I Am God Made Manifest: . . . and so Are You

By Thandiwe Folotiya

This book takes you through my personal journey with spirituality,
based on Helen Bartons teachings of her Seven Spiritual Truths. These ancient Truths have helped me understand my purpose

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Africa
• Release date: Mar 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781482860856

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Thandiwe Folotiya.

ISBN:      Hardcover         978-1-4828-6086-3

                 Softcover           978-1-4828-6084-9

                  eBook                978-1-4828-6085-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/africa

Contents

Acknowledgement

Chapter 1 The Yearning To Know

Chapter 2 Be Who You Be

Chapter 3 Accept All That Is

Chapter 4 Live In Harmlessness

Chapter 5 See The Illusion

Chapter 6 Be Discerning

Chapter 7 Live In Simplicity

Chapter 8 Live As Community

Epilogue

Bibliography

This book is dedicated to my parents, Lydia and Mwansa. I will love you always. Until we meet again.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am deeply thankful to Helen Barton for generously and graciously allowing me to use, reflect on and publish some of her teachings, meditations and exercises on her Seven Spiritual Truths.

CHAPTER 1

The Yearning to Know

It’s the Circle of Life

And it moves us all

Through despair and hope

Through faith and love

Till we find our place

On the path unwinding

In the Circle

In the Circle of Life

The Circle of Life, Tim Rice

Who the hell am I, and what am I doing on this earth?

This is a question I have been asking myself for a very long time. From what I have seen and heard, it is a question many people have been asking for millennia. I instinctively knew that the answer to my question lay in figuring out who God was and His relationship to me because every other lead, like that new job or that nice dream house I had built, had yielded no results. When my restlessness became outright misery, I knew I had to find the answer quickly. I am sure it is no coincidence that my need to get answers was most pressing when my solar plexus chakra was at its fore.

This book is a chronicle of the journey I have taken in my quest to find the answer to this simple yet very complex question. The idea of writing a book came to me years ago, although I didn’t know what I would write about. A few years ago, a flash of intuition told me that I would write a book about looking for and finding God. This scared me to death! What the hell did I know about God? For months I have fought my yearning to write this book, coming up with all sorts of crazy reasons why I should not. I compared myself to great writers like William Shakespeare and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and, of course, felt daunted by their talents. Why would I write a book about my journey to find God when I’ll probably get ridiculed for doing so, be called a blasphemer, or much worse? Why would I tell the world such intimate details about my not-so-angelic thoughts? Why would the world care what I think about God? Despite this constant self-doubt, I sit here typing away at my laptop as a result of an inexplicable compelling urge to do so, which is thankfully stronger than my insecurities.

I cannot remember when I first became aware of God. I most probably first heard about Him in our home, in the usual way that adults refer to God in many homes in Zambia in the presence of children. I would be lying were I to write that my parents were devout Christians who brought up my siblings and me as devout, God-fearing children. My father was an atheist, and I didn’t personally hear him mention God or anything remotely religious in my presence. I find great comfort with the fact that he sought God when he knew he was dying. My mother was a Catholic who, in her quiet way, encouraged me to seek God. I remember her admonishing me for not attending Mass on Sundays when I was an obnoxious teenager who thought I knew it all (no offence to teenagers out there, but I was obnoxious) and wanted nothing to do with God, whoever He was. We sometimes prayed before our meals. My mother made sure my siblings and I were baptized, and all but one of us received Holy Communion in the Catholic faith. She took us to church as children, but there were no Bible study classes in our home, no prayer meetings. There were the few church functions she hosted at home that I was not remotely interested in. They were just one big bore, a chore that had to be endured.

I was enrolled at a Catholic primary school and attended Mass every Friday morning. We were taught religious education by the nuns, and I’m sure they and my catechism teachers at church instilled all the usual Catholic-faith dogma in my mind. I was taught that there was a God who loved me, who miraculously made the Virgin Mary pregnant; Mary gave birth to her miracle baby Jesus Christ on Christmas Day; Jesus Christ was my saviour because His death on the cross on that Good Friday two thousand years ago washed away all my sins (including Adam and Eve’s original sin) and they were forgiven; if I did what God told me to do, confessed my sins and indiscretions, and loved all those around me, I would earn a place in heaven when I died, where I would live beside God for eternity; if I was a bad girl and committed mortal sin, I would go to hell. I was taught the difference between heaven, hell, and purgatory (where we go for cleansing when we commit venial sins), and limbo (neither heaven nor hell), and the difference between mortal sin and venial sin. This was the summary of my religious education at the age of 12. Not once did I ever confess the whole extent and range of sins I had committed between each compulsory trip to the confession box. It was always the same—‘I ate the biscuits I wasn’t supposed to’ or ‘I didn’t do what my mother told me’—and never about how much I loathed the class bully at school and fantasized about boiling her in oil or my grumpiness at having to confess things I wasn’t really sorry about. I was afraid of the priests and thought they (and not God) would never forgive me if I confessed the wide plethora of my sins. I attended church throughout my secondary school education because I had to and not because I had any relationship with God. If I did have one, it was based on fear and not love. I stopped going to church as soon as I went to university and was not obliged to attend Mass.

