Nigeria, yes, I remember this country…
A country of great wealth yet crouched over by poverty
A country that exude peace outwardly, but beneath it lies tension of pain..
A land that has been endowed with abundant blessing…
Yet this same land consumes it’s inhabitants..
What a country of contradictions…

A place where greed seems to be the norm…
Greed has a way of turning blessings into curses
How could a country with so much potential for good be so blinded by greed?
The whole governmental infrastructure is infected by this hideous disease…
A disease called “GREED”
In their greed they forget how to provide common basic services…
Their police force have been reduce to legalized armed robbers.

Landing at Lagos Airport…
Every official seems to want bribe…
But why should I bribe you oh lazy and good for naught officials?
I observed in pity and dismayed at how far this country has regressed.
This once beautiful country…
Once the pride of Africa…
Has now regressed to such a repugnante state of being…

A country where religious passion burns hot…
But their passion is denude of love for their fellow human being…
Greed seems to’ve incapacitate their ability to love.
They can’t think beyond themselves…
for even when they tried, greed seems to deny them of that ability.
They’ve become slaves to their greed…

What a pitiful country you’ve become oh Nigeria…
A land that consumes it’s inhabitants
A country whose political leaders are thugs in disguise…
For they can’t see beyond themselves…
Their greed cursed them with a blurred vision…
Your inhumanity to one another will be your undoing…

Till you rid yourself of this disease called greed…
You will remain a country of low reputation…
A breeding ground for lowlives and uncivilized people.
Alas, there is still hope, and that hope is in…
Putting away your greed, and letting love thrive…
Then compassion will rise…
And the healing will begin…

In vain I searched for a quite place, space or crevice
From which to observe this curious occurrence
The stupefaction and idiotification of the masses by political frenzy
The question that comes to mind is, What happened to civilization?
Or was there ever one?

The line have been drawn, sides have been taken
I can see and feel the tension mounts as both sides tear at each other like savage beast
Their sense of reasoning seems to have vacated them..
The media that is supposed to be the watchdog for the truth are the first to sacrifice truth at the alter of delusion.
The intellectual elites, though opened their mouth, what come out are devoid of objective rational…
They are like brutish plagued with imbecility.

Open your eyes and reasoning to see the travesty that’s staring you in the face
The line drawn is false. For before you is a political trickery…
This is nothing but one coin…..
So what you think are diametrically opposite is not so
but two sides of the same coin…

I suspect who ever wins come election day, would make no difference…
For there is one that always wins, the one that own the coin.
Ho the noise again…
I wish these fools will be quite, if only for a while, and let common sense prevail..
Ha, I almost forgot they’ve killed common sense…

We are so enamored with learning how to
That we run the risk of not making time for the actual doing
In being so preoccupied with the study of life…
We never make the time to live life.

Always learning…
But never getting any wiser
Becoming more inform in theories…
Practically becoming more bankrupt existentially
We are studying ourselves in to imbecility

But oh, how deep are the thoughts of the heart
The mind, struggle it may to understand but to no avail.

There is a thought, a reasoning process of the heart
That the mind can never understand…
Just like the physical can never fully understand the spirit.
This is the mystery am facing…

Perplex by this constant presence, I dare asked..
Who are you or what are you?
Why are you always in the company of humans?
It looked at me steadfastly in response to my questions.

Then calmly said…
I rule over human kind and my name is Hypocrisy
I dwell in every human and make them do my biding…
I endued them with the ability to change faces at will…
They love to hate me, hence the denial of my presence

In rage I grabbed its by the  throat and slammed it against the wall,
In response it let out a grotesque spin shilling laughter….
Pinning it against the wall, I looked into its eyes
Beholding all forms, size, color and types of humans
Among them I saw one that looks very familiar…

No not familiar, it was I…
I was staring at me
And of all the hypocrites I saw, I was the most…
The most… the most hideous
O my God, what a state of denial
We are all hypocrites, but of them all…
My hypocrisy knows no bound.

Then it hits me like a brick wall in the face
It’s almost Christmas, hence the traffic jam
That seems to plague me every where I turn as I drove.

Where are all this people going?
They are going about doing their Christmas shopping of course
Shopping… hmm Shopping for what?
Shopping for Christmas gifts for their loved ones…

For their loved ones, really?
Hmm…that is strange, cause the closer I observed them
The more stressed laden emotion I sensed from them…
If they are really shopping for gifts for their loved ones….
Why are they not doing the shopping with much love and joy.

I suspect there is something amiss here…
Ha, now I think I’m beginning to get it!
The joy of Christmas is gradually being suffocated
Under the weight of commercialism….

This commercialism induces a warped view of Christmas
Once Christmas lost its essence
Then the joy is gone
It’s almost Christmas
But, were is the joy?

Julian Marias, the Spanish scholar said: “The United State is one of the creations of history, like Rome or the Spanish Empire, realities which we enthusiastically study and understand today… It is being created before our very eyes, at an accelerated rate that allows us to observe it within our lifetime, or even in less than a lifetime… Is this not an intellectually exciting spectacle? Has there been a greater social and historical experiment available for man’s contemplation in many centuries?”

Marias is right. Whatever else may be said of it, it truly is one of the most notable creations of history, born out of the amalgam of an enriching diversity. That is why millions come here to make it their home, notwithstanding its flaws and weaknesses.

We derived our philosophical categories from the Greeks; the Romans gave us many of our legal categories; the Hebrews provided a base for our moral categories; and the English gave us our language and the principle of a representative government.

Let us take a cursory look at one of the cultures that molded our early soul:Greece. In Grecian culture we may well see our own reflection, for while recognizing the grandeur of its legitimate glory, we must resist the temptation of being enamored by the image. It was a glory that was ultimately destroyed by a colossal moral blind spot.

If the 18th century can be pictured as the intellectual looking in the mirror and becoming entranced by his own reflection — like Narcissus of myth — the 19th century at its conclusion can be portrayed as one looking toward the horizon and being wooed by the mirage of pragmatism. The philosophy of doing whatever works deceived many into a world view that could not sustain itself experientially.

While technology was blazing the trail for humanity, Charles Darwin was unveiling humanity’s primordial past. Scientific inquiry was elbowing its way into becoming the sole interpreter of the past and the sufficient hope for the future. Confidence in humanity increases as confidence in God’s creative power decreases. Marxism, avowedly atheistic and politically repressive, was spawned at this time, dehumanizing millions in its wake. Paradoxically, while espousing atheism, Karl Marx had a thorough understanding of the human capacity for destructive self-centeredness, thus ensuring that the worker would not be whisked off in a whirlwind of technological gains. He called for the employer and employee to coexist equally in a classless society. How pathetic was his utopian zeal, for it unwittingly served as the philosophical womb that birthed some of history’s most dastardly criminals of the likes of Joseph Stalin…

Artistic liberty coupled with technological capacity produced a modern-day Greece fashioned with American ingenuity. The old America had the mind to sift through these strengths and harness them, but the new America now finds itself without a point of reference. Purpose and performance have been severed so that performance is now judged in the free-fall zone of an artistic vacuum, totally unsecured by the safety net of human essence.

As America grew and waxed stronger, the belief that was once rejected — that man is the measure of all things — is now espoused. The once-held conviction of the fallen nature of man is rejected, and in every sense of the term, a major conflict for cultural control has begun to emerge.

The increase in scientific knowledge and the existentialist and relativistic philosophy that accompanied it; the shifting focus of intellectual life to a secular expertise; the rise of consumer culture; the struggle of a harried church to cope… all these (and other) factors prepared the way for the engineering of the masses’ mind set. The perilous blunder made was the assumption that the intellectuals always arrive at cultural deductions by virtue of open minds and scholarly objectivity. But not surprisingly, these groups always bring an agenda of their own, and their motivation is often anything but pristine. As demagogic as these intellectuals might be, the worst and most despicable offenders are the religious leaders, especially the pastors, because they are expert at baiting the hook to take advantage of their unsuspecting audience.

If humanity is the measure of all things, and chance is our God, then robbery, murder, rape, sodomy, and child molestation are nothing more or less than humans worshiping their maker. For when there is no reference point by which to distinguish right from wrong, it becomes easy to wipe out a set or group of individuals without feelings of guilt or remorse

It was Viktor Frankl who said…
“If we present man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present him as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drive and reactions, as a mere product of heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case prone.”

If any progress is to be made, it is imperative that we understand where meaningful dialogue can begin. Too much is at stake and too many lives will be hurt or lost if we are unable to agree even on a starting point.

Every human, regardless of race, gender and physical capability, is unique, special and of higher value than any material possessions.

If we are to make a positive impact on this cold and ruthless world in which we live, we must learn to love in the presence of senseless cruelties. No human has the capacity to sustain such love, for this kind of love transcends our current state of being. This love comes from, or is, the first cause, the creator of all things visible and invisible within our time-space dimension and beyond our time-space dimension. This is God, and God is Love. Trusting and resting in Him as we fight injustice of any kind, makes us strong, calm, resolute and, above all, loving … even in the very face of injustice and cruelty. These may seem weak or trite to some, but the results that they inspire reveal a power that is beyond our imagination or comprehension.

Love is the only flower that survives in the arid wilderness of life…

I’m also infected with this human condition. if you examine my thoughts closely, you will find them mostly occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we did think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future…

The present is never our end…
The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end.
So we never really live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be.

Oddly, all we have is this present, but if we are plagued with the inability to recognize or appreciate it, do we really have it?

This generation of which I can’t deny being a part of.
Is mood driven, today we praise one thing…
Tomorrow we denounce the very same thing, all based on nothing but mood.
A generation driven by mood can be as unpredictable and dangerous as a pet lion.

We are living in a time when sensitivities are at the surface…
mood, mood… mood……..
It can be a dangerous state of mind.
You see, moods are far too often given the authority
To crush reason under the weight of feeling.
And alarmingly, it is precisely a “mood”
That represents this generation thought best.

We are becoming as narrowly ‘practical’ as the irrational
animals. We are simply not interested in the question of truth or falsehood.
We only want to know what’s the current societal mood.
This generation justifies the saying
Truth is stranger than fiction…
Reality is more ironic than fiction…..

I can sense the mood changing again…

…Who is this man that came back from the dead?
Why does he have such a great influence over the human race;
even after he has left the scene for more than two thousand years?

His name is Jesus Christ.
That name stirs up extreme emotions.
Many devote their lives to the study of his life and claims,
some out of love, others out of hatred for him.
The theologians, the philosophers, the scientists…
all have something to say about him.
He is the most studied presence in the history of mankind.

I’m not talking in a religious sense; for religion I don’t have much regard.
I’m talking about the person “Jesus Christ,â€?
who seems to be more than the ordinary.
Could he be the missing factor that brings meaning and coherence to life,
seeing that he has existed in both the world of the living and the dead?

Hmmm…
I think it would do me well to take personal stock of his life and history.
What to expect?
I don’t know…
But you could come along with me, if you dare.
You see, there are certain hopes in each of our lives that shape our world view, orient our direction, and provide a sense of coherence to confront life’s most plaguing questions. Whenever we come to a place where our hope seems to let us down,
it is either because that hope was not intended to hold such authority, or because the hope, though worthy, was not in sync with our expectations.

In any case reality must be our goal and truth our path, for the lure of expectation and predisposition is profound…