|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Isaac Ato MENSAH
Accra – 15 March, 2019
I have many initiation dates – all of which I hold dear and celebrate.
I know my date of birth, baptism, First Holy Communion, initiation into the Catholic Youth Organisation and so on and so forth.
Like some of you might have experienced, life and learning sometimes conspire to ensure that you are no longer active.
‘I have disowned you as my son; if we meet somewhere we don’t know each other,’ some friends have reported their parents as saying.
Yes, you may cease to be a member of an organisation, for whatever reason, but do you ever lose your initiation?
Can any man with a stroke of a pen or via an oral dictum, declare you a non-initiate, a profanus?
Well, it should be obvious that such parents were just talking ignorantly and out of anger at something they may have found offensive. It could even be a crime committed by their children.
Such worried people need to be given clarity and precision on the matter.
We should not let ignoramuses give us sleepless nights; birth into this life is an initiation and you cannot be born again, literally.
Even in the Catholic church, where a tradition of ex communication vitante – in Ghanaian parlance ‘I sack myself’ – exists, such affected persons do not lose their baptism; they remain Catholics.
What remains in such cases of membership conflict is how long red tape embalmed bureaucrats and egoistic local champions take to acknowledge facts, evidence and reason presented to them.
There are many people who have had know-nothings threaten them through often awkwardly worded written communication that they should no longer hold themselves as who they are by virtue of their initiation!
At such a point, it is always useful to remember that patience is a virtue.
At a college Advertising class eight years ago, a student (let’s call her Sister T) told me during self introduction, that she will forever feel guilty over her mother’s death.
‘You worry me too much,’ Sister T, then 21, quoted her mother as saying. ‘If I die don’t ever call me your mother.’
I explained to the class that Sister T, then in her mid teens when her mother spoke, did not merit such talk. I urged her to free her mind and tried to convince the class that Sister T’s mother simply had difficulty responding to her daughter’s youthful exuberance.
I don’t know if I succeeded.
We are not talking about membership here, for we all know that there are members of organisations whose membership only brings ridicule and sniggering to the ideals of the group.
I can even declare that I am no longer a member of the Anona Abusua of Abandze and Accra, but the physical act which brought spiritual blessings and graces upon my soul cannot be erased.
Can The Most High reverse his creation?
Yes, God can do all things, but will that erase the fact about what He created and its existence or its effects?
The principle of energy conservation states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but can be transformed from one form to another.
So, I am who my initiation says I am and only I can channel its energies and graces for better or for worse; for charity or malice.
Why?
Because I came in all CONSCIOUSNESS and went through my initiation.
Yes, men acted, but the graces bestowed on me, came from above – from the inexhaustible store.
Man, even in his sinfulness or foolishness, is a perfect creation of God.
The divine mystical work is going on, and another’s role is just tangential to it; it is through divine grace alone that the dross is turned into gold. GO FIGURE!!!
‘Caesar, beware the Ides of March…… the Ides of March are here, but they are not yet gone.’
Happy Initiation day to me!
Feedback; [email protected]; LinkedIn, Isaac Ato Mensah; Instagram, @Atomenswriters; Twitter, @atomens; Facebook, Isaac Ato Mensah; Telegram, Isaac Ato Mensah; Quora, Isaac Ato Mensah; WhatsApp, (+233) 020 022 0353.
Writers and Shakespeares Ghana Limited exist to be a moral and intellectual guide to the best practice of PR and integrated communications around the world, beginning with Ghana.