I make no judgement whatsoever on my parents’ efforts (or lack of effort on the part of my father) to introduce me to God. I am merely stating my few scanty recollections of events that happened three decades ago. My parents died young, and we never got to discuss or explore God or any religion. This was probably because I had been sent to a boarding school at the age of 13 and the topic rarely came up during the holidays (apart from my mother dragging me to church when she could).

All along, however, although I never actively sought Him, I was always curious about this thing called God. The teachings I had received about God were always there at the back of my mind. My young mind tried but failed to reconcile the stern punisher that my teachers portrayed Him to be with the loving Father I was also taught He was.

My first adult encounter with His presence was when my mother suddenly died from a stroke. I was furious with Him for taking my mother away from us, especially as my father had died three years earlier. Surely, God could see that we needed her more than He did. Where was God’s love and care when six children had been left orphaned? A few weeks after Mum’s death, I started having nightmares. I vividly remember one nightmare of doctors performing an autopsy on her corpse in the middle of a busy road. I would wake up sobbing and screaming. The horror and terror of these ordeals would quickly fade away as I felt the comforting presence of someone in the room with me. A loving voice would tell me to get down on my knees and pray in order for me to be able to get back to sleep. Once on my knees, I would ask a God I barely knew to take the nightmares away, to ensure that my mother was safe in heaven, and to help me get back to sleep. I was astonished when I did fall asleep immediately after my prayers because my nightmares were so vivid and seemed so real that I thought I would never be able to forget them. I would wake up the next morning knowing that God and my guardian angels had been with me throughout the night. I had no doubt about this whatsoever. I felt His love but did not explore His presence in my life any further as I was busy with my last year of university.

My next vivid encounter with a higher force at play was a few years later. I had moved away from home into a flat and was trying to improve my culinary skills while chatting to a friend. The dish I was preparing turned out to be inedible, as happens more often than not, and I intended to throw it away. For some reason, I walked to the front door with the pot in my hand on my way to the outside bin, leaving a perfectly empty bin in the kitchen. As soon as I opened the door, I encountered a woman with two small children, hand raised, just about to knock on my door. She smiled at me and asked for something to eat. My blood turned cold. The first thing I thought of was, why had I not simply thrown the food away in the bin in my kitchen? I knew the answer to this question immediately. God had wanted me to know of His presence in my life through that incident. He was the one who stopped me from throwing the food away in the kitchen bin and led me to the front door. I was so overwhelmed by my insight that I merely handed the pot over to the woman, something I would not normally have done. I also uncharacteristically went back inside the flat to get something else to be eaten with the dish, with instructions for her to clean the pot, plates, and utensils at the outside tap once she and her children had finished eating. I closed the front door and walked back to the kitchen in a daze, narrated the incident to my friend, who agreed that there had to have been some Divine intervention. The woman returned with the cleaned crockery, giving me a very serene and secretive smile, as if she knew something that I didn’t. I have never been able to forget this incident, and I always recall it when my doubts in God’s abilities rear their ugly heads.

After this incident, I started attending church regularly for a while and reacquainted myself with Christianity. I liked the fact that the Catholic Church I attended left me alone to my thoughts and did not demand anything of me during Mass. I had once attended a Pentecostal church service and was so terrified that I would be called upon to give a testimony of some sort at some point during the service that I didn’t hear a single word said. I loved the hymns, both old and new, and felt God’s love and peace. My guilt, however, always kept me back from taking a more active part in church activities. I am ashamed to admit a perceived superiority over all those good Souls I regarded as sinners pretending to be devout Christian do-gooders. At least I knew I was a sinner and merely attended Mass to seek solace and forgiveness for those impure thoughts I never managed to keep at bay, always reminding me of my status of perpetual sinner, no matter how good I tried to be. In reality, I envied them for seeming to be at peace with themselves. To this day, I love the familiarity, words, and structure of Mass, but try as I might, my mind always wandered a few minutes into the priest’s homily. I would surreptitiously look around the congregation and imagine what they had all been up to the night before, some of them looking worse for wear and barely able to keep their eyes open. What a great Christian I was. Not! Someone once said to me that the Devil strikes by doing anything to distract believers during Mass. They may have had a point, had I believed in the concept of the devil.

I was married in the Catholic Church and baptized both my daughters a month after their birth. Again, I am ashamed to admit that despite the compulsory class I attended the day before the baptisms with my husband and godparents to my girls, I struggle to remember what I was taught in these classes and, therefore, still hold the incorrect reasoning that babies need to be baptized soon after birth to keep them out of limbo (or hell) should they die young. To this day, some aspects of Christianity still baffle me, despite having read the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and several other books of the New Testament: Why, if God wanted me to be of pure thought, did he make me so impure of thought? Why could I never be as perfect as Jesus? How could God have made someone as evil as Lucifer? How could He, in all His power and wisdom, not have foreseen that Lucifer could turn on Him and lead His people astray? Why were Christians so obsessed