Sermons of Soul

By Iman Rappetti

Sermons of Soul brings you the best-loved opening segments from Iman Rappetti’s award-winning radio show, POWER Talk. With each daily sermon, Iman sought to reach out to her listeners and give them something special before the day’s tough subjects unfolded on the programme. She wanted to create a moment for them to feel appreciated, thought of, challenged or cared for.

Some days the sermon was a motivational letter, encouraging listeners to stay strong and confident, to have hope for themselves and the country. On other days it was different – a call to action, a sociopolitical critique, a powerfully moving assessment of how we were doing as a society.

These few minutes became one of the most-listened-to segments in radio, so popular that people frequently called in to comment on the impact of the messages or stopped Iman in the street to talk about them. More than once, the sermons have been called life changing.

Reading Iman’s labour of love will remind you of important issues at the same time as it will encourage and inspire you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: Aug 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781770106871

Book preview

Introduction

To you, my beloved …

‘Good morning to you my beloved POWER family!’

This was my daily greeting to listeners of my talk show on POWER 98.7 every weekday morning. It was a ritual that I grew to love, and I do believe that my listeners loved it back. This salutation was followed by a message or a ‘sermon’ of sorts and the feedback we would receive from people calling in on the open line would crackle with the energy of those who felt touched and sometimes personally spoken to.

Often, these ‘sermons’ would come to me as I drove to work. They would be inspired or triggered by stories whispered from the passing faces I saw or the events I’d witness, scored against the crazily, cacophonous symphonies cascading down the gritty and polished streets of Johannesburg.

Most days I’d write these ‘sermons’ within twenty minutes, eyeing the clock, feeling the words tumbling out of my consciousness in a way that sometimes felt overwhelming. But on other days there were themes that would linger in my mind, making my heart so sad, until one morning when the words would unlock their own shackles and walk, heavy-legged, onto a page.

There was a freedom for me and for my audience in the way that I could share, they could receive, and we could be bound together by the sacrament of connection. What was remarkable for me was the incredible adventure I had walking delicately, sometimes harshly but always lovingly, across widely divergent themes to create a composite of sorts about the things that captivate our attention.

I have felt for a long time, that we as people, as a country, have found ourselves in the darkness of so many challenges that we need to go back to the basic ability of being able to send a signal, to listen for the answer, to explore and to find our way back home. Just as bats use echolocation to navigate and to find their way home, so do we, as South Africans, need to speak and listen to one another. To listen to the sounds we emit to one another. Sounds that direct us, that steer us, that help us find our way in the dark and sounds that help us survive.

Each morning I’d feel as if my body had been covered in fine antennae, which quietly picked up signals, absorbing sounds and smells, conjuring up imagery and weaving it all together into messages I wanted to share with my listeners.

Every day I would write my sermon, transmit it and then listen for the deluge of responses I’d get back appreciating either a call to action or the call to self-appreciation. I’d get stopped on the street, or sent messages from people saying how what they had heard would change their lives.

It filled me with a sense of deep validation but also of humility and compassion for the power of humanity and the need we have in our society to find a balm for our suffering, to find courage and optimism for what is possible. It amplified why we need to believe more fundamentally that we have been downloaded with everything we need to be happy and successful in our lives. We do not need a saviour, we need to amplify our agency so we can save ourselves.

So what you will read here is a constellation of my feral thoughts and I hope they provoke you to think, to exercise more reason and restraint, to understand the fissures we witness in our society and to have more love for the being you cannot journey without – YOURSELF.

KEEP YOUR SPIRIT LIGHT, IT’S HEAVY OUT THERE

Purple train

Like confetti on a wedding day,

Jacaranda trees set free their pretty baby buds, anointing the grey veil of the street with a carpet of indigo

Their generosity and surrender pulled a thought of you from deep within

It was only the beginning.

A storm was brewing, rousing trouble, making the sky frown

Wind bullied dark clouds across its face blocking the countenance of the sun

The sky began to weep,

Gently and softly at first, and then uncontrollably

It connected me to every atom of hurt and pain you ever

had to endure

As the trees launched frantically into a dervish dance

I whispered a prayer that I hoped would tornado its way to you

And keep you safe from destruction.

