Kay Ugwuede

Tasting God

I.

Soul of my Saviour, sanctify my breast;
Body of Christ, be thou my saving guest;
Blood of my saviour, bathe me in thy tide; 
Wash me with water, flowing from thy side.

The first time I taste God, he is a small circle of unleavened bread and tiny cruet of mildly diluted red wine. It is my first holy Communion Mass on a Sunday morning in October ‘99. The church is aflame with burning incense. White clouds envelop the assembly of priests on the altar in celestial celebration. Smoke flows through the aisles and rises to the stained-glass windows towering up the walls. I am eight, dressed in white lace and giddy on the woody scent of burning frankincense and myrrh.

In the days preceding this Sunday, we shuttle between school, evening lessons and the church cramming catechism responses to who God is and why he made us; to what the sacraments are and how unleavened bread and red wine become flesh and blood. At eight, transubstantiation is difficult to understand. But I recite my way to passing the final exams and my father, seeing my distress, refuses to have the teachers pull me out of the intending communicants’ group when they say I cannot join my older siblings because I am too young. I confessmy sins to a priest; a lie here, a bad thought there. I don’t keep track so I tell him the ones I remember and do the penance he gives me.

There are over a hundred white-clad communicants that Sunday. They occupy about half of the church like a host of angels. The priests, in persona Christi, take turns in leading the liturgy. My heart pounds fearfully in my ears—what if there was a sin too grievous left unconfessed in this house Christ was going to occupy soon? I race through the events of the past weeks trying to recall what I may have missed out at confession lest I filed out to eat and drink judgement upon myself. Memory fails me. Resigned and faint from an intermittent fast, I join the procession of communicants onto the altar and into the cloud of incense. The unleavened bread is bland and the red wine is crisp. Its aftertaste sits briefly. My strength returns.

After the Mass, my parents, proud, flank my older siblings and I and pose for a picture, our gloved hands clasped tightly together.

***

There is a picture of my parents I carry with me. It must have been taken in the ’80s or sometime in the early ’90s just after they married. My mother sits on a brown sofa in the sitting room of our childhood home. Her white t-shirt is tucked into dark blue jeans folded at the ankles. She is adjusting the band on her ring finger, her right elbow resting on his left knee. Her head is lowered in a demure bow and there is a small smile on her face. The camera captures her in mid-sentence. My father’s left arm is around her. He wears a matching white short-sleevedcollared shirt tucked into black bootcut pants and a black tie. He is leaning into her and there is a small smile on his face too. His legs are crossed at the ankle, a habit he carries into his sixties.

I found it in one of my family’s photo albums, thick collections of sepia pictures that introduced my siblings and I to a world that existed before us. My father did not show up very often in these albums. Save their marriage ceremonies, there were only a handful that showed him in his younger days, full head of afro and bootcut trousers either flanked by white engineers or standing in front of his grey Peugeot 504—a status symbol for a formally uneducated young man who had risen through the ranks by sheer hard work and undeniable charisma. I am not sure how they met. Or when. But I imagine that she, this quiet, smart, beautiful nursing student had caught the eye of this young, ambitious, equally stylish engineer who was carving a life for himself almost out of nothing. I like to remember that there was a time when they had been a pair smitten by each other’s quirkiness and eager about the future they were committed to building.

Born to Anglican parents in the year Nigeria ceased to be a British colony, her family was a large one; nine children and two parents, a size that proved problematic when the Biafran war broke in ’67 and Mama Awka, my maternal grandma, had to gather her little children journeying arduously in search of safety and food. I was fond of my Papa Awka who had nicknamed me Sleeping-with-one-eye-open. I kept watch while asleep. Of our extended families, we were closer to my mother’s side. We spent a lot of time in her hometown visiting for holidays and weddings and title conferments on grandma who was very involved in the Anglican community church close to where the family house was situated. Before we moved to our own home in ’98, we spent a protracted amount of time with her family in Awka, listening to Osita Osadebe’s highlife and eating oranges from a tree that grew inthe back of the house. When Papa Awka passed, a church service was held for him before he was laid in his resting place at the entrance to the house.

