It was my first day in a popular church in Aba known for their Day of Miracles monthly services. I had been putting off attending but after several invitations by my colleague, a member, I finally visited.
The hall was bustling with people, all of them expressing various forms of worship as soulful songs burst from the speakers mounted at strategic points in the wide hall. Five hundred or more people stood in that hall, weeping or singing, dancing or clawing the air, jerking or screaming – a pure, delicious cacophony akin to a wild pagan celebration. It was eerily unorthodox – the displays, the energetic dances, the exaggerated swings of the arms, the howling and whistle-blowing; practices that would cause my Monsignor a cardiac arrest if we ever attempted such in my traditional Catholic Church.
But it was new, this experience, unlike the antiseptic, monotonous and mournful mass I had known over the years. I felt a pang of envy for people who could do anything just how they wanted, dressed just how they wanted, scream just how they wanted, sing just how they wanted and it wouldn’t matter; so long as they sprinkled these acts with the right dosage of Bible chants and holy name calling.
The songs got me first. Being a woman deeply and miserably in love with music, I found myself singing along when a young man with a Barry White-like voice mounted the podium and crooned Deitrick Haddon’s ‘He’s Able.’
And when the young handsome pastor mounted the pulpit and began his sermon with a cry-song, I found myself wiping my tears when he was done singing.
Then sermon began, and it all changed.
The pastor bustled and bounced and pranced about the stage – the usual theatrics known with our televangelists, one which had worshippers clapping and hooting; and I was left wondering if they were taken by his gymnastics or by his words. He talked about miracles; of passing exams with “flying colours”; of new profitable businesses landing on our laps; of bountiful harvests problems miraculously solving themselves, and all we needed to do was to believe, have faith, and we will possess our possessions. Worshipers screamed ‘Amen! Pastor, Amen!’
It all began to seep out of me, the previous headiness. It was everything I did not believe in. I willed for something to happen. Perhaps, the pastor could elaborate on the miracle peddling without making it look orchestrated, like it was a ploy to lure the naïve permanently into his fold. Perhaps he could add that you needed to work and not sit and wait for the miracle to fall onto your laps; perhaps he could add that problems don’t solve themselves – this wrong notion that is the bane of our part of the world; perhaps he could add that when we strive in our endeavours, when we work towards problems solving, then God would make it easier and be our balm and guide and light.
But the pastor did not say this.
The little girl in front of me, who looked not more than twelve, was clapping her hands. The older woman beside me was nodding her head. And the young man behind me was jumping and hooting. Everyone believed the pastor.
Miracle. It had taken on a new meaning, and with the right sprinkling of Bible verses, we get fixated and are left at the mercies of its peddlers.
It brought back the memories of when we were preparing for our WAEC examination in 1999 and a girl urged us to bring our writing materials to her church for her pastor to bless them. We would pass our exams with great grades, she assured us. Her pastor performs miracles, she insisted.
It wasn’t also any different from some Ariaria Market traders who shut their shops for hours every day just to engage in miracle prayers sessions conducted by clerics in dusty shoes and oversized coats. It wasn’t surreal anymore to find the traders drenched in sweat, singing in hoarse voices, hands raised to the sky, brows crumpled in concentration as the clerics blabbered prayers and commanded God to come and make them wealthy.
And after the prayers, the clerics bring out their basket and ask the traders in drop in their money because it was the way to seal their pleas to God; it was the surest way their prayers would translate to bountiful businesses.
I walked out of the church, in silent revolt.
Outside, the fences and walls were plastered with posters of our grinning governor in various poses – these bills printed by interest groups, all of them bearing same saccharine praises, all of them congratulating the Government of Abia State for a work well done. I sidestepped a pothole large enough to swallow half a car, same that riddled most of our roads in Aba. I walked pasts clogged drainages and flooded streets and over-filled waste bins spilling their contents on the road, breeding diseases.
I hadn’t walked up to a kilometre when I heard another voice blaring from the speakers of another church by Brass Junction. But this preacher was talking differently. He said, “Remove your religious cap and put on your thinking caps! Use your sensibilities because God gave it to you freely!”
And then I was laughing finally, because I knew I had just received the greatest miracle.