More than beauty, spirit too

The first time I really saw, and was awestruck, by the giant baobab tree was on a journey to Polokwane years ago. These breathtaking pieces of natural timber art dotted the sides of the road, popped up in open fields and seemed to me to be a sacred, if not showy tree, with its wild hairdo and curvy trunk. I had been lying on the back seat of our TV crew vehicle trying to get some sleep but as their wiry heads peeped over the window I sat up and took notice. There is something so magical about baobabs. They live for thousands of years as witness, watching over the lives of vast animal and human life. One wonders what they have seen and as they reach to the sky what they are pointing to.

One story about how baobabs came to be goes that along the Zambezi River many tribes believed that the baobab once grew upright but it considered itself so much better than the lesser trees around it that eventually the gods decided to teach the baobab a lesson. They uprooted it and planted it upside down in order to stop it from boasting and to teach it humility.

Another story talks about a particularly large specimen of baobab in Zambia’s Kafue National Park which the locals know as Kondanamwali, ‘the tree that eats maidens’. According to legend, the tree fell in love with four local girls, who shunned it and sought human husbands instead. In revenge, the tree pulled the maidens into its interior and kept them there forever.

Online resources tell us that elsewhere it is believed that washing a young boy in the water used to soak baobab bark will help him to grow strong and tall. Others hold the tradition that women living in a baobab area are likely to be more fertile than those living in an area with no baobabs. In many places, the enduring giant trees are recognised as a symbol of community and a place of gathering.

Baobab fruit, though, has really made waves. It resembles a velvet-covered, oblong gourd and is filled with big black seeds surrounded by tart, slightly powdery pulp with immense health benefits. Young leaves can be cooked and eaten as an alternative to spinach, while the fruit pulp is often soaked and then blended into a drink.

Recently, the Western world hailed the baobab fruit as the ultimate superfruit thanks to its high levels of calcium, iron, potassium and vitamin C.

Some reports state that the fruit’s pulp has almost ten times the amount of vitamin C as the equivalent serving of fresh oranges. It has 50 per cent more calcium than spinach, and is recommended for skin elasticity, weight loss and improved cardiovascular health.

Watch me run back to Limpopo for different reasons now …

But to end, pause for a minute to consider the beauty of the unique plant and animal life we have in Africa. Remind yourself of their ability to evoke deep spirituality that goes beyond root and branch, beyond flesh and hide, into the spaces that whisper we are connected. The ancients knew the magic and power of nature, it’s time we remembered it too …

WX

Feed your mind

We need to eat to live. We need to nourish our bodies with wholesome, healthy food that allows us to function optimally. Vitamins, nutrients, purifying water, breathing in good, clean air, all support us and help us live. High fat, high sugar, nutrient-absent foods, not eating at all and not exercising, all bring weight problems, disease and death. We have all read the grim stats about the plagues of malnourishment and obesity all over the world. Balance is what is important to see us living optimally, functioning at our best, allowing us to perform at our peak, charged, energised and ready to go.

Malnourishment and starvation force the body to look elsewhere for substance, breaking down muscles to find fuel to run the body. The mind is affected, depression sets in. When you are obese you can’t sleep properly at night because you snore or stop breathing at various points, osteoarthritis sets in, you develop joint problems, diabetes and heart disease take hold and you are vulnerable to serious danger.

The physical face of both is not pretty. A body so voluminous, a skeleton so landlocked by fat, wobbly, sticky weights around the knees, fat-like islands around the stomach, like lead around the ankles, stopping one from moving freely. Or a body so emaciated, bones sticking out like desperate signposts, a ribcage that can’t disguise its existence, teeth falling out, face hollow and shadowed, eyes in sockets that seem orbital. Moving is a painful, exhausting exercise.

These two extremes, extreme weight gain and extreme malnourishment, each carry with them their own kind of horror.

I’d like to apply that picture to our mental states. Talking specifically to a mind, or a state of being overfed with notions and programmed responses that make you feel bloated and sluggish, or worse still that paralyse you with indecision. Are you experiencing the indigestion of bad thoughts? Ideas you know are wrong for you, ideas that are vomit-inducing? The constriction of everything pushing up against the remnants of you. Are you swimming in a gelatinous sea, consuming the ideas of others like a glutton, your originality so diluted and opaque you don’t know where you begin and where you end?

Are you starved of creativity, hungry for inspiration? So depleted that you are reduced to bone and skin, unable to give anything to yourself, let alone share with anyone else. Why have you forgotten to eat what is good and nourishing for your mental state? Why have you stopped exercising your creativity? Why have you stopped taking it for walks, stopped allowing it to breathe in the clear air of something new and challenging? Have your creative wells run dry? Where do you go for replenishment? What do you turn to, to fill you up once more, to reconstitute the withered dryness of your creative process?

Think about why you are not functioning optimally and start to do something about it. Seek that balance once more, avoid the extremes that damage and confuse you. Be choosy about what you feed your mind, what you store in your consciousness. Avoid everything that will do harm and keep you from operating like an elite athlete, at least on a mental and emotional level. In the meantime, I’m laying a table for you, would you like to come in?

WX

Gratitude

There is a beautiful poem by thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi which so perfectly encapsulates what I want to say to you this morning.

‘In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art’.

Today I genuflect at the altar of gratitude, mindful that all I have was not entirely mine to have; some I earned, some found its way to me by accident, but mostly what I have is because of the generosity of others.

And perhaps it is the same with you. How you are made is because of others and so all of us are a part of each other.

I would like us to ruminate on the virtues of gratitude. On how to be still and thankful for all that we are and all that we have. And all that is to come.

For those lucky enough to have parents or strong adults and guides in our lives, we learned the virtues of thankfulness early on. ‘Thank you,’ is drummed into us and forgetfulness brought the pain of a pulled ear, a disappointed look, a pinched arm or a spanked bottom. Growing up we did not want to cross our mothers whose creed was built on respect and whose parapets were fashioned from gratitude.

Gratitude, I think, has a twin called patience. We have to be in a state of gratitude even though we haven’t quite tasted the fruit of our dreams just yet. But it will come. Be still; believe.

We have perhaps forgotten how to say thank you. Thank you for breath, thank you for health, thank you for kindness, thank you for humility, thank you for bequeathing me a smile, thank you for making me laugh, thank you for honesty.

You know that when it comes to feelings I am predisposed to melodrama, but you will suffer me this concession to say thank you to you. Thank you for caring enough to debate, to share your triumphs and your betrayals, your hurt and your history, your perspective and your pain, your heart, your feelings and occasionally glimpses of your soul.

You will hear it said that being able to be on radio as a listener is a privilege but I believe it is a privilege to hear your voice. Thank you for unfailingly bringing those voices to us from Tembisa to Turffontein, Soshanguve to Somalia Park, Pietermaritzburg to Pimville, Durban to Diepsloot. Thank you Ike, Bongiwe, Ncamsile, Phaswa, Mokone, LG, Eddy, Bruce, Billy, Neo, Kgakgamatso, Wagadugu, Mam Thandi, Mandla and Joe from Alex. So many names, the list is long. You make us think, you make us angry, you make us cry, you make us laugh, you make us almost drive off the road with your audacity. You make me want to drop my microphone and exit stage right but most of all, you make us know how much you care about what happens in this country, a place where so much is expected and so much is at stake. Thank you.

We may not agree, but I am grateful to you all who let us know that there are many pixels in this picture called South Africa, who let us know that the cataracts of a flawed history must be surgically, perhaps painfully removed, so that we see ourselves in all our conflicted, real, but most of all, honest beauty.

Your light becomes my art.

WX

Righteous indignation and

the folly of dogma

Powerful beliefs are what fuel our existence. I am an atheist, I believe in God, I believe in carefully prescribed order, I believe anarchy is the solution to correcting the class status quo. I believe in peace, I believe peace is elusive until justice is achieved. Beliefs are what we argue over till sweat drips off our brow and the veins near our temples swell and throb.

