everything god requires of me, i require of god.
patron ghost of iyi oji, art by Oma
written a couple of years back, transferred from retired blog.
Every now and then, a deep unnamed resounding feeling comes upon me and when it does i find myself in a situation where we have to name it, identify what it is, give the feeling some sort of baptism, rid it of ideas, of notions belonging to my old self and give it a rebirth worthy of my new status in God. Today's naming is simple, I want to be understood as much and as deeply as I understand. This feeling, which we have now identified as the need to be understood as much as we understand, is a dilemma. Yes a conundrum, that's what i said, addressed at self. A riddle of myself. I want to be understood as deeply as I understand. When I place this statement in my chest the god in me is silent. When I move it to my belly, the only feedback we get is a rumble which we translate to mean, in my belly this dilemma has been identified as a sort of natural hunger. But when i move the statement to my head, i want to be understood as well as i understand, my mind responds immediately, in fact she responds before i finish my upload of the statement. What are you even saying? Of course for you to be understood you must understand and for you to understand you must be understood. The voices in my head are multiple, too many, too logical, too intellectual. I want an emotional response, so I go back to placing the statement in my chest. I can feel my heart beating steadily in there but the god in it is still silent. In the end, I recall the John the Baptist moment I had just before we started shifting this dilemma around my body, in my own voice I asked, to baptize or to be baptized? To hold the dilemma, I want to be understood as deeply as I understand, or to let the dilemma hold me? A prophet, my voice became a prophet who always knows the end from the beginning. So we laid it down instead and chose to do the renaming, the rebirthing, the re-identifying, yes the baptism of that deep resounding unnamed feeling that came upon me in the beginning as a word, as god. And what did we get out of it? Don't ask me, I am still facing the riddle of myself which has become this whole exercise, of exorcizing my mind, to lay hold of meaning.
I realized a long time ago, from a different deep unnamed reverberating feeling that came upon me, that the holy trinity resides in my body. Yes my body is occupied by the holy trinity, god resides in my head, in my chest and in my belly. I came to this realization that those parts of my body are designed in such a way that they can all think and function independently of each other, yet they must all coexist to keep me alive. This different feeling was a different conundrum, a sacred one. Tell me, is god not in me? Is there any facet of the holy trinity that you cannot find already existing as a faculty in my body? Except of course you lack understanding. Which brings me back to my initial dilemma, I want to be understood as deeply and as well as I understand. When I was a little girl, my adopted mother invented a name for me, and till date it is the name I wear whenever I am in my francophone reality. She said, your igbo names are pillars, your traditional titles are incantations. She informed me that I had been initiated from birth. Yes she informed me, because then i could not understand. She called me by one of my invocations and she told me that my name was my presence. She gave me my own deuteronomy five, my own commandments to uphold for my life. She said we are of ancient royal lineage, and to become the new thing this life needs, we must first reawaken the old within, and to reawaken the ancient things again, we must first become them. We must become a mystery, shrouded in darkness, this darkness is not a bad thing, it is the necessary order to bring forth our light. I did not understand her, so I doubted her like all beliefs and mysteries require doubt, she required my doubt to remain my mother. If you do not understand, it is because I too did not understand. And the god in this dilemma was no longer silent after my mother, the one who invented a name for me, died. Life came upon me and stretched its hand out like Moses' rod demanding her commandment from me, opening its python mouth and swallowing my old life up. But even the great snake knows you cannot leave what you are, so after that battle it turned back into a rod, a silent god, an idol. I was my own Egypt. When my names came asking to be set free, I had only disobedience to give. Since then my whole life has become a spell, parting red seas wherever they show up, turning impossible things into everyday realities. My mother tried to tell me things that even she did not fully understand, and as a result I could not understand. Since then I have learned to never be silent with my own dilemmas, to move them around the different faculties of gods image in my body and to require of my god the very things it requires of me.
