ANTHROPOSOPHY- BY CLEMENT ERNESTERICK

How do you interpret "love your neighbor as the self?" Does it mean we should love the neighbor first before loving our-selves or selves before the other, so then we can see another as the self?

After reading through Kevin Omwanza's post on which he tagged Nyanchwani, and reading through Mwende Kyalo's post about her misgivings about the Christian God, I went into ponderances oscillating on: the self science, human psychology, theology and philosophy. Recently, my heart told my mind: "God is involved in the affairs of man: He reads and examines the past, the today and modern and the future at once and proceeds into action" and, "the God of man is man, but man is not God, man is an evil to himself and ultimately, he is the salvation of his own soul however, in retrospect to the wholeness of life and its intricacies and complexities, there exists and truly lives, a force outside man", basing how I've been interpreting my experiences and judging them.

 

How can a woman, a man be sick yet when taken to hospital to be tended by specialists no physical illness can be detected! Much perplexing is the doctor's question at the patient after full examination: "could you have walked over a dark spell?" This alone reveals deep and hidden layers of meaning of life beyond the superficials we do base ourselves on, we mortal men. 

Kyalo posits, post analysising the political violences; the abductions, extrajudicial killings, maimings, rapings, and other Rutoisms replica of Moi era that has currently engulfed our nation that "I am more just than God, Kenyans have outgrown God or that man made God in his own image", and this throws me into a tank-think: can man be more just than God or it is man who doesn't have the capacity to grasp the idea of?"

Who is God and what is man and how can the two be reconciled? Sometimes, I do play with the idea that comprehending God is far from man's capability but looking into Catholicism, perusing through the pages of the Bible and looking into the culture of human life in its grander macrocosmic glance, the inner voice calls me into neutrality: "Mwaka, stop lying to the self " yet another, "God is fully comprehensible", envisioning the drama of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well and Paul's arguments, 'even if one can understand all mysteries but has no love, he's like a clanging cymbal'. So God can be understood but his full comprehensibility begs a perfect unity with him!

Omwanza draws on dualism and contradictions. God commands that we love him first but loving him is entwined to loving the neighbor but as self. He enquires, how can one love the other without the full knowledge of it? And how can I love a neighbor without loving the self? One can only give what he has and not what he has not! So the concept is kinda tri-tied: God, self and the other. To know God demands that first you fathom the mystery of being, secondly, this accentuates to grasping the other-being. Fully understood, leads to emotional literacy anchored on physical support leading to ultimate realization: God is a harmonious unity of the whole; mystery of life.

Having integrated this, Rev. 17v8 phrase rang: "the beast that was, and is not, and is about to rise from the bottomless pit and go into destruction." I've been thinking to slide the modes of interpreting it like preterism, historism etc aside and indulge on what I ponder about it. The *was* calls into being what was made into being/became or brought/caused into existence and/or the past Church/political history. And *is not* indulges into what is transient, impermanent, temporary; given limited life span. *About to rise from the bottomless pit* gives a connotation of re-emergence, resurrection or rebirth from Hades; deep darkness which ultimately goes into annihilationism. Looking into these aspects, my mind engaged with not Nero of old or his likes, neither the Roman empire but man in his eternal transient pursuits which has never known true satisfaction: the quest to rise above God, the anti-God tantrums and the similar likes of atheistic demands that commands immediate gratification, the sin and it's consequent causes of causations and the encapsulation: death whose stings and fangs will, in Christian doctrine, philosophy and theology, completely be destroyed.

But how can a child outgrow his parent(s)? In what ways can what's been given birth to become the parent of its predecessor? Kyalo's ideology to mine thinking outstrips logicity; slips into logical fallacies precisely, impossibility. It can be likened to books written by men who reasons: "if the world is destroyed by fire and you happen to be the one remaining, what will you do?", is a metaphysical possibility but physically impossible. In Christian religion, even the creation of the New Earth and the New Heavens will find others still living!

If man can be more just than God, then we wouldn't be having cases of man killing another for whatever reasons and against this Assumpta K. Matei asks through Mwangeka in her novel "Chozi la Heri", 'Je, binadamu ameandikiwa kumpoka maisha mwenziwe? (Is man destined to murder another, his own blood and flesh?)' And, what is the solution of the problem of evil; retaliation and its mechanisms, or conciliatory mechanisms? And if Kyalo thinks herself more just than God, then why has she not moved into action and brought societal evils into a sudden halt? 

© CLEMENT MWAKA ERNESTERICK

- Kenya