Spirituality Versus Religion
I became a very spiritual person at a very early age. I remember getting the beating of my life in my second week of school. It was break time and we were playing in one of the forbidden gardens or sanctuaries the nuns used to frequent for prayer. It was the most exquisite little garden I have ever seen. It had a fish pond teeming with brightly coloured goldfish, there were little waterfalls and water fountains, and the sound of running water and the singing of the birds was like a symphony at an orchestral performance. There were flowers everywhere, mostly sweet-smelling roses, and the aroma they exuded hung in the air. I remember standing in front of an exquisite statue of the Virgin Mary and, looking up at her as she held her little baby at her side, I thought of my mum and my new baby brother Joe.
The moment was rudely interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps. Then I remember looking up and seeing a great big, fat, red-necked old nun charging at me. Unknown to me, all my friends had seen her coming, and had scattered in all directions. Before I could even explain that I had only come into the garden to play, before I could even activate my short little legs to run, she had picked me up by the arm and, small as I was, she hit me. It was the hardest and most brutal beating of my life. She hit me so hard, to this day not even my own parents have done that to me. Then everything went black. I must have passed out for I remember waking up in the sickbay in the hands of a gentle-looking woman, another nun with gentler, brown eyes. This was not the one who had assaulted me; her eyes were a cold, icy, cobalt blue.
I could hear shouting coming from the office behind me.
“Why did you do that?” asked an angry voice.
“She was being naughty so she had to be disciplined,” came the answer.
“And what about the other three, did you hit them too?”
“No, they ran away.”
“Look, this is the first time we have had black children in the school,” I heard the first voice say. “What do you think this will look like? It will look like brutality and racism and that’s something we are trying to discourage here at the convent.”
“There was nothing, absolutely nothing racist about my actions,” the old nun replied with dignity.
There was a pregnant silence; and I could hear heavy breathing.
“Sister Magdalena,” came the stern voice. “Times are changing, and what you have done today is unacceptable. Please report to Mother Superior immediately.”
“I really think you are being unfair,” came the angry defence. “These Africans need to be taught discipline at an early age.”
“I said you will treat all the children the same! Now, report to Mother Superior.”
A hand touched my brow, making me shrink as far away into the corner of my bed as I could. It was another nun bending over me, maybe she wanted to hit me too?
“How are you feeling?” the nun with the gentle brown eyes asked me. I noticed that she was not dressed in a nurse’s uniform. She still wore a veil, but she looked different. All the nuns at the convent dressed in white and they all wore black veils bordered with white headbands. That was why the children called them ‘the penguins’.
The nurse tried to touch the darkening bruises on my legs but I flinched away, feeling I just couldn’t trust these strange white women.
“Don’t be scared”, she said gently. “I won’t hurt you.” There was something about her voice that was honest and very reassuring, but I think it was more her eyes. They were dark brown and their colour was so familiar, not like the blue eyes of the nun who had assaulted me. It took me a very long time to trust people with blue eyes again.
The nurse let me spend the rest of the afternoon in the sickbay, but got me out an hour before the end of the school day. After talking to my mother that evening about the incident I found out they never even told my parents what had happened, the nuns just kept it to themselves. I remember being told to go to confession the next day to confess my sins to the parish priest.
In my mind I wasn’t the one needing confession, it was Sister Magdalene and her horrid ways, but when I went into the confessional box I had to say, “Bless me father for I have sinned. This is my tenth confession this month. I sinned by playing in the garden during break time.”
Rationally it still didn’t make any sense and the priest didn’t even seem to acknowledge what I was saying. I had just been playing, after all, so why should God want to punish me for that?
“Do ten Hail Marys and three Our Fathers and your sins will be forgiven,” the priest told me. Had he heard what I had said? I had been playing. How was I to know that it was a forbidden garden? What kind of God punished children for playing? I later found out that there was a sign on the gate of the garden warning children not to enter the sanctuary, but this was my second week at school and I couldn’t even read.
So I went into one of the pews in the chapel and knelt down and prayed.
“Hail Mary, full of grace
The Lord is with thee
Blessed art thou amongst women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus
Holy Mary Mother of God
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,
Amen.”
Now after reciting this prayer ten times I was as confused as a 6 year-old child can get. I had thought that Mary was the mother of Jesus and that God was her husband. Now I was praying that she was the mother of God, so where did Jesus fit into the scheme of things? I was totally confused. When I got home my mother tried to explain the meaning of the prayer, but with each explanation I would ask yet another question. Finally exasperated, she gave up and told me to listen to the nuns and do as I was told and not to ask too many questions. Unfortunately for my mother, that wasn’t the end of it. If anything, the lack of a satisfactory answer, made things worse, so at the age of 6, I started questioning my faith.
We used to have a picture of Jesus on the wall in our lounge, painted by my cousin Kenneth who was a brilliant artist and had managed to capture the life like image of this man Jesus. Kenneth was going through some religious phase in his life and was inspired to paint hundreds of pictures of Jesus. They were all over the place, and people were buying them by the dozen. I didn’t like the picture in our lounge. It was very lifelike and had eyes that would follow you around the room, but what made it worse was the color of those eyes. They were exactly the same as those of the nun who had given me the beating.
I told my mother this. I thought I was just being honest, but to my dismay she didn’t understand me. I must have acted as if I was possessed with this notion that Jesus was an evil man, and so all his followers had to be evil; it was simple logic. My mother realised that she needed an intervention and she decided to invite her cousin, Sister Kevin, to help.
Excerpt from my book “Born on the Continent – Ubuntu”, buy a copy on my website http://www.bornonthecontinent.com, 100% profit goes to the Africa Alive Foundation for HIV and AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe
