In the week before Easter this year, Holy Week in the Catholic Church calendar, I went to mass on Holy Wednesday, on Maundy Thursday, twice on Good Friday (Stations of the cross and the Good Friday re-enactment of the crucifixion of Jesus service), on Easter Eve Saturday and on Easter Sunday.
It’s the first time I’ve done that since I was a teenager, since my mother made me.
Going to mass was obligatory in the Naidoo household – no argument. Church on Sundays, and on high and holy days were mandatory, a date cast in stone by my mum and dad who believed in heaven and hell and fire and brimstone and a merciful and a wrathful God.
I went back to church 18 months ago to the surprise of many of my friends. Not surprising since, for the last 30-odd years, I have announced my religious status (with a shrug) as not-so-holy Roman.
I told anyone who asked that I was more spiritual than religious, a fashionable thing to say.
I’d say I believed in universal goodness, in the power of self in white light and … and…
So why did I return to church? Because I changed my mind and went back to embracing my childhood lessons, to acknowledging that all of that stuff I said I believed in actually came from a divine source (I did say I believed, so please note that I’m not denying other people’s belief). I decided to go directly to the source.
I love early Sunday mornings. Going to church is a lesson in respect. People, no matter who they are, are reverential when they enter a place of worship – be it a temple or a mosque or a church. Voices are lowered, heads bowed, fingers steepled as hands make the religiously acceptable prayer mode.
I walk into this quiet, meditative space and light candles for my dead mother and father and brother Shaun. Sunlight streams through the stained glass windows turning the interior of the church into a magical place lit with myriad colours.
It’s a contemplative place; I sit on a wooden bench in pew 11 and think about my week, my life, of how I can be a better person – kinder, more compassionate, more empathetic, more humble, less arrogant; how grateful I am to have a home and friends… you get the gist of it.
Then a man in an exquisite embroidered robe (the priest) gives his homily on how to live a good life. What’s wrong with that? It has become the most precious part of my week.
And it all began with my mother. And my lovely dad.
You learn your values from your family (usually). You learn how to behave, how to tell right from wrong. You are taught what is acceptable, what not. You learn about things like compassion and empathy and humility and generosity and kindness from the role models and mentors you encounter in your early life.
My life lessons were learnt from my mother, who died on November 5, 2000, and who I still miss every day.
It seemed fitting to honour her memory on this Mother’s Day weekend by remembering how she imparted the moral code that I live by.
Honesty and integrity are probably my biggest gifts, because without those qualities we are savages and graft and carelessness with the lives of those most in need become the sad norm.
Honesty and integrity require the keeping of promises made.
Promises not kept, have disastrous consequences, as seen this week in Eldorado Park and Freedom Park, both satellite suburbs in south Johannesburg, where protest turned violent with residents and police fighting it out along the highway that winds through both areas.
People here have long been promised development, housing, a chance to turn their ghetto into a working community.
They’ve waited and waited. The lack of promised service delivery erupted into burning and looting and pelting with rocks more reminiscent of the darkest days of apartheid than 2017 metropolitan Johannesburg – Africa’s financial and cultural hub.
And then there is Coligny. This maize-faming town, situated next to the railway line between Lichtenburg and Joburg in North West province, exploded with all the force of a volcano this week.
Some say that the protests began over the lack of delivery of desperately needed services in the little town. That might be true.
But mostly the protest was about two young men getting bail after it was alleged they threw 16-year-old Matlhomola Mosweu out of a moving bakkie. Apparently he was caught stealing sunflowers; an ignominious end for a seemingly minor transgression.
Enraged by the granting of bail to the young men accused of the boys murder, protests in the suddenly racially divided town began.
But those who suffered most were the foreign national shop owners, caught up as they were in the outpouring of hate from Coligny residents.
The most poignant interview I saw was with a Bangladeshi man who said he’d lived in the community for a decade and built up what he thought was a trust relationship with his neighbours.
In a broken voice he expressed his bewilderment; he’d thought he’d been accepted. He thought he’d been kind, extending credit and helping people in need.
But his neighbours looted his shop, taking his clothes, his stock… food out of his fridge. He feared for his and his family’s lives. And, when the mob were done looting, they set fire to his modest dwelling. He’d lost everything.
You see, it’s this kind of behaviour that I find abhorrent.
This is where the values instilled by Mother’s and fathers and priests and the church or mosque or temple kick in.
Who teaches children to rob and loot your neighbours; to burn their homes?
Who lets a child know that it’s OK to steal.
Who allows a young person to be disrespectful of others?
Who instils racial prejudice?
Who makes hate acceptable.
People snigger when I say I’ve gone back to church where every Sunday a man in a frock talks about how to live a good, honest, integrous life; where a blueprint for how to behave – even in difficult situations – is covered in the teachings.
I’m just grateful to my parents for introducing me to religion. In church I can, on a regular basis, review my value system and recalibrate my way of thinking to ensure I’m on the right track.
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