The homeless god

‘I hereby rename this road JESUS ROAD in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit.’

‘AMEN!’

The crowd chorused amidst thundering applause.

People half-leapt into the air and sang jubilant hymns as the young priest from Umuchukwu made the declaration. He was 38 years old but ‘mature for his age’, according to the middle-aged women of the Catholic Women Organisation in their white and blue attires.

The congregation of Sacred Heart parish Oguta was assembled on the church lawn, spilling onto the main road. The brightly dressed mass formed the pulsating heart of this serene town on the lake this bright Sunday morning.

Ogbuide road ran past the church, the central school, and the post office and terminated at the shore of Oguta lake, resuming on the opposite shore. The green painted pontoon which ferried people and property to and fro from morning till night sat idle across the lake.

The crowd was singing and dancing now and near its periphery stood a lone woman. The other being was as invisible as a blade of grass in the vast lawn.

He spoke now.

'Ironic isn’t it, Ogbuide? How men work so hard to undo their very existence.’

'Mmm’, the benevolent goddess Ogbuide hummed in reply, a ripple cracking the surface of her deep thoughts.

'They revolt against their mother.’

A large woman in the crowd tapped her from behind a bit roughly and asked authoritatively, 'Bia, kee aha gi? Why are you not wearing your CWO uniform?’

She turned.

‘My name is Ogbunnenanwa’, she said, smiling a deathly smile at the rude woman.

The woman glimpsed her eyes and recoiled in horror.

'Yes, Ehi’, she turned back to her male companion as her questioner fled shrieking with her hands on her head. 'It is the way of the world, yet my suffering is but an ant’s sting to some.’

Ehi winced.

'From the day of his birth I knew he would make a formidable priest’, he said in a voice flecked with something that resembled pain, the pain of a jilted god. 'I mourn his loss, yet I am…proud of him.

The goddess started to turn on him then caught herself. A storm stirred momentarily in her eyes, then swiftly dissolved into its misty depths. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

'Are you, really?, she asked irritably.

'It feels like your body is split and turned inside out. You feel the wind on your bones and you see red. It feels like death.’

'Yet you watch over him day and night, Ehi. You guard your children yet they conspire to deny you even history as consolation. You love them when you could scatter them like the firewood that drew them out of their holes in the ground only seasons ago. How dare they expunge my name from my own land?’

'Ogbuide. He’s my son.’

The big warrior god glanced down at the ageless water goddess from weary eyes and she saw unfathomable pain.

The young child priest from Nkerehi grew into a man priest, like his father and grandfather before him. He was a priest from Umuchukwu now, his white cassock as native to him as his mother’s ogodo had been.

His was a fiery passion. He considered himself a missionary, determined to wield the cleansing gospel against every pagan refuge.

The small backward village of Nkerehi had embraced modernity. Red earth roads had given way to black tar, mud houses had been replaced with brick bungalows, and the old name devoted to the pagan god, Ehi, had given way to something new.

Umuchukwu — Children of God.