Powerful beliefs are what we are willing to take up arms for, what we are willing to live and die for. They are what we leave our families for, what can separate old friends and tear allies apart. Righteous indignation is very much a part of this universe and ultimately those involved in the worst atrocities did so by some warped concept of a holy war; of a changing of people’s minds through the barrel of a gun, the flash of a sword. Where we don’t have physical weapons, we have learned how to weaponise our mouths, our hands, our very looks.

Each side swears they are driven by beliefs, wholly convinced of the justice of their ways, their ideas, their convictions, ironically clashing and colliding on a battlefield of those ideas, blood spilling, spittle dripping, slogan shouting. Pawns in a proxy war over points of view, interrogating people, not interrogating the very ideas themselves. Tearing people apart, instead of tearing apart line by line the words on a holy page that told them what to do. Did you stop to think where those beliefs came from in the first place? Who told you? But, more significantly, why did you believe?

There are scales and logarithms to measure consciousness or how conscious you are; I find them complex and speculative but perhaps I’m impatient. Still we all have a concept of what consciousness is, of what being awake is.

For me, being awake is being alive to new ideas, unafraid of anything that challenges an established point of view, opening yourself up to the possibility of having your mind changed if what you are offered is superior, makes more sense than what you already know. It is also about choosing to hold onto your beliefs anyway. as long as you have allowed them to be unfurled and exposed to the light of debate, the light of a different point of view.

It is about surrendering dogma if it no longer serves you and being wary of having any in the first place. The very definition of dogma gives me hives. It’s defined as ‘a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true’. Blind faith, unquestioning, arrogant conviction. Which authority? Whose faith? Forced or acquired by choice?

The opposites of dogma are the dictionary definitions of ambiguity, doubt, indecision, unbelief, uncertainty. Negative connotations, but for me exciting ones. I would rather be undecided yet questioning, seeking till I’m satisfied, than settled in, set up in a construct of ideas that leave me no room to think freely, that allow me no room to move.

Christopher Hitchens wrote, ‘To choose dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid’.

In everything you do today: in voting, in sharing ideas, in defending them, think about whose point of view you are protecting, whose belief you are really espousing. Is it really yours? Have you really thought about it? Or do you borrow the opinions of others like you borrow a coat, wearing but never committing, putting on and casting off at will? How much harm will you do if you continue as you are?

Ready for a mental detox? In Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game he writes, ‘If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything is tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense.’

I have been through the pain of swimming in belief’s once holy water only to find it acrid and stinky because the idea itself died. In fact I euthanised it. Because it simply made no more sense.

WX

When it’s hard, tread water!

Buoyancy talks to our ability to keep afloat, to rise to the surface, to get our heads above water and to stay there. It can also be used to describe how we walk, as if the streets were trampolines. There were always boys in our hood when I was growing up who walked with a certain type of swagger, we called it ‘bouncing’. They glided over everything their feet touched, effortlessly. They seemed to walk as if they knew something we didn’t, something special. They strutted with confidence, they oozed cool. You could only look at them in awe, wishing you were among their ranks, wondering where they got that kind of self-assurance.

Know people like that? People whose spines seem so elastic they can bounce back from anything. They navigate with a sense of pliancy, dodging with Matrix-like skill anything that’s thrown their way. I know people like that. People who just encapsulate strength and vigour, who are fresh when others are sweating. Who paradoxically are as rigid or malleable as the situation requires. They have that buoyancy, that ability to never slink wordlessly beneath the surface. It’s like they have a cupboard full of gold medals for resilience and tenacity. And every day they run a victory lap for another triumph, another conquest. That’s not to say they have it easy or that there were no mountains or rivers to cross. What they did manage though was the ability to navigate through dense brush, uphill and downhill, scraped and bruised, but ever focused, never accepting a fate they did not have in mind to begin with.

Among many things we claim from our evolutionary legacy, I’m highlighting buoyancy. An attribute that augments our survival instinct. I know Darwin didn’t meet the young men from my hood, or the people I’ve just referenced, but if he did, I’m sure he would agree with what I’m saying. I wish we could tap into our own buoyancy. Where we would locate the keys to our mind camps, unlock the door and step outside prescribed norms and expectations. Where we could shrug off a knowledge legacy that has no use for