Father tells us his parents were pagans. They worshipped Alusi—deified carved pieces of wood or clay—with bleeding cocks and yams, poured libation and consulted dibias. Then Catholicism came, forcefully taking its tenets into villages and made the people swap bleeding cocks for prayer beads. Household shrines were burned. Personal gods were discarded or smashed. He embraced the church. I don’t remember much about Papa Amala, my father’s father, only that he had married two wives, snuffed tobacco a lot and was keen on giving away my father’s half-sisters in marriage regardless of how young they were. I recall my father was always infuriated by this. Mama Amala, I remember. She visited often. Just a few months before she passed on an operating table where a tumor was being extracted from her belly, she had come to live with us. She would perch in a corner of the large compound snuffing, mumbling to herself and pouring libation when we served her food. When they both passed on, we held traditional rites to lay them to rest. There was no Missa pro defunctis, no funeral service.

My earliest memory of contention between my parents is over what sect of Christianity to raise us in. My mother, by virtue of her marriage, not only needed to cede her father’s name but her religious denomination as was customary. But, often on the road for work and not particularly religious, my father provided no firm spiritual direction for his young family. At least, not in the manner that she wanted. But with Catholicism, there was no need for firm spiritual directions. You attended Mass on Sundays; often confessed your sins to a priest so you did not receive Communion in a state of ungrace. You restricted your transgressions to venial sins that did not stain so immutably and were amenable to being washed by the blood of Christ. You donated your used clothing to help the less privileged members of your church and donated your money to building marble altarspossibly making a show out of it. You joined a pious society. You said your rosary. You made sure not to miss the holy days of obligation which were practically the same every calendar year. You perhaps, adopted a patron saint, a centuries-old deceased faithful whose life was so transcendent their death became miraculous and sheltering. Catholicism was a handbook with to-do lists. All you did was tick items off the list.

My mother had taken up interest in a popular Pentecostal church whose leader was an exuberant light-skinned man with a swollen face and stentorian voice. She threw herself earnestly into the church community attending Sunday services and weekly activities where we learned Psalms and memory verses by heart in the children’s church. I don’t recall very much how it went each week. For the first few years until that first holy Communion Sunday, we oscillated between reciting memory verses one Sunday, and the Nicene Creed the next until ’98 when we moved to our new home just down the street from St. Mary’s.

Now, I had no preference for either of these two churches we attended. One entailed a lot of exuberant worship and demon-chasing; the other was more solemn. One preached a fierce God and a raging hell; the other preached a merciful Father and Purgatory. One called down the wrath of God ever so often on any and every one; the other preached forgiveness, turning the other cheek, welcoming the prodigal with open arms. I slipped in and out of both deftly. There was nothing at stake yet.

Maybe it was, at last, due to the proximity of the church to our new home, but my father began to insist my mother commit fully to the Catholic church which was now just up the street. She was having none of it. The demons of her warfare were not mellow nor solemn; they deserved fire and brimstone. Serving God required a measure of fervency and my father was unwilling to unearth it. They quarreled openly. They quarreled in theprivacy of their room. My father would pace the compound muttering under his breath indignantly. Sometimes, their arguments will filter into our room next door stifling the air with their tension. It was only a matter of time before she conceded.

After our first holy Communion, we fell into the routine more decidedly—morning and night rosaries, saintly devotions, benedictions, confessions, Masses, the Eucharist, which my father mandated we receive at every Mass. And my mother, not given to half-measures, plunged in.

***

Dearest Lord, I love Thee, 
With my whole, whole heart;
Not for what Thou givest, but for
what Thou art;
Come, oh, come, sweet Saviour!
Come to me and stay;
For I want Thee Jesus, more than I
can say.

I was off to a Catholic missionary school when I turned ten. An ear-splitting bell—a car wheel and metal rod contraption—quickly became a compass in my regimented new life. We prayed round the clock. Early morning and late evening Masses at 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. every weekday, except Tuesdays and Thursdays when we were engaged in physical activity in the evenings. Daily rosary processions in October, the church’s Marian month. Stationsof the Cross every day of the Lenten period. Angelus at noon which always brought the school to an abrupt stop for a few minutes. Saintly devotions as members of pious societies. Benedictions every Sunday evening. Confessions. End-of-term and beginning-of-term retreats with or without exorcism sessions.

