The miracle men
BY
I know a place in Lagos Island — one of several such places, I shouldn’t wonder — where friends gather to sit out the worst of the evening rush hour traffic while fortifying themselves with some refreshment before heading homeward via the Third Mainland Bridge or Eko Bridge. Resigned to the fact that they have a minimum of two hours to kill before the traffic progresses from a total standstill to a crawl, they give themselves up to discussing any subject that chanced along, and they do it with great seriousness and conviction.
The last time I was with the group it had rained all afternoon, and the "go slow" we were avoiding had stretched from Onikan to Apongbon, so about six of us sat down to discuss, of all things, miracles defined either as "a marvellous event attributed to a supernatural cause," or simply "an amazing or wonderful event." Whichever it is, the connotation is usually pleasant, and miracles are much sought after.
Somebody in the group told a story that sounded like a parable, about an evangelist who had so set his mind on winning the jackpot prize in the local weekly lottery that, on the night before the draw he spent several hours on his knees praying to God for a miracle that would make him win. He also asked his congregation to join him in fervent prayer and fasting, since he intended to use the jackpot money in extending the church building. When his wish was not granted in the first three draws, he made his complaint to God saying;
"Lord, You it was who said: Ask, and it shall be given to you. Well, I prayed hard enough, didn’t I? So why isn’t the jackpot mine by now?"
To which God replied: "How do you expect to win when you haven’t bought yourself a lottery ticket?"
The thing about these stories is that some other person is bound to want to top it, and soon we were listening to stories about miracles, miracle workers, seekers after miracles. When it came to my turn I related the story of my friend Peter, and about his next door neighbour, a pastor names Caleb. Peter was an engineer in a state ministry of works, and when he retired from service he had sought some peace and quiet in a small village deep in cassava country in Ogun State.
He had built himself a bungalow next door to one of those churches where drumming, clapping and dancing was the preferred mode of worship. I paid him a visit on a Sunday morning, which was no doubt a mistake.
For a while after I got there we both sat in the verandah and listened to the noise from next door, where Caleb was preaching a rather complicated sermon about labour and reward.
"If you sow okra," he was saying, "don’t expect to reap oranges, for, no matter how hard you pray to our Father in heaven, He won’t turn your okra into oranges."
"I hope he’s not getting his congregation confused," Peter told me. "Only two Sundays ago he preached a sermon about miracles, and what he told them then was that, with faith and prayer everything was possible."
"All religions teach that."
"Then why blame the man who plants okra and, because onions are selling better this season, prays with perfect faith that his okra should be turned into onions? You would be destroying the man’s belief in miracles if he didn’t get his onions."
"I don’t think religion encourages unreasonable beliefs or fraudulent expectations."
"I don’t think that either," Peter said, "but that preacher can’t have it both ways."
"Anyway, miracles are not all about turning okra into onions. That would be too worldly."
"More worldly than two loaves of bread and five small fishes? They all come under the classification of food."
"That’s different. The loaves of bread were still loaves of bread; they were not potatoes miraculously turned into bags of rice. You are getting two things mixed up."
"I don’t know. Have you ever been to a miracle crusade?"
"No."
"Neither have I. But a miracle week was held not far from here, not very long ago, as part of something that was advertised as an evangelical outreach. It attracted thousands of people, including a friend of mine who had travelled all the way from Abeokuta. He was looking for a quick fix for some problem that was bothering him at the time. He prayed and sang and danced along with the multitude, and in the end, nothing happened."
"When you say nothing happened, from whose perspective is that?" I asked.
"That of my friend from Abeokuta," Peter said, "How do you explain that?"
"Perhaps he didn’t have faith, or if he had, it was shaky."
"That’s too easy," Peter protested. "Every time a supposed miracle worker or faith healer fails to deliver, it’s only because the person at the receiving end doesn’t have enough faith."
"But you can’t have a miracle without faith, can you?"
"It depends," I said, "on how one defines faith."
"Or on how one defines miracle. Take your friend as an example. Let’s say his problem was financial. Just because a bag of money didn’t suddenly drop into his lap from heaven didn’t mean that he didn’t get his miracle. He may have gone home with a renewed strength to cope with his problem. Surely that would count as a miracle."
"Not if what was advertised in the publicity posters was nothing less than resurrecting the dead, or causing the lame to walk, or turning the penniless into instant millionaires. That’s what pulls the crowds and makes them toss their money into the collection baskets."
"Why," I asked in genuine puzzlement, "do you sit and listen to this man every Sunday, when you don’t believe what he says?"
"Three reasons. First, because this is the only house I’ve got, and there is nowhere else to escape to. Second, I do it as a sort of penance —for an absence of religious conviction on my part. You see, I sometimes envy members of that congregation whatever satisfaction they get from their act of worship."
"Then why don’t you join them?"
"Because, whatever other sins I may have committed, or may be committing, I don’t want you add the sin of hypocrisy."
"You said there were three reasons. Which is the third?"
"The third is that I believe his sermons are directed at me. He holds them up to me like a mirror, and I am supposed to see and recognise my image in it. Unfortunately it is a bad mirror, and the image I see is distorted. Let me give you an example. The pastor and I once had a dispute over a piece of my land. The land had been cleared of bush, and the digging of the foundation was about to begin, when I made a gruesome discovery. Right in the middle of the plot was an earthenware bowl in which someone had placed the severed head of a goat, half submerged in some devil’s brew, its unseeing eyes staring glassily into my face. I felt sickened, but the effect on the handful of labourers I had hired to do the digging of the foundation was more than serious. They refused to do any digging, or even to stay in the vicinity."
"How did you get them back to work?"
"I hired a witch doctor of my own, who came and did more of the same, sprinkling his own concoction on the land, and chanting some mumbo-jumbo and, for good measure, driving a stake drenched with the blood of a rooster into the ground. The labourers returned to work the following day, and the bungalow was built in three months."
"I hope he stopped bothering you after that," I asked.
"The very first Sunday after I moved in here he preached a sermon that lasted a full hour, all about a foolish man who built his house on shifting sand. The text was from the Bible, of course, but clearly the reference was to me and this bungalow. What he was telling me was that I had built my bungalow in the wrong place, and that it was bound to collapse on top of my head before long. Well, he is due for a disappointment. The bungalow may have been built in three months, but it is a small bungalow, the soil around here is solid laterite, not sand. I have a diploma in building, and was in the business for fifteen years, so I know more about structures than he thinks."
Aren’t you taking him a bit too literally?"
"Caleb intends that I should."
"Doesn’t it bother you? When he makes you the target of his sermons, doesn’t it affect your own relationships with the congregation? After all you live among them, and have to get on with them every day."
"I don’t let it bother me. Anyway, I have a feeling that most of the congregation go to church to forget their own problems, not have their pastor saddle them with fresh ones. Besides, they enjoy their singing and clapping and dancing so much that they hardly listen to the sermons."
Just then a babble of discordant and unintelligible sounds came over the loud speakers. Peter sighed and said: "Now they are speaking in tongues. That will be followed by a few miracles."
I gave Peter a look and said, half-seriously: "Do you think he would take me on as an outpatient? I have this lower back pain that has been giving me hell for some time."
Peter gave a shrug and said: "It’s a free country."
December 2001