Month: August 2015

DADDY I don’t believe in God

“It’s still beautiful though.” finally agreeing with my son. Many years have now passed, when as a young catholic boy, I had shocked my mother with the news of being born-again. I was persecuted to say the least. But that’s not the point. Here was what I have come to understand. My boy is being honest, and that is beautiful. His views and feelings are authentic, plausible and sincere. I saw beyond that sharp pain in my heart, and the mockery that I had lost to the devil, only as true as my limited self was capable of understanding at the time. Then, latter, I was happy and I became more confident of his future… If God is not True, why shouldn’t my boy come to know?

In my art class, I learned how the blue box wasn’t blue, yet it was blue. It had six sides. The side that faced the light was a lighter blue than the two sides I could see. The lighter side had fleeting properties of green, resulting from the ‘yellowy’ sun ray and the ‘bluey’ hue on the box. When I moved my drawing board to another position, I was able to see only one side, and this was easier to draw and paint. This side had almost one colour of blue, but at the end, it was more of a rectangle, a flat shape than a box. I painted in the shadows and the surrounding background, and was happy with my artwork. So was my teacher. We all saw the box with six sides in my ‘artwork’ with only one side.

Our imagination is an important gift and a space of ‘zero’ gravity. It is akin to that grocery supermarket, that is totally different from the kitchen where the food is eventually cooked.

In my art class, I saw how true it is that ‘we’ see in partial dimensions; in familiar shapes and colours, mostly flat. The closer the object, the more our dimensions of thought and perception improve, and our understanding is sorted in perspectives; with either a dominant vanishing point or multiple ones, within a common and shared space. The free ‘will’ or the audacity to imagine is not a rebellion from the absolute Truth, but a bidden of it, occasioned by His dignified non intrusiveness.

But in His ferocious strength Truth snatched the Harlot, the thief, the corrupt public servant, the numbed rich and the poor fishers.

Absolute Truth stands dignified at an inspiring space, in a reassured confidence that through our subjective perception of what is Truth, through sincere and honest curiosities, seasoned by our tempting interactions with the corruptions around our evolving selves, we will become. Truth by imagination frees our heart to question and own our answer.

My son’s dissent, could point to my language, and yet every day, he embodies and preaches the story of God; a language my generation has lost to speak.

Let’s cheer up.

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Leonard Chintua-Chigbu
Listening and Creative Communication Artist
BA Fine Art (Painting) University of Benin 1986

Ending

TRUTH is that it’s not True

Cheer up!

The illusion is that Evil is dominant and does not live in constant fear. It indeed does but only projects a perversion of its core identities and strength. It also continues to send messages of its presumed dominance to a less perceptive world, that it is the marauder and conqueror of all Good. Yet in its nerves, it shakes and lives in the frail subjectivity of its constituents and the inevitable notice of their existence, through the undeniable christening of Light. Deep in its innermost consciousness, it lives with the evident Truth that there is therefore no such place as a place of darkness. It continues to cave in on its futile attempts to shot out light from spaces where it operates and yet, surrenders to its own sincere and entire sense of lack of dominance.

If there is no such thing as a place or space of entire darkness, a place shot out for the eye to see or make out an object, that there is no such deeds that in its evil nature could triumph without the existential threats which are only real sure and time sure, then we begin to share in the empathy of a desperate invader and a frustrated eventual loser.

Light comes and caress all things, places and spaces. It quietly reveals situations and enriches it with its own understanding of its self. It makes no trumps or unveiling of its lordship over those situations. The situation is shredded and understood, often making it look worse and out of its monstrosity; the earth of its death, the promise of its solution hovers in the light particles of its shared understanding.

I went to the pit of hell. In my darkness I lost orientation because I did not know where I was backing or facing. I was blind, but it was worse because I even felt no grounds on which I was standing; all seemed to float. In my blindness, I was dazed and pressed by torrents of darkness beating every coast of my lost orientation and balance.

In that darkness, its persistent rage and unending perturbs became a predictable normalcy. In my inexplicable buoyancy and pitch darkness, I could start to see. In the greatest pitch of darkness, my pupils could grow larger and darkness yielded itself to the definitions of its masses and content and I could in my retina see the silver lining cresting every mass. In every object there was an inherent light because all things consist of light and defined by it.

I walked in my darkness; through the compressed spectrum of its irrepressible rainbow, sorting out the constituents of my depressed self, my depraved mind, the knowledge that rain terror in my helpless parts; the hapless poor in Arabia, Africa, Asia, Europe, the Indies and the Americas. It was as though it was day. In fact, all were day. And the truth remained; that it was not true that evil is the ultimate conqueror but Truth the Light. Keep walking!

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Leonard Chintua-Chigbu
Listening and Creative Communication Artist
BA Fine Art (Painting) University of Benin 1986

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