Like a candle, my love for the monotony and the onslaught of religious activities burned slowly but steadily. I joined Legio Mariae and Médaille Miraculeuse societies. The latter had me singing The Magnificat as Mary, Mother of God in a reenactment of the Angel Gabriel’s visitation. I joined the lectors society. I even served at Mass. I was in awe of the rituals of Mass, the sacredness of it all. I memorised the four Eucharistic prayers and would say them under my breath as the priest said them on the altar: You give life to all things and make them holy, and you never cease to gather a people to yourself, so that from the rising of the sun to its setting a pure sacrifice may be offered to your name. Poetic. Potent enough to transform unleavened bread and wine into life-giving entities. The unease about my worthiness as a vessel for Christ and his body lingered, but I was thrilled by my proximity to these expressions of divinity. I wore scapulars. A prayer booklet said they would take me to heaven just as the Médaille Miraculeuse I wore around my neck would bring me special graces. I revered the monstrance at Benediction. I confessed my sins to our chaplains—a little more accurately because I began keeping a journal—and continued to partake in Communion. Judgement seemed far away; I was ticking items off my list enthusiastically. Until 2005.

The Vatican and Papacy were, to me, shrouded in a familiar mystery that didn’t bear heavily upon me until Pope John Paull II, well-travelled and beloved, passed in 2005. I was in my fourth year in secondary school growing an independent, thinking mind. I had questions. How did Papal conclaves work? Why did the cardinals have to be in seclusion cum clave to elect a new Pope? What determined that the smoke which drifted through the chimney of St. Peter’s Basilicaduring the conclave was fumata nera or fumata bianca? Did the cardinals lobby for Summum Pontificem? I read all I could find at that time which wasn’t a lot. I followed documentary after documentary rehashing the life of Cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła, his deep conservatism and how he clung to the church’s dogmas and the ways of being they dictated in a world leaning further and further to the left. This was in spite of the fact that already, at this time, tales of the church’s silence on sexual predation and assault as well as his sluggish responses to these soul-crushing incidents were an ember just at the brink of leaping into flames.

The year after, the movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s The Davinci Code was released in cinemas. It was hard to tell what was fiction and what was not. But, for me, it went beyond the believability of the film. I had taken it apart and begun seeking out aspects of it that intrigued me. I wanted to know who the Opus Dei were and, what or who was the Holy See? Was the Holy Grail fictitious or did it have the power to tear down nearly a decade of my faith? The more I questioned, the more elusive the answers and the more questions arose. The Good News Bible, with its eight extra books, did not mention Purgatory. What was it then? If the holy book says Christ is the only way to heaven, why were there so many saintly and Marian devotions all offering to lead us to God? What would become of people whose only misstep was being born into a family whose forebears had handed them faith that looked a little different? Why did images of saints and martyrs, always inspired by a vision or trance, look more like porcelain dolls with their translucent skin, defined cheekbones and natural red lips; features that looked nothing like me, me made in his image and in his likeness? I think now that my unraveling was cemented by a conversation on infallibility. How was it that the Papacy, founded upon a lineage of human frailty, could not err?

II.

The concept of a God-shaped hole is the root from which springs the very many ways humankind continuously seeks out the divine. It is also religion’s greatest marketing tool. In each of us exists a bottomless void, an insatiable search for meaning that nothing material nor temporal can fill. Some, however, point to the eleventh verse of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, “He hath made everything beautiful in its time; also he hath set eternity in their heart,” as proof this void is divinely orchestrated. But the subsequent verses hint more at an afterlife and the trepidation with which we must approach what the hereafter unveils: judgement and reward to the wicked and righteous.

When Solomon, ascribed author of Ecclesiastes, sets out in the beginning chapter, it is with this quest for meaning that plagues everyone of us. He fills himself with wisdom and denies himself nothing: women, treasures, silver, gold, slaves. He considers fooly and labour; laughter and wine; and concludes that everything is meaningless but admonishes, in closing, that meaning can be found in the fear of God and allegiance to his commandments. Pensées, a theological meditation of 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal arrives at a similar conclusion without the specifics: “This [emptiness] he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.” [x.148]

My immersion into Catholicism, in some way, was born out of this void and my father’s victory over what path his family took to fill it. Catechism taught me how to know when God had seeped into the gaping space he had built in for himself, filling it with his presence. I would bear fruits—joy, charity, patience, peace, gentleness, longanimity, chastity. I would be bestowed gifts—wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge and piety. But filling a God-vacuum was only one piece of a complicated reason why I needed faith.

