Its good to know I’m mortal
I think I had excellent preparation for Lent this year. My sister rang me up the other day to find out if I was alive. Well, I hadn’t been sick. I hadn’t travelled on Kenya’s notorious killer highways. And there hadn’t been an Al Shabab terrorist attack in Nairobi.
Rather, my sister had dreamt that I was dead. She woke up with her face drenched in tears. I was very much alive, I assured her. We laughed. Our people believe that when you dream that someone has died, it means he or she enjoyed a great meal that night. We laughed again.
But the issue of my own death hasn’t left me since. For sure, one day I will die. I will close my eyes for the last time and never open them again. I will leave many people behind in sorrow. I will leave a lot undone. But elsewhere life will continue pretty much as if I never lived.
There are times I have looked at the pictures on the obituary pages of newspapers and wondered how people would feel about me when I am dead. How will they take it? How will my close relatives and friends cope? It is all so sad.
I have sometimes recalled relatives and friends who died and wondered how things would be if they were still here with us. Sometimes I have actually asked myself where exactly they could be. Are they completely dead (non-existent) or are they alive in another form somewhere? Doing what?
One of the interesting responses to these questions is to be found in African religion. Death does not mean one absolutely ceases to exist. If one was morally upright, he or she transits into the world of the ancestors and continues living there.
The dead petition God on behalf of the living. They receive sacrifices and offerings and in return bless and protect the living. They are close to God who shares with them some of his power.
The dead can always come back to the world of the living as good or evil spirits, depending on their moral condition at the time of their demise. But most importantly, they continue living here through “nominal reincarnation”.
That concept means after I die I would return when my relatives name children after me. It means that, because I am named after certain relatives who died, their life continues in me. Thus in African faith, human life never ends at physical death.
I like this idea. It is consoling. But now that people in my village no longer offer sacrifices or pour libations to the ancestors, haven’t we lost touch with the spirit world? Will I not get a hostile reception from angry spirits upon arrival in the ancestral world when I die?
I honestly have no answers to these questions.
Lent gives me a different perspective. On Ash Wednesday the priest marked my forehead with ash saying: “Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” It is a sobering message. But it is the truth. My death is certain.
For 40 days, I am invited to keep that in mind and to strive to be reconciled with God and neighbour. I am also offered an opportunity for inner renewal through prayer, fasting and sharing what I have with those who are in need.
The gloom of Lent ends with the bright joy of Easter. Jesus Christ assures all who believe in him that he will raise them from the dead at the end of time. And they will live in a perfect world with God forever. He offers as a guarantee his own resurrection.
In fact the Bible presents resurrection of Christians as a certainty: “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep” (1 Thes 13-14).
I want to grow in this faith this Lent. And I have my sister to thank for reminding me of my own mortality.
- Why the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ Thrives in Africa - November 15, 2018
- What were the gospel writers up to? - January 16, 2017
- Church lost an opportunity - September 4, 2011