Familiarity breeds contempt. I was raised in a Catholic home, attended a Catholic primary school and even moved onto a minor seminary at Ibadan for my secondary school education. During my time at the minor seminary, we had to attend mass every morning and attend compulsory afternoon and evening prayers. Although I had a reverence for God, I developed an almost zombie-like attitude due to the necessity and sometimes grueling nature of these spiritual activities. I knew I had to thank God every day for life but I didn't see why I had to be woken up at 5am every day for mass and I had to bath with cold water every morning even with the unbearable cold, everything was just tiring and quite mechanical.
Then sometime in 2008, on his way to pick me up from school for vacation a minor accident occurred. My dad had parked on the side of the road to fix something on the car, when he'd finished he was about getting back into the car. Just before opening the car door a huge truck trying to overtake another truck hit the side of our car, the driver's door was badly wrecked but my dad didn't have a scratch on him. This was the second time I came close to losing a parent on Lagos-Ibadan expressway. The first time, my mum while driving the other car was involved a mini crash on the day I resumed JSS 1 and nothing was lost, not even a scratch on her. These are miracles to me, nothing logical or scientific could explain these incidents especially my dad's. Not that I needed any proof of God's existence but these events helped my faith in God. Fast forward to May 2014, my friend's dad died after a very minor motorcycle crash. I was distraught, where was the God who saved my parents? At the funeral, the pastor was going on about God's plan and how fragile life was, but I still felt disappointed. During those days, I felt really sad and I questioned God more times than I could count. My solace came some weeks later in the most unorthodox form - a rap song.
Boogey's amazing single 'Sanctum' was released some time in 2013 - a song about finding inner peace with God despite skepticism about religion, unfavorable circumstances and uncertainties about the future. It wasn't until the death of my friend's dad (over a year after its original release) that I resonated with the song. The words in the first verse “But I'm beginning to think he lives inside of us and not in Church. Tunde's papa died and that tortured him, mine alive. Does that mean I go to mass more than him?” struck me the most, it felt like I had just met someone who knew what I was feeling. The solution to my dilemma came in form of the hook “I find peace in my inner sanctum, I look for God and then I thank Him for this happy day”. JaneSam's crooning of “oh happy day” felt liberating, like it was okay to not have all the answers immediately. I hung onto these words for weeks and with each listen they brought me peace and acceptance, they were like a source of light which further illuminated a dimly lit place in my own inner sanctum. I still hang onto these words today and definitely will never let them go especially for darker times ahead.
Faith in this context is a strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof. Humans are beings of logic, we naturally expect basis for everything that happens which could make total faith and submission to a higher power quite hard especially in the face of hard situations. And even when we do believe we expect to find answers in places of prayer or through divine situations, forgetting that everything and everyone we come in contact with is an extension of spirituality. Even though I'm not the most spiritual person, I have a firm believe in God and part of that is because I found an important answer through a rap song by a fairly popular Nigerian rapper. Whatever you're searching for to fill a void or connect dots could be found in an unexpected form, you just need to pay attention.
(Dedicated to my friend, Victor Samuel and others who have a void they yearn to fill)
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