***

Fr. Abel was too handsome to be a priest. My friends and I conjured up reasons why he had chosen a priestly vocation instead of creating more beautiful humans. Fr. Abel visited in our first year. It was during an end-of-term retreat. It might have been at the beginning of the term, there wasn’t a fixed structure to them. If the principals found awilling, powerful priest, they carved out three days or more of intense spiritual activity that most times included exorcisms. Fr. Abel was powerful. Handsome and powerful. For the first few days of the retreat, we listened to spiritual talks, read scriptures, said Mass or rosaries and did Expositions. The monstrance housing the Body of Christ would sit alone on the altar for a few hours and students would go in and out of the silent chapel to pray, meditate. Or get lost in the book of Revelations. Or Esther. The last day often came with some relief for us. For our principals, it was a rush to cram in as much as had been missed in the first few days as the priest tried to tie together the knots he had been unraveling. Exorcisms were a part of this knotting. Fr. Abel’s was not the only one that would happen in my six years in school but it was my first.

The medium-sized chapel and its extension were filled to the brim with students; Catholics and students of other faiths who had been lumped into a minority Protestant group. The pungent smell of sweat was as heavy as the haze from the frenzied singing, clapping and dancing which went on as students were writhing in front of the altar as Fr. Abel emptied buckets of holy water on them. More aptly, on the demons that had taken over their bodies manifesting in their squirming and shrieking.

You can’t stop singing or the evil spirits will enter you. I was exhausted from the rigorous, frightful business. I must have nodded off while standing when the person next to me shook me awake. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal but are mighty in pulling down strongholds. Puddles of water had formed and a spectacle had ensued. Students were climbing the pews to pick out which students they knew out of the writhing bunch, students whom they would now avoid until school dispersed for the term. These exorcisms happened a few more times, enough that I became immune to what I began to consider were teenage desires for attention masking as demon possession. And while these sessions happened in school, at home, my mother navigated the idea and supposed presence of demons a little differently and for a different reason.

The story of Job, to me, is one of the Bible’s most fascinating anecdotes. Here is a man who has everything going for him, enjoying the life he’d been given with the wife of his youth and children around his bountiful table. Satan goes to God and says, this man thinks you’re the It because you’ve given him a blissful life. Take it away and see if he would not curse you. What follows is a story deeply revealing Creator and Created; the delicateness and defiance of faith and the oftentimes unfounded nature of evil. In the sequence of events that saw Job’s fortune crumble, it seemed my family’s fortune was being undone too from one seemingly unconnected event to the other. Job questioned; my father doubled down on his business endeavours. My mother donned an armour fighting evil shaped like the birds that flew past our house at dusk, birds whose shrieks tore into the night and curled the blood with their startling sound.

As years morphed into each other and, like Job’s friends, I questioned whether our family’s fortunes would ever return to normal, I began to take on some of my mother’s paranoia. And Catholicism became a simplistic tool that was powerless to the things that had befallen us. Now studying a course I had no penchant for at the university campus in Nsukka, my life not exactly in tow with the plans I had envisioned for it and in search of something more substantial, more weighty as my mother had in those days, I joined a campus fellowship. Here, students prayed in tongues, a language as unearthly as it was undecipherable. They read the Bible. No, studied it. They prayed without prayer books, sometimes rather noisily, sometimes repetitively. Without prayer books, it seemed like a pouring out of the heart to the divine. It was intimate. It was fluid. There were no templates. They shared stories about ‘dangerous men of God’ who, like Christ and his apostles, did the humanly impossible. Like kickstart a flatlined heart or grow out a stump. They shared testimonies, believed in the miraculous. And for a few years, I believed too. God was again, filling a hole which Masses and rosaries could not adequately fill. Like amustard seed forcing its way through doubt and despair, a tree in season, I bloomed again, differently. And with these fruits sprouted hope that my fervent prayers would avail me, us, much. I stopped attending Masses altogether, discarded my prayer books, was too ashamed to confess my sins to a priest—what was a pronouncement and penance compared to the shredding of a body on a cross which one repeatedly gashed every time they sinned? I stopped receiving Communion, attempted to speak in strange tongues, rent up fervent pleas for my family’s dwindling fortunes, to seal the widening cracks the years had stretched in my parent’s marriage, for grace to stop touching myself, to remain a chaste vessel for Christ. Help did not come, and things fell apart.

