and still...

the fire of the sun still beats here
power to the son in me
truly the honey and the bee

warm-suckle it feeds
the hunger
just for a little bit
/the raging sunshine of her eyes
\her hands are a gift/unharmed by the beast

and still there is strenght in the beat
the old song gone
tell it to india, to the pradesh of pradeshes
tell it to the hindu
for the christian has no fear
and still there is the heat
on bloodied streets
i just run out of steam
and then i howl
but no one hears
or cares
water under the blasted bridge
and still there is

do not be twisted
happier alone than together
but missing the old years
of alone as one
no sense in hiding
can i say your name?
it is.....serendipity for my pain
asthma for my inhale
er
go home you darn european
i want to stay in africa-land

and still it beats
and still, and still
the stones, the shade, the whispering, the way,
the falling down
two hundred and thirteen

i have become a man-whore you see
a wolfman of little success
cause i only howl for you
such desperation in my voice
but peace in my heart
and still there is...
i believe
space in the juice
of the orange
where the lives are played out
in the shadow of the fair

gibberish, i know
but late at night
we talk again
and i want to qunatum leap
into that bus
and obey DEI again

and still there is. and still there is
only you
stupid, irreverent, unknown you
and still, all i want
is to be free
but all i want
all i want
is to not bleed
all i want
is you....
and i love the rain the most
in the shadows of some place only you know
when i used to be the truth
re:stacks on my heart
on my side, a pact
desire like none other
samson's hair screams: halleujah!
and then repents
go back to God
to find the long ride again
and say: baby i love you and i am sorry have and you have doubts and i will open the toilet door
it may be too late
back to my hut in the tent, fiona
but first,
nothing
i give up daily
and still...oh baby....still....
you.

why i am a Christian.

I fell in love when I was seventeen years old. It was not at first sight. In fact it had been a long, slow immersion into the true state. I did not even realize the process, the years it took were as ordinary as years come. But in the year of being seventeen I was ready to give in to love.
I did not fall in love with the shadow, as is my custom, I fell in love with the voice from the forest on fire, with the trumpet herald, the dove dropping from the sky to crown one head, the dragon-slayer, the lion, the lamb. The greatest story and storyteller had me eager to enter the tale; in short I fell in love with God.
It is important to clarify that this does not mean I had a strong emotional response to God. Regrettably I am much too bland for that. What I really mean is that in this year I decided to obey God. This is what is meant in scripture by loving God. And this was my attempt in surrendering my indifference and fear for light and grace.
There is a history to this. Through my move from Anglican to celestial to Anglican to Pentecostal systems of worship I did not need the cosmological or ontological arguments for or against deity. Like a true African I took it for granted that there was indeed someone much bigger than me. Years of filling out the word “Christian” on forms made it clear to me that I owed some allegiance to Christ and that three could indeed be one. But I did these things because I was told I must believe or go to hell. What does a child know of hell but that you did not want to go there? There was no concept of a loving God and so I could not love Him. He was frankly a bit of a killjoy and I just said the prayers and tried not to upset him.
All this does not explain why I am a Christian but why I was not until that year.
I became one in the year where my life came apart and then came back together. It was not altruistic or deep. I did it for survival. It made sense and my Pentecostal background told me this was the way to get things from God. And I needed many, many things. I made deals with God and I intended to break my part of this great bargain. He did not. So I found my life led more and more by Him and my flaws became more important. I became different. Somehow less self conscious but more selfish, strangely quieter but falsely louder. I became inconsistent because I finally made a stand but I was so full of falling. I had taken in the bread of life but I was hungrier. Things did not get better inside, they seemed to when it was novel. Once that wore I was in an even worse hole. I knew myself and I knew what was wrong. And I knew I could not fix myself.
My life has come apart recently. In a good way. I have seen promise fade and lovers leave and books unsold and habits reappear. I have had this curious experience, curious enough, where I could hear myself talk and know I was lying. I have found out the shallow beneath the shallow is just me, posing as wise in foolish clothes. A beggar looking for a palace, a drunken man in the gutter ringing for a butler in the snow.
Christianity is the only thing I know that is for the down and out. For me. Looking at us Christians you would not think so. We want to be centre spread in gloss and top of the food chain. We want to be the serpent that swallowed the dove that pecked the lamb to death. There is more to us than turning the other cheek. We are the great re-visionists of our own sacred history. Disciples lived in beach houses, Jesus wore a Versace robe, give to caeser till you can overthrow him, nine coins better than one and the poor you have with you because somebody did not follow the laws of prosperity. All lies, all excuses for our own demise.
Am I painting a grim picture? I do not mean to. I want to show a real one. For it is at ground zero, with that pesky mustard seed, that the Christ-thing begins to grow. When you come to the bottom of the matter, the place of mirrors without pretense and face yourself whole, this is where Christ comes. He is no stranger to being naked, to shame, to pain, to alienation, to being lost.
And this is why I am a Christian. In the end I am looking for people to relate to, somewhere to belong. A place where I do not have to be together but I am getting better merely by being there. I find it in love with God and I cannot relate to God outside the reality of Christ. It is not a placebo for the soul; it will not make you feel good overnight. It is true, though. As true as I have ever known. There is no room for shadows. Slowly the light will get you. I had this letter from an old girlfriend that always moved me to tears. I thought it was the great missing that got me all Maxwell but it was not. It was the way she laid herself bare in words of such beauty. I realize Christianity is always like that. The promise of it is always there, the carte blanche to be bare, to show your true colours and then much more, to see those colours change in slow, painful but true ways that resound into the boundless world to come.
This is why I am a Christian.

