The Cycles of Silent Adoration

Easter weekend is one of the periods in the church calendar the Eternal Year when I feel most proud to be a Catholic, especially now that Easter, like Christmas, is being taken over by a consumerist overdose.

I like the silence and conscious austerity, and the Holy Week re-enactment of events that led to the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Somehow I always find myself arguing with my siblings who, in their charismatic churches, tend to emphasise the conquering message of Easter over the suffering and death of Christ.

Of course, Easter is our greatest feast. But what concerns me is the manner by which they tend to shove underground the path towards Easter Sunday, when God willed to go through Gethsemane, Golgotha and the silent tomb of Easter Saturday. They drown all that by making the premature noise of celebrating Easter Sunday as early as Good Friday. This attitude of disregarding God’s hurting love and humility (conquering by suffering), the triumph of love over pride and injustices seem misdirected to me.

I’m not surprised that their congregations sound increasingly like nightclubs, a place to get a fix to escape pain. Perhaps this quest for a Christ-fix is a worst kind of idolatry, using religion to avoid an encounter with St Paul’s living God.

My outlook of life generates itself as part of cosmic cycles akin to nature renewing itself in seasonal cycles. I think I understand the dangers entailed in the attitudes I have described above. African culture (and Jewish, for that matter) nurtures through the natural/agricultural and along the historical commemoration side of things. African and Jewish cultures break the unbroken stream of time into cycles which create a rhythm that gives shape to the experience of days, weeks, months, seasons and years. It is through this, the reiteration of eternal life in the chain of events and generations, that we find meaning and structure to our lives.

For instance, in Jewish and African culture, holidays mark the harvest and seasons; Pesach (Passover) is in spring, Shavuot (the feast of Weeks or Pentecost), in early summer, Sukkot (the festival of Booths) in autumn, and Hanukkah in winter. My Xhosa culture follows the lunar calendar to mark the cycles of the year, and those of an individual life. Xhosa boys also mark their coming into manhood through Pleiades, izilimela. It marks even the naming of children through significant events; hence you find children born in 1994, the year of our first democratic elections, named Democracy or Nkululeko (freedom).

These cultures bring about a clear realisation that we are interconnected, interdependent, in a universal web of life; and the fact that the natural world is the ground of our spiritual lives and deep source for symbolic meaning.

The universal source of symbolism can be clearly seen from the African shaman waking in the morning, donning the traditional regalia, to meet the coming dawn with praise singing; or from a Native American with his own divining accoutrements (feathers, beads and prayer rug); or similar practices from Muslim imams and Jewish rabbis wrapped in multi-coloured tallit (prayer shawl), arm and head swathed in tefillin (phylacteries).

I’ve mentioned all this to show that I am profoundly attracted to the earthly side of things small wonder Luke’s gospel is my favourite. But earthly components can easily get out of whack; like the economic becoming merely utilitarian or consumerist; the spiritual becoming abstract or self-assertive.

When in the early 1990s I was discouraged by the charismatic religious movements, it was because I found their spirituality too abstract, without sound theological foundations. I’m surprised to discover now that their wheel has turned full circle in what they call the prosperity gospel, which emphasise earthly wealth.

I still do not find an integrated median way to mitigate the unifying realm between the human spiritual and earthly needs in their religious attitude. They can teach Catholics a thing or two about fervour though, provided one channels it with sound theology and silent moments of adoration to listen to God�s answer now and then.