***

I am airborne to East Africa when I begin reading Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. It is a sunny afternoon. I have lobbied a window seat for myself and separated momentarily from the rest of my travel companions. Without the distraction of familiar chatter, I fall into this book which has come greatly recommended. My mind drifts now and then as I gaze out of the oblong window into pearly white clouds. They look like dense cotton candy in the sun, and as dusk falls, they break up into a bowl of porridge. Occasionally, the plane tilts, and I see its wing nod off ever so slightly to my left. I think about falling, like the Patient, from a moving aircraft, burning, landing in the heat of the desert as if from a hot pot into fire. She, the nurse, describes her patient as “her despairing saint” in the first few pages and I feel a tinge of sadness at the allegory. I am also a kind of despairing saint falling, only I haven’t quite reached the bottom yet.

III.

When I moved to Lagos after school to build a career (I wasn’t sure out of what), I had temporarily taken up residence with one of my mother’s sisters whose home was close to my place of work. It was a blessing. I didn’t have to spend so much out of my meagre monthly pay to move around nor get caught up in Lagos’ hair-pulling traffic. My aunt pastored her own church, a family Pentecostal ministry where everyone knew everyone. I sensed an unwritten injunction that I would become a member and confirmed this when I once followed a friend to another, more popular, Pentecostal church a few meters away from home. My aunt was displeased. Her displeasure annoyed me. But, Sunday after Sunday, I sat through services listening to all the things I needed to do to live a more elevated experience in this life and the one to come. Most of it seemed transactional, a buy-one-and-get-one-free endeavor. On some weekdays, if work permitted, I joined mid-week Bible studies and services. On other days, I tried to be part of any group activity. It very quickly became a list of chores, a lot of which I made no effort at.

I moved out to my own apartment about a year later and began attending another teaching ministry where the sermons were more practical sets of living instructions. Trading niceties with God was not center. Still, a lot about Pentecostalism remained performative to me: the loud prayers, the gimmicks of worship, the utmost reverence church leaders were held to despite, as the years would unfold, glaring accusations of sexual assault or extreme affluence serving a Christ who wore tunics and sandals and gave more than he ever received. With time, even this fettered away and I began spending my Sundays reading, cooking proper meals and catching up on sleep and laundry.

Dear God,
I’ll write you tomorrow.
Today, my mouth is twisted in a labyrinth 
of silences, and unanswered prayers.

I began writing a poetry series titled Dear God a few days after my 27th birthday two years ago. They were micro letters that helped me excavate some of the bewilderment, loss and fear that had swamped my life. Without the deeper sense of communion I once shared, a firm grip on my faith in the divine, it seemed like these trio had taken up my God-shaped hole and they were not bearing any fussy, pleasant fruits. I clawed at anything that reminded me of the times I believed fiercely and strongly. I binge-watched gospel videos on YouTube particularly vested in videos of the lead singer of famous gospel band, Hillsong. Their songs were like my heart’s cry. They were intimate, almost like something you would write for someone you were deeply in love with. They did not shy away from human weaknesses or extol the dogmas of the church that benched salvation and grace on what you did or failed to do. Taya Smith was a moving singer and I was envious. Not because of her voice, which when she sang, would reach incredulous high notes that she held for more than a minute. When she sang, it seemed like she was transported to a place I once could go. There was always that sold-outness in the way she sang, like there was nothing more on this earth she desired other than to belch those words.

I began looking at religion more broadly a year later. Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam. Zoroastrianism. What did people believe in? Who did people believe in? Why? What was faith? What were the expressions of this faith? What did they consider as the gifts it bestowed on them? The benefits it bestowed on them in this life or the one to come if any? I lapped up readings about the Catholic Church’s history. I saw The Two Popes months after it was released on Netflix. It answered my questions on infallibility, or more accurately, affirmed answers I had already arrived at years before. Human frailty in human-run institutions was not impossible even if it wasdivinely-instituted. I saw The Shack and Miracles from Heaven. Sometimes, oftentimes, I told myself I didn’t care and then feared that I didn’t. After shedding a few tears at Anna’s agonizing fall into the tree trunk and when she recounts meeting God, I told myself I wasn’t really beguiled by indifference.