the bida trip.

I just got back from a fantastic trip to bida. I drove down from Abuja with two friends and spent two days on the road (to and from) and one night in a hotel where we were the only occupants. It was fun, it was crazy, it was familiar and new all at once.

We went over there to chase a woman. More accurately I went girl-chasing and they followed like faithful friends. I’ve been dating this girl for three months and for the last month we have fought and been on the precipice of the end of the relationship. I consider myself a pretty lousy boyfriend. Too much clumsy romance and not enough love. So I went off to bida to prove my stuttering attempts had some form in something real and immediate and useful.

We had other reasons. The trip through Niger state, the photographs waiting for our eager clicks, the love of the road trip. But I went for the woman, mostly

We set out late on Saturday. Kalat overslept, Steve needed to stop by the office, and I had a hangover from a night of purely mental bingeing with Bukar and then Nakama. We left Abuja at noon. The first thing to be known about driving to Niger state is the bad roads. The potholes are the real danger. I felt sorry for the car. We did not know our way but we did fairly well. We stayed within the country.

At minna we stopped over to spend a few minutes at the university. Kalat‘s cousins are in their final year there and the female of the two is very, very easy on the eye. My protests about the stop-time were very, very mild.

45 minutes from bida and I had to face my own reasons for being there. My friends chatted on about the road and the landmarks and the distance and the closeness of the clouds to our patch of earth. I was worried because my love interest had moved from a thousand texts a day to one word replies to five hundred previous texts from me. It was the great unloving. It was all too familiar. My relationships seem to blow hot and cold. Perhaps on both sides but I am from that part of the gene pool that wants something the more it is out of reach. I think.

I thought of the last time I broke up, the sudden drawing away, the discomfort in even the most innocent physical contact. I thought about this because I fully expected to be dumped. I could almost see her refusing to hold my hand, deciding that since I am a man and men do not listen then she must rude as well as firm, to be strong and not give in to the desperate pleading of the about to be discarded. I was not excited. I was numb or steeling myself with numbness.

When we arrived we waited for her at a petrol station and while my friends took in the sights and bought sugar cane I scanned the arrival of doom. Doom arrived looking beautiful. I do not know what principle this follows but it always seems that women grow more beautiful at the moment they start becoming the grass on the other side.

She gave me one of those side hugs you give an untrustworthy boy you suspect of trying to feel you up. I am not a hugger but a holder so I did not mind. I did mind that she covered Steve in a full embrace and that he winked at me over her shoulders. I think.

As we drove to the hotel where three of us would spend the night I held her hand and this was different. She held me back. I played with her hand and she played with mine. It was not the perfect scene. I could feel the tension in her fingers and she was on the phone a bit, ordering a life that did not have me in it.

At the hotel we had a debate with the manager so we could share a double room and not have to get a spare room. This was a financial not an ethical decision.

As the evening drew closer to the night she said the words that signal, always, the end of the affair:

“I have to go home soon.”

My friends went looking for fish. I pulled her close and she came. I had much to say but my words left me. I was closed up and so I just held her and asked her to explain why we had to end. She talked and I talked and we got nowhere new. I gave her gifts: a c.s. Lewis devotional, a night gown, a cake from kalat and some candy she liked. She gave me gifts: boxers. This was not a good sign. This was a good sign. It was not a good sign because my last girlfriend bought me clothing before she pulled the proverbial plug and my last semi-girlfriend bought me a bottle of perfume. “It is about what I lack.” I thought.

When she left I was more conflicted. All the body language was the old love but her words were the same: I want to end this. I talked it over with kalat and tried to pray. I slept in that haze. The next day was no better. She could only spend two hours, I was at a loss for words and she was quiet and sad and we kept kissing and saying we were breaking up. we promised to pray about it.

She left. I stood on the road with kalat and Steve. She told me to stop being cold and to be her friend. I did not want to. I wanted to let her be and seek a new adventure. A little ambivalence will follow and then a few months of pining and then some other arms. But it did not seem right, for once.

