So, I think about the brave, and the thoughtful, and the supernatural, I think about divine intuition, our divine assignment, our divine meetings when it comes to the sensibility of persuasion. I fix my eyes upon the Cross, upon the crowds, upon the crossroads wherever I find myself. I think of the waiting game. Waiting for my prayers to be answered, waiting to be loved, waiting, waiting, always waiting. I am like a fugitive down here. Prayer explodes in my head and my neck, and something exquisite snaps back I to place as girl, as child, as adolescent, as woman. When I think of the revolution from within, how it comes with a price, how it comes with a breakthrough from memory and desire, a kind of spiritual persuasiveness, milk-fed, book thief, and I think of all the tragedies that this world of ours has seen. War, depression, global recession, climate change, global warming When I was at my most vulnerable I turned to theology. I turned to fasting, prayer, and meditation. I turned to the filmmaker Mikale Barry, Shakespeare, and to John Updike, Hemingway and Ghandi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou, Trevor Noah, Macbeth.
I knew I was purposefully crafted in the image of Christ, but only came to that realisation late in life, and if I bloomed into piety, righteousness, and Christianity, if I bloomed at all into theology, a theology that conditioned me into thinking that the universe was/is somehow aligned with God and science, the psychological framework of philosophy and education about religion, for the omniscient being is both the alpha and omega, the unseen, quiet miracle-worker and guard of our mouth, the helmet of salvation, the breastplate armour is made of redemptive powers, and separation-anxiety, attachment to karma has marked humanity’s indifference, and great aloofness when it comes to evolutionary biology, detachment of history, and there have been times when I don’t feel good, and have turned to prayer in the centre of my winter, and it greatly helped the acute suffering of my heart. I think of love, not in the divine sense, but the love that carries with it shame, and guesswork, and all I want to say is that the wolf must not think of me. I am awake now only because of reconciliation, democratic values, the origin of the species, which is theology and not Darwinism.
It is God’s will be done. To my art, the contact I make with other artists, I only have this to say. To know when to say please and thank you. I’m the girl who knows not to make a scene in front of your beautiful wife, your children look like her, your children look like you. Nobody loves me. I try to ignore you, I try to ignore this. It is in theology that I find my identity now, that my psyche remains intact, that. I find confidence in winter, spring, summer, and autumn. I remember what I had as a child when I think of theology, I wait for the dust of the Colonial Masters to settle, eat the breadcrumbs off their table, congregate around their prophetic words, their prophetic visions, their divinity rules, the school of their thought, and law, and philosophy, and education rules. Tonight, it is theology that is holding me her arms like the scientist Niels Bohr, the writers John Eppel, Virginia Woolf, and my own father Dr Ambrose Cato George, the poets Brian Walter, William Blake, John Keats, the playwright Athol Fugard, the philosopher and educationalist Athol Williams, the journalist Lee Gary McCabe, and Ithink of our struggle heroes, Stephen Bantu Biko, Dulcie September, Rick Turner, and Chris Hani.
I think of political meetings held in secrecy on Table Mountain, and my mind keeps returning to the post-apartheid system of theology, the inaction of congregants from different beliefs, norms, values, faith-based systems incorporated into every sphere of modern-day life. I’ve been living life in a kind of theological bubble. To go to church, or not to go to church. To be hurt in church, or not to be hurt in church. To meet likeminded the individuals there. Or not to meet likeminded individuals there. I believe in God, but I don’t believe in people all that much. I think of my paternal grandparents. It didn’t ever matter to them if they were hurt by people in the church. And when I write, I commune with the angels, with an angelic realm, and the voice inside my head is not a pre-conditioned voice, it is Christ’s voice. And when I write I worship Elohim, and when I write I worship Yeshua. I think of Moses in the wilderness, I think of the burning bush, the multitudes, and how all of that is not part of an indoctrinated religion, but a part of me. I think of the oneness of Jesus Christ, I think of modern-day Christianity, and how it impacts both event and non-event in my theological discourse.
A voice inside my head says tells me what to do, what I’ve always been good at. I think of the Salvation Army’s hymns, and how I’ve devoted myself to something else now. How I’ve decided to devote myself to the church, to research, to writing, and to the writing-world of poetry. I regard God as nothing more than spiritual breakthrough. And I take cognizance of the fact that a prophet has an international vision, that prophecy is not worship, that we have to literally wakeup someone else to anointing and the supernatural. We must respect both the narrative and context of the Scriptures, because the word is truth, and light, and revelation. And I suppose we could look at theology as opinion-based rhetoric, or irrelevant for this day and age, but truths are truths, and semantics are semantics. Far from being commentary on social justice, an incomprehensible expression of dead scholars and prophets, far from departing from obscurity and complexity, theology is a part of us all. It is a part of humanity, a living thing of theatre, a book designed to be interpreted, read, and reread, assumed, branching out into theory and code and philosophy and religion and source and resource.