My longing, though, refused to ebb.

***

Of all my siblings, my elder sister has stayed unfaltering in the Catholic faith, grown in it. On a weekday, I forget which, after gentle persuasion, I join her to attend an Opus Dei gathering on the Lagos island. The Center reminds me of a priestly seminary my class visited years ago during an excursion to learn about water purification. Serene. Clinically neat. The Center is for women; single, married, well-accomplished or on the path to wherever that was for them. The Opus Dei wasn’t a secret sect, it was the laity’s vocational calling, the ordination of the ordinary Catholic. Anyone was welcome. They discussed doctrines and dogmas, a very frank white priest anchoring the discussion. They asked pointed questions, a number of them positioned to elicit reaffirming responses regarding the Catholic faith more than answers. I was fascinated by the openness with which these inquiries were approached at the Center. It was out of place with the norm I had grown up seeing and experiencing. Yet, as the day went on, I felt largely detached.

My sister introduced me to an older lady during an interlude. She was cordial and taken by our resemblance as many of the women were. She asked about my faith journey, about when last I had been to confession and promised to give me a book when I explained I really did not see the point in confessing my sins to a priest anddoing penance as restitution for them. I offered mumbled explanations for the rest of her questions: Holy Communion? No. Rosary? No.

The book came a few weeks later. I am yet to read it. Perhaps it is not the efficacy of the personal conversion story the book recounts that holds me back but rather the thought that nothing the book says will move me enough to go for confession or buy a new set of prayer beads.

***

The first Sunday after we arrive in Enugu during Christmas a year ago, my sister and I are up early to attend a 6:00 a.m. Mass in the Catholic church up the street. My sister had asked if I wanted to come along the day before and I didn’t want her to go alone. The air is cold and the water is cold and reminds me of our early morning baths in the open bath halls of secondary school. Morning Masses are often a simple affair and do not require your Sunday best. We are ready in forty to fifty minutes and spend the remainder of the hour brisk-walking to St. Mary’s. A lot has changed. Only myself and my sister take the walk up the hill in the cool early morning towards the church. About ten years ago, we would have met others like us, in groups of twos and threes, marching up the hill to catch the speedier early morning Mass in order to spend the rest of the day Sunday-ing. There are no such clusters this morning. Instead, we pass a jogger or two, and catch the amber lights of cars as they drive through the road intersecting the street and the church. By the time we reach the church compound, Paul is speaking to the Romans.

The priests say the Mass in Igbo. It’s been a long while since I attended Mass said in my local dialect and some of the prayers seem to fly past my head in a temporary spate of incomprehension. The church feels new but old, muted, not the flashy golden-marble-altar church I was last in years prior. I do not recognise any faces. Time, it seemed, had washed ashore a new church community.

Mass goes by quickly. Save the Igbo hymns and a few lines from the liturgy, I feel more nostalgia than anything else. We attend one more time before we return to Lagos.

***

It is 6:07 pm and we are waiting for Mass to begin. Our altar is compact. My sister's grey HP laptop astride two pieces of the disembodied coffee table in the centre of the sitting room. Archbishop Adewale Martins appears on the screen. I imagine thousands of faithfuls forced into their homes by a sassy semi-living organism watching from computers and phones and tablets. Two seminarians stand beside him on both sides holding a microphone to his mouth and a sacramentary to his face. It’s chrism Mass. The Thursday before Easter Sunday is one of the most solemn celebrations round the Church’s calendar year. It must have been solemn for the disciples too, their master preparing them for his death, washing their feet, promising them he will return to them in three days, in parables nonetheless.

The priest, one of three present, centers his sermon on the significance of the Mass in establishing the church’s sacraments. Sometime as the Mass proceeds, the Archbishop will bless three oils—oleum sanctorum, oleuminfirmorum and sacrum chrisma—which will be used to administer the sacraments across the dioceses till the next Holy Thursday.

The camera pans in and out of the church occasionally showing an aerial view of the Lagos skyline. The pews are empty and shrouded in a soft