As we left bida I was really numb. I have been listening to the audio book of “blue like jazz” by Donald Miller. A good book, a perfect book gets under your skin and heart and tells you, shouts at you how much more you have to travel to the real you.

It was on this trip: reading, listening, sleeping getting angry at Steve for blasting the radio and insisting on Christian music over my tuface idibia album. On the way back I saw my own folly, this need for my own way, to be desired and praised and respected and full of love.

I saw that Steve was playing and having fun and being himself and I was just offended. I saw that the woman I claimed to love was struggling with many doubts and fears and all I wanted to know was why she didn’t close her eyes anymore when we kissed.

I am selfish through and through and in need of God in every second.

From bad roads to bad heart, this is the legacy of a wonderful trip to bida.

I am growing.

Amen.

prayer nation: from abstract nation to real people.

I recently begun, along with a community of friends, a commitment to pray a whole year for Nigeria in hopes of aligning the divine will with our own intentions for this young nation and then to pray along the lines of her destiny and not merely the wishful think of her potential.
It has been a unique challenge. For one, praying daily outside the scope of your immediate concerns is always a task. The pressure of work, the depression of urban life and the fun of living or just the haziness of rest, all contribute to days of imperfection where I could barely utter a sentence of prayer.
The problem, I realized, was that I was praying in abstract, for things I could not feel or issues I had no life-experience about. The solution is this: to pray for real lives and not an abstract nation, to locate the national problem within the individual struggle. Part of the golden rule is: “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” It is far more useful, I find, to start your prayers at the most intimate level of your own troubles and then to realize that around the country, maybe even just around the corner, there are those with similar burdens to bear. It will spread out like this: the private prayers becoming of pubic relevance, the individual bonding within the community, fighting a battle to save others like him, knowing that he is just a step ahead or step behind similar dangers.
This is how we can move from an abstract notion of a nation bedeviled by differences to the full notion of a nation of “people like us”. This is our future. Limited by common problems we will find uncommon solutions, bearing each other’s burdens we will find the load lighter and shared. Is this utopia? Yes it is. But if you do not believe in utopia, the very kingdom of God, then you probably should not consider yourself a person of faith or with faith. The very end and the startling beginning of the Christian story is about utopia. Are we not to seek that kingdom? Is this not the good news?
I ask you to care about yourself deeply. And then spread that care to others. Start with these prayers. Pray for everyone facing what you are facing today. This is the very essence of the people we are to be and the nation we are to build.
Amen.

the thing you will not lose.

