Compliments of the season Sir, and the coming season's greetings to us all !
Indeed Idoto's watery presence is one such.
As Prince Hamlet says to Horatio, "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Some of the cosmologists among us still interested in other people's cosmological ideas may be interested in Meher Baba's "God speaks" - the only book I've had time to read by him....
In these modern, post-enlightenment times, outside of poetry & the poetic, any mention of the supernatural is not only forbidden/ anathema, and pray who is anxious to be ridiculed and labelled either lunatic (crazy) or if such a one is African, to be labelled superstitious, primitive? I guess that's why some people may not talk too loudly about "spirit beings" or "mammy wata" or watery presences, that area where the extra-sensory enters the realm of what's sometimes known as the mythological ( e.g. all the fictitious," the real" or the imaginary Carlos Castaneda stuff) Toyin Adepoju has already talked about the anonymity of those who authored the Upanishads – and indeed there's Shruti and Smriti, the philosopher-seer-poets of what goes down as other people's scriptures, causing some to learn Sanskrit even as others take to hieroglyphics.
However, the Sanitaria are self-confident and don't bow down to evangelizing missionaries – they themselves have become missionaries - missionaries to other lost sheep of another house.
Bearing in mind the property of water as a purifying agent,
1) I'm still wondering whether the Assemblies of God Pastor& Brethren, who gave me a full immersion baptism in that River in Umuahia, in 1981, considered it a holy river. (I have finally tracked down my long lost evangelical Igbo Brother Titus Akanabu - he will surely be able to answer that question, hopefully on the phone one of these coming days...
2) What Professor Segun Ogungbemi asked here about President Goodluck Jonathan's prayers, on the banks of the Jordan River. (In fact, I just watched this programme on al-Jazeera in which someone (from the Jordan Valley) is in essential agreement with Professor Ogungbemi's "Dirty River" concept: in speaking about the Jordan River he says, "This River, so holy to Christianity, is now a garbage dump!"
3) That one of my bosses in Nigeria was a staunch follower of the leader of the Cross Rivers based Brotherhood of the Cross and Star (and here I'm being a little superstitious - I have never uttered the name of name of their leader which consists in a triple O) - she made me to understand that people were coming from as far away places as the then Soviet Union to be cured of certain skin disease by taking a healing hip in the miraculous river waters, under his supervision...
Langston Hughes : The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Yours sincerely,
On Sunday, 29 December 2013 23:58:30 UTC+1, Abolaji Adekeye wrote:
CH,
Compliments of the season.
The storied IDOTO before whom Okigbo stood naked is one.Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTNFrom: Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com>Sender: usaafric...@googlegroups.com Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2013 09:37:12 -0800 (PST)ReplyTo: usaafric...@googlegroups.com Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Journey Of The Teenage God-Boy (Poem)--Chidi,
Could you be talking about Meher Baba? Certainly not about the Christmas child?
What you present (speculation) tallies with "The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ" by one Levi
I talked to one of my daughters today (among other things she's a theologian - an MA from Hull) - a few months ago in London, she recited the apocryphal prayer of Manasseh by heart and I was amazed - - anyway, today she told me tell that God is a spirit – and talked for a while about spirit-beings – (the kind that Heaveansgate's Christopher Okigbo could relate to and this could be a satisfactory answer to this question.
Whilst we are still on the subject, may I ask of those who know: Are there any sacred rivers in Nigeria?
Only asking
Sincerely,
On Sunday, 29 December 2013 17:39:14 UTC+1, Chidi Anthony Opara wrote:By Chidi Anthony Opara
After the swims
On the estuaries of Egypt,
God-boy
Soaked with waters of ancient wisdom
Returned
And taught eager ears
In the land of his birth.
Teenage years approached,
Time approached,
Time to reciprocate
Visit of the wise men
Who came
Bearing gifts from the orient
When god-boy was baby.
Time to swim
On sacred streams of the orient
And be soaked
With more waters of ancient wisdom.
Thirteenth year came,
Teenage god-boy
Journeyed to the orient
And swam on sacred streams
With masters of ancient monasteries,
With mystics
Who revealed divine mysteries.
Teenage years passed,
Adulthood arrived,
God-man
Soaked with more waters of ancient wisdom
Journeyed back whence he came.
(Poem presented as social service, all rights reserved.)
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