Married in Namalo Part II

It almost felt like I had become religious again after all those years.

However what I was however experiencing was the primordial instinct to conform. Humans are essentially a pack and deviating from the group triggers an error signal to short circuit everything and tell you something is fundamentally wrong.

But as I realized this I was actually appreciative that I had been involved in an experience that my rational mind would have brushed aside.

Religion had found a way of allowing me to break out of the perceptions of my present reality, to be carried away by a shared communal experience with strangers offering me new ways of thinking about myself.

Read Also: Married at Namalo Part 1

The Sermon

The priest sermon was based on the story of Tobbias and Sarah.

It explained how we reconciled orgiastic experience of sexual pleasure into meaningful process of playing God at creation with his guidance and in care of community.

While the couple had had their relations outside the church, they had chosen to come before God and family to bless their union.

The mass also helped me experience up close, the levitation of sacrament as faithful took symbolic ingestion of bread in memeory of Christ.

I witnessed the burst of unimaginable excitement around greeting strangers that was turned into a ceremony of embrace by our people who believe a handshake must extended to the elbow. I watched how the wedding impacted the couple and noted the anxious reverence David Mukudi vowed to love Faith. Tremor in voice, twitching fingers and the confident relief as they were declared husband and wife in front of family and friends who are childishly elated by public frolicking.

Religious upgrade

What the church offered to the children of capitalism was an alternative experience, from what we tell ourselves we are.

This state however can easily be abused by the vulnerability of the process of moulting and even weaponized by fringe extremists. 

Before this pull off religious fervor, I had considered Catholic one of the less conservative religions that allowed its followers autonomy demanded by our liberal world.

I felt that religions that demanded full conformity with all doctrine would eventually run at odds with reality lest they can maintain a sect-level of discipline and conservatism. Only sects that demand inbreeding among faithful can keep offspring within a bubble of myth with the powerful threat of ostracization by family. Otherwise they would come in contact with the world and its multiple views and will very soon discover humans just want to connect across all manner of mentally erected walls.

So I felt catholic, the mass religion that has had to incorporate global cultures would have less and less demands upon its faithful for conformity.

In fact, lately the church under its most liberal leader Pope Francis, has sought to break up even the last of these old age doctrines that were outright discriminatory and even imperial.

Religion is inherited tradition

I inherited Catholicism from my family although, they themselves had a mixed history with the religion. One of my grandmothers followed Ondeto, the Jesus of Legio Maria where they invented their versions of Israel and biblical miracles in local geography. One of my grandfathers, I heard oscillated between christianity and legio and lived most of his life in between.

But by the time I was born, the house was catholic and automatically I took up the filial tradition like an inheritance.

I served my time as a true believer especially the formative years where tales of heroism were very impressionable. I was especially taken in by the story of the Uganda martyrs which Mother read us, a chapter a night.

A book in the family library Mary’s Pilgrim cemented this resolve and I had no other purpose than to enter Gods’ service.  It helped that my brother had served as an altar boy so it was a natural choice when I took up the role.

The power of sitting at the head of the congregation watching over adults and friends hanging on your every action and words was quite attractive that I wanted to be a priest at some point. But it would not last long, akrasia set in and I lost the will to the pleasures of sensual experiences, which in hindsight confirmed that I had made sound decision not to go celibate.

At a personal level, a brush with the reverence given to the men of the cloth convinced me of the mistake of conceding too much agency to another human merely because they are agents of power structure.

The cover up of sexual abuse because instructions of religious men was considered beyond reproach unsettled me, since they were just humans who made mistakes like everyone else.

But I remained within the fold, for as long as knew very little of the church’s history. My break away came as I studied more and more about slavery and the African experience of the doctrine of discovery, the victims of the 500 years after papal decrees used to rationalize Europe's colonial conquests, and conditioning for abuse.

I remember being the radical atheist in high school as the rebellious side wore on. This phase offered me an opportunity to really think through religion.

From basic history I learned that it was almost human condition to believe in deity regardless of geography and temperament.

My friend Job Kimani pointed me to Alain De Botton who deconstructed what religions really offered us, catharsis.

In its spectacular appeal to illuminating art, its akrasia addressing repetition, its commitment to communal rituals and a calendars in dates to reconnect with our deeper neglected selves created the opportunity for self-renewal, biological upgrading of sorts.  

The Sufis’ had discovered an even more intelligent way to think about the experience likening religion to workers who were paid with one gold coin by their master. When they went to spend it, while they all wanted grapes, the fact that they came from different nationalities who had different names for the fruit meant that they started fighting over something they all agreed about. 

For the Sufi, the naming of grapes are unimportant, when you can have not just the grapes, but its wine.

Namalo nafinish

While today most humans share a world view about freedom and justice we have allowed fringe voices of division to drown the reality of consensus.

As Pope Francis in his Lent message put it, ‘how else can we explain the fact that humanity has arrived at the threshold of universal fraternity and at levels of scientific, technical, cultural, and juridical development capable of guaranteeing dignity to all, yet gropes about in the darkness of inequality and conflict.

Political actors convinced of the illusion of their present reality are exploiting religious differences for short term power and are dragging the world into the chaos of war.

War is ravaging Sudan, Palestine and Ukraine even as Nato is in full scale preparation for confrontation with Russia where compromise and negotiation would have spared the lives of thousands of innocent civilians.

It is assumed that we share theses irreconcilable difference that we are willing to commit mutual suicide in senseless violence when the truth of the matter is that a small segment of society is driving a narrative.

We do not want to exterminate each other because there is enough to go around, those who divide us are relying on the fact that we are not likely to challenge their assertions because we wish to conform to cultural norm.

Most people in the group go along with the idea that they are not actually in agreement with, because they incorrectly believe that most people in the group agree with it.

Once we step out of the cultural norms that are merely reflections of the prior generations consensus we are able to see that they are not sound doctrine.

That we should look for the parts we agree on and challenge arbitrary norms that exist merely because peopled don’t question them.

Read Also: Married at Namalo Part 1