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Updated Friday, October 4th 2013 at 23:19 GMT +3 By Barrack Muluka
Whenever my country prays, I will invariably write about prayers. I last did this only a few months ago, during the meeting dubbed the National Prayer Breakfast. On all such occasions, I elect to be the voice of the man crying in the wilderness. This man screams, regardless that there exist men and women in the holy orders, proclaiming godly messages.
There were enough such men and women in the days of the original Voice in the Wilderness. His name was Isaiah the son of Amoz. Then there was John the Baptist after him, several centuries later. The man in the wilderness often takes umbrage with his compatriots and especially with the men in the religious orders and those in political high places. The voice speaks out not to make our spiritual superiors happy. It rather speaks to prick their conscience and make them uncomfortable. This is a good thing.
Woe unto the nation that has no people to prick the conscience of the leadership – worse still whose leadership has no conscience to prick. When the country’s notables and grandees put everything else on hold to pray, we must therefore, engage them on the essence of prayer. We must interrogate the manner in which they pray and the prayers they say. Can God take us seriously? This question cannot be wished away.
As a Christian gentleman, I have yet to find a manifestation of prayer greater than the immensely rich library that is The Book of Psalms. Henry Winterman’s Complete Bible Commentary has celebrated the Psalms as “the choicest and most excellent parts of all The Old Testament.” But why? Because “this book brings us into the sanctuary, draws us off from converse with men (note my emphasis), with the politicians, philosophers, or disputers of this world, and directs us into communion with God, by solacing and reposing our souls in him, lifting up and letting out our hearts toward him.” How so beautiful and inspiring!
Accordingly, in this great book among books, we go through the whole gamut of human passions and emotional states. We cry, laugh, sing for joy and make pleas to God. We experience moments of ecstasy and low moments in “successive simultaneity.” There is a rich trinity of prayer. Ultimately, good prayer will be laudatory – marveling as it does about the majesty of God. It will be penitent, confessing our dislocation before God. Then only thirdly will it be supplicatory, asking God to do this and that for us – for He already knows our needs and our wants anyway.
But do we seem to pitch ourselves on false pious high ground each time we purport to appear before God in prayer? Do we seem to cast ourselves in the unblemished mould of good people who are sinned against without sinning? Does everyone else wrong us, even possibly in “conspiracy” with God? In any event, the timbre and substance of our public prayers would suggest as much. Hence each time catastrophe strikes a sure recourse is a giant prayer meeting that knows no denominations, complete with public proclamations of our oneness.
Ultimately our consort appears to be less with God and more in converse with men, politicians and sundry disputers. But let us first confess the supremacy of prayer and the invocation of God’s name. Is it possible, nonetheless, that if we suddenly materialise before God and start screaming, “God we want this, and we want that, give us all this!” that God will be so happy and grant our prayers and petitions?
I don’t think so. I have often written in this column about the Prophet Isaiah’s caution on the futility of some prayers. You can read about them in Isaiah 1:1 – 17. The bottom line is that we cannot pretend about the bad things in our lives and hope that we could bribe God with a prayer. Each time religious zealots strike us the religious fraternity comes together in the denial called joint national prayer. Since the zealots who harm us claim to be Muslims fighting for Islam, the focus of the pious assembly is always on condemning the zealots and denying that they are Muslims.
Even bishops from my own Church know that the terrorists who recently messed us up at Westgate “were not Muslims.” Now this is where denial and hypocrisy meet. There is only one way to deny a man the faith he proclaims – excommunication by an authorised institution. My bishop can excommunicate me if I should fall out of the ordinances of my religion. An outsider, however, cannot stand before a crowd and say, “Barrack is not a Christian.” This is regardless that he is temporarily enjoined in assembly with the Archbishop of Canterbury and all the bishops of the Anglican Church in the world. The assembly would be wrongly constituted for purposes of outlawing me.
What is the truth about this matter then? The truth is that we have a problem with global Islamic fundamentalism. You cannot strip these fundamentalists off their Islamic faith and tag without excommunicating them from the mainstream of the faith. This responsibility resides with Muslim leaders throughout the world and especially in countries that have been victims of religious terrorism. The sheikhs and Imams have a duty to their faith and to the rest of the free world. They must come out to consistently preach against terrorism as redress to grievances, no matter how legitimate they may be.
Nobody should live in fear of another’s religion. My bishop has no business joining a universal parade of denial in the name of prayer. God will not listen to the pious mumblings you make there. Muslim leaders have their job cut out for them.
The writer is a publishing editor, special consultant and advisor on public relations and media relations
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