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
-Jim Elliot.
It has occurred to me recently how empty my Christian claims have become. I have a natural aversion for ceremony and so I struggle through any series of events designed under a program. My church attendance has always been abysmal. So when I felt the dryness I linked it to being in direct violation of the book of Hebrews chapter 10 and verse 25. It seemed that a loss of community made my individual effort to reach or to be reached by God less real. So I looked for a church that was not too Pentecostal and not too orthodox, the centre, where all goodness lies. This did not help much. It was useful because I am quite sure that I will continue to seek regular church attendance and participation but apart from the expected glints of light I was the same.
My mind remained unfocused, my days stretched on in grim hope and I felt far from any sort of presence capable of shaping my life in anyway.
Yet life does not slow down for introspection. All was still dull inside so I clobbered to a halt outside. Criticism and cynicism crept into the soul of my mind as the only escape. And, the scary part, this seemed to be going on for years. Inch by inch my soul was slipping into inertia, then atrophy and then demise, all wearing the mask of goodness and smiles. The inherent absurdity of the unfettered life weighed my mind down to the point that minutes moved into days and I felt nothing from the wind or the water or the sound.
And quite without effort or expectation something changed recently. A sort of stirring had begun within the dead embers of the extinguished wood of self. My mind had begun its rebellion against the rebel of absurdity and my heart had begun to know the future shape of things. Pushed, I began to look again and to find solace in the foundational principles that govern the living.
Pushed and pushed again, I surrendered over a three day period, listening to an audio version of C.S. Lewis’ ecumenical defense “Mere Christianity”. The book is no stranger to my reading eye but we make a mistake when we think truth can be consumed in one swallow. The vital lessons come over and over again until we are mastered by them perfectly. Until they move from being merely real to being living reality.
My lesson here was simple and simply put. It is the sort of lesson a Christian must learn every day, the one strand of clarity that simplifies what we have made, by living outside the ark, more complex. It is also the thing we fear the most and unreasonably so because it is the fear that cannot help. It is fear of losing the very thing you have already lost.
I am referring to that place where your pride lies, where you can say, if the sun falls into the sea and all of nature rebels against reason, “at least I still have this”. Your consolation and fortress against the triumph of others over you. A little box of prepared victories that say you are worth something in the fluid nature of what is valuable and what is not. There is no need to specify. We all carry little boxes of instant relief around. You know the colour of your fake rainbow and I know the colour of mine. It may even be God but as deadening drug not awakening spirit.
Recently part of mine was divided into three un-whole parts: one woman, another and yet another. It was also writing. It was also cynicism. It was also God.
The problem with the “at least…” is much of the problem with modern Christianity as practiced: the pursuit for the consolatory prize when the real jewel is within your sights and already paid for. If you are first on the podium you cannot also be second. We have life, open and full but we prefer the weakness of the un-life. At anyone who has tasted of the real juice knows everything else is second best. This is at the very core of becoming a Christian, at the end, nothing else will do. It commands you to be hot, cold or spat out. There is no place for anything less than the best of heaven even if it means meddling through the worst of earth. You have reached, by becoming a Christian, the most unsafe place in this universe, and the next, for any trace of dark or inferior light. It is really all or nothing.
The all is hard. It is difficult to leave yourself vulnerable to only one source of delight. It is suicide to say: “God and all He gives and nothing else.” It is impossible. Sometimes we need to hear and heaven is silent. Sometimes we need to feel we are active and getting on in the world and heaven is strangely uninterested in motion or ambition.
Yet what is really hard is what our “at least…” feeds that must now go hungry. What fights tooth, nail and bone against the necessary surrender is the ego. The need to please your self is the greatest hindrance to saving you. God is interested in being the very real captain of your ship and master of your fate. There cannot be another one in charge of the sail and the boat. “Invictus” is fine poem, written at a time of physical ailment and personal doubt, a defiant and, perhaps noble, stand, but it is not the word of God. There is nothing wrong with being strong willed except that it is not the perfect will. Dying like Christ means exactly what you fear it means. It is going to interfere with all your dreams and hopes and ambitions though not to kill them but to test them and make them pure.
No doubt you have heard this all before but it is one of those lessons that I spoke of earlier. The one that is needed again and again. But it is what you truly need to get to the bottom of who you truly are. It is like a painting. The artist is the creator and what he paints is the created. The created does not know who he is outside the mind of the creator. He does not even exist outside the creator’s mind.
This is the kind of myth Christianity stands for except that it is absolutely true. It is the ongoing saga of love conquering self and self dying so love can enthrone itself in hearts and minds. If no one told you this before you signed on then I am sorry. They should have. This thing will kill the you that you have always known until you become a new creature. It is surgery and you have to consent to it. If you do you will live forever in an abundance unimaginable that has nothing to do with money. If you do not you will have your way in this life but that is all you will have.
In the end the faith is a gradual slide into the endlessness of God. It is as conscious as anything you know and more so. You will feel everything happening to you. If you choose it you will move from honesty to truth. His voice will become clearer in the steps and your heart will unfurl into His naked peace. Like Christ you will become. He gave it all and his disciples followed suit. Not many of us are called to die in violent ways in defense of Christianity. Yet this is the crux of the matter. The thing we will not give up. We take it in patches, swallows that cannot feed us.
The lives of those early dissidents of the impure order of things were laid forfeit as they followed a man to his bloody cross. Yet, here were men that lived and knew why they lived. Their lives were full because they gave up something important to gain something vital. Our lives are empty when we refuse to do the same.

let us pray.....

Father,

These are trying times. I am looking through the window of a bus, at a policeman holding a gun outward through an open window. Many things could go wrong with this scene. He may have forgotten to put the safety on; he may playfully finger the trigger of his gun while the squad car goes over a bump. A shot could be fired, an innocent killed. This is the state of our nation. There are many acts heading toward full combustion. For years and years we seem finely perched on the edge. Yet we desire to live away from the brink of disaster. We want to live in the safety of a country that works.

Many say and believe that we are an unwieldy contraption, a mistake of man. We believe that we are born of divine inspiration, a city of God. So, before we embark on one of those doomed exercises of the flesh, before we enthrone ourselves as better than other men, before we become full of disastrous self-right because we know a little of the truth without knowing how to use it-we come to you.

We ask that you enlighten us. That you teach us how to pray, and from that, relying on you, become worthy ambassadors of your will. It is your will that is good for all; it is your will that separates the darkness from the light.

We have no illusions about the task ahead but we know that we cannot afford to lose the tiny battles of the earth and lose the war over our own souls. The end, to you, could never justify the means. The means are smaller parts of the end that come together, finally, in the end. Only what is sown can be reaped, help us to sow the right seed.

In essence, lord, we are asking for forgiveness. A realignment of the past with present/eternal truth and future glory. Make us a people of a prayer before you make us a nation of action. Help us to dwell forever in the light.

Amen.