… Biafra … a late note …

I remember the name, and the tasteless jokes we immature teenagers batted around, having no idea what was going on, nor even where it was happening. Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel about what happened to Biafra, 1967 to 1970. A little country that never had a chance.  To shut it down, they starved and otherwise slaughtered 3 million people.  It’s a book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian author and public speaker, herself Igbo, one of the major people groups in Nigeria. 

In about 2006 or 7, I was part of a group visiting Nigeria and Congo to learn about AIDS.  At the time, the WHO said 5000 to 10,000 people were dying of AIDS every day, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa; we met many affected by this illness and still many others who were health and church and government workers responding to this global pandemic.  

Our first evening in Nigeria, one of the MCC workers, Gopar Tapkida gave us a couple of hours about Nigeria. An introduction to a large country of over 400 languages, set up by the British to be ‘a north’ and ‘a south’. Loosely, Gopar said the north was mostly Muslim, with less access to schools, less education and therefore also less access to political power.  The south, he said,  had been more opened to western missionaries and with them came access to education, influence and power. It was an arbitrarily constructed dynamic, almost designed for conflict. And so, frequently, violence would break out, as it does there today. Massacres … on either side. Christian south, Muslim north. In fact, early in our visit we had accidentally met a local evangelical leader at a guest house who, talking about a spate of recent killings, casually said to us … we needed to do something. Otherwise, they don’t stop. Something like … ‘it was our turn’. 

Half of a Yellow Sun is actually the flag (or was) of Biafra.  This little country of  Igbo (and others) people in the South East, corner, a people seen in the north as wealthy, progressive and self assured, they became more and more isolated in the whole of Nigeria until they simply declared themselves a new, separate country, after yet another wave of gruesome killings, particularly of Igbo living in the north. The Igbo (also Ibo) are descendants of the Nri kingdom, the oldest in Nigeria, consisting of about 18% of the total population. Some claim the Igbo are descendants of one of Israel’s lost tribes, after the Assyrians invaded the Northern Kingdom in the 8^th century BC, forcing 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel into exile.  In 1967 they dared to declare themselves a country, but the international community doesn’t like that kind of initiative, and almost no one recognized this new country, which had rich oil reserves that others had their eyes on. So, instead, they all stood by as Nigeria, with lots of help, crushed it.  

I suppose it could be said that what happened in 1967-70 is not very significant for 2022/23.  It’s a long time ago. Since then we’ve had the killing fields of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan and Darfur, Canadian Residential Schools, Apartheid in S Africa and Israel, North Korea, the chillingly dirty wars in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Guatemala and El Salvador,  the Rohingya of Myanmar, the war in Yemen, Syria, Colombia, Venezuela, the endless Palestinian tragedy, Ukraine … .  But as with any story of conquest, war and killing and starvation, it never really ends. I suppose it shouldn’t.  

Canada prides itself on bringing in a lot of newcomers and refugees over the last 150 years but their stories don’t just begin anew as if the earlier hadn’t happened. Our recent number is quite modest compared to the million Syrians Germany took in back in 2015, but regardless, I’m often struck by the silence of people who come from difficult and horrific stories of brutal trauma and loss, as they struggle and settle here into … what? … our stability? Our peace? Do we expect them to keep their stories to themselves? Do we know that they have stories?  Do they simply prefer to keep a silence as they struggle to start over, often having to survive without the language, social and family supports they will at one time have had, back somewhere? 

One of the last lines in the book is … ‘the world was silent when we died’.  It’s easier, I suppose, for us here in our peace and stability, if the survivors now among us also remain silent. A complicity almost … to keep us from losing sleep. One of the stories in the novel mentions, almost in passing, a woman who has travelled through 5 refugee camps to arrive at yet another one with her baby, and then she dies leaving the baby. The camp manager calls to the priest to come for the body. Another burial. There are many. One source says maybe 14,000 died every day in that small population. There simply was no food. Biafra was the orchestrated starvation of a people. 

I read this book, remembering the name, Biafra, from my early teens, but nothing much more. Has there been any justice or acknowledgement of what happened? Of our complicit silence?  Of the role the British and French and the Americans played? The Russians with weapons they made available to Nigeria – to test their weapons – so they could subdue a people who wanted only to be left alone? Were the Igbo ever a threat to anyone? They wanted security inside their own borders, borders they had determined, I guess without the British to draw the lines for them. And apparently, that could not be allowed. 

… we adults …

I’ve never quite understood what Jesus meant when he said we have to become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. None of us can really do that, unless we’re children, and he will have known this.  But, that it’s not possible can’t take away from whatever he meant by it. Just a careless remark? I doubt it. Maybe … it not being possible even adds to its meaning? Did he mean … you can’t think or believe your way into the kingdom?  Jesus telling Nicodemus he would need to be born again, and then not saying how this would happen is a lot like that. A lot of things Jesus said are like that. The last being first is another!  Love your enemies! Do good to those who curse you? They don’t fit our experience of the world, and yet, we kind of know intuitively what he means and we also know that that mysterious way is really, always, and in the end, THE way and not really all that mysterious. Our souls and our hearts know this.  We are, I think, actually already built for the kingdom and it seeks us.

Last summer, which now seems a very long time ago (it’s winter) our grandchildren were here and we did things.  Lots of things. It never gets old … not because I don’t get tired, but because when I’m with any or all of them, the world looks different. It’s almost as if my imagination becomes less cluttered and there’s more space in there for upside down and rightside up things I hadn’t thought about for a long time, or ever. When you’re spinning on a ferris wheel with a 6-year old or eating ice cream with them on a day so warm it melts onto your hands … the world relaxes and in that moment, it’s really just about the ice cream or the view from the ferris wheel. The clutter fades away, the world becomes colorful and more pleasant, expectations are fewer and all things become possible.  

In one of his posts, Richard Rohr writes about what it means to become ‘as children’.  One of the characteristics of infants is that they are often seen, especially in the spiritual sense, as innocent.  In his essay “The Recovery of Paradise” Thomas Merton writes of the Desert Fathers and their search for “lost innocence,” which they saw as the emptiness and purity of heart “which had belonged to Adam and Eve in Eden.

Jesus’ teaching tells us that the gift of being like a child is vital and necessary for entry to the kingdom—it is a command: “unless.” This extraordinary teaching is consistent in the three synoptic gospels but the meaning of the teaching is less clear. In fact the mystery of what it might all mean is revealed only to babies and toddlers, in other words those who are not yet able to speak: “At that time, Jesus said, ‘I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants’” (Matthew 11:25). The message is that for us to see and to be close to God we have to relinquish the part of us that feels important and knowledgeable … and turn (back) into a state of not knowing … .

So, I wonder if Jesus meant to tell us that real understanding is to not try so hard to know and understand? A child experiences the world, but doesn’t have the same need to name and understand and describe things that we adults have. The expectations are basic and surprize is always exciting and expected? To understand the kingdom of heaven, to even allow room for the last being first, the hidden ones becoming visible, the marginalized becoming welcomed, and peace – rather than winning and conquering – making sense at last, we adults have to unlearn and let go of our human experience, and then see, as a child can, the little stories inside the bigger one of all humanity. The stories where the last do become first, where Cinderella does find her happiness, and where the poor have equal access to all things. A world where conquering and winning and bullying (even peace people do this sometimes) aren’t a thing. Sadly, these days, a large part of what is called Christendom hangs on to the knowing and conquering parts of our story, insisting in some perverse way of thinking, that that, in fact, is the kingdom of heaven. Gaining it by conquering and dividing and even fervently believing was never anywhere close to ‘the way’. 

A parenthesis: (In response to my last blog, about the upside down surprize of Revelation, my brother sent this note: … the book of Revelation is about worship; there are about 30 references to the beast and as many references to the lamb. So the question John asks of his readers is, will you worship the beast (of empire) or the lamb? It seems to me, he adds, some of the American evangelical world chooses to worship the beast of empire … increasingly today being called Christian nationalism or dominionism.) 

When, a long time ago, I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I was fascinated by what happened at the end.  In giving himself up, Aslan, the lion gave birth to new life. By not winning, everything became new.  Everyone around him changed and it had nothing to do with conquest and violence and thrones and swords and horsemen and trumpets nor even with temples. It had to do with turning it all upside down, inside out. Service and sacrifice.  When we see it, we recognize it because we ‘know’ it. The child in us knows it. 

Beauty and the Beast … the same kind of story. How many stories like that are there? Something mysterious happens when we let the violence and clutter end. When we turn away from it and from our expectations and fears and angers, risky everything, and move towards each other. I’m pretty sure that’s the kingdom of heaven, and while children may not write books about it, they get what this is. Why else do they love the stories?  We adults do too, but we have so much to unlearn.