. Yes,
Jesus is our Ancestor. He is no stranger since he admitted and understood as an
ancestor. He belongs to us and we to him, he is our own. We have to think of Jesus
as a person-oriented towards a living person, on a spiritual level. Because
what is involved here is a personal relationship with the living
Christ-ancestor, older brother, a liberator. This is understood at the levels
of celebrations, ceremonies and rituals, religions, because in an African
family the stages are punctuated by dowries and births, depending on the region
and population concerned. It is as widely practiced as had been an original
thought.
Polygamy
form is the result of social tolerance. It attempts to resolve certain problems
raised by the experience of the first complete marital contract which is, in
fact, monogamous. A dowry is usually paid in the initial phase, not by the betrothed
alone, but by his family with or without his contribution. There has been an
evolution in it but the structure has not changed. There has incorrect to continue
imaging that polygamy is the original and most common means of marriage in Africa.
That form is monogamy, beyond all possible doubt. One can state today as a
definite fact that sociological proof has conquered the cultural truth about
these forms of marriage. A theological reflection can now lead us with some
certainty to valid pastoral guidelines.
Today
we do not want anybody to translate African realities in their own eyes but
have to allow Africans to tell their stories as they are also open to the
international global perspective. As they say until the lions learn how to
write its story, the hunter will always write the victory story. Sometimes
Africans write stories, experiences but they have simply brushed aside, or no publishing house is interested to publish them, hostility is emitted right from
the presentation by the people we call book reviewers because they do not just
understand what it is all about and it looks they will never understand.
We
need to spread the word, shed light on the cultural, spiritual, moral, social
and scientific complexity of our African traditions. Why? All expressions of
evil the counterpoint of life, have been lumped together and label it witchcraft.
This is a pejorative label and one that is inappropriate. This has led to the
marginalization of the essential values which have been consistently ignored,
misunderstood, and despised. This is a great challenge to theology. This
challenge has to lead us towards a new consciousness and new demands for a
theology of Christ, whereby it has also to give us the impetus to boldly set
ourselves to work. The African educative systems must initiate and inculcate
moral and traditional values, which should not only be academic but those
values written in the hearts, stories narrated as a way of cultural formation.
There
should be room created for something new and truly lived. The big question is.
Is the west in the state of listening and accepting similar cultural kenosis in
collaborating with African Traditional religion and philosophy? The pastoral
aspects signify the necessity for faith to express itself within an adequate
discernment to that of apostles in Jerusalem and Vatican II, reading the signs
of the time. The light of the Holy Spirit leads us to discover the problem, the
strength of the Spirit will lead us to find the solution.
© Nyamunga Joeseph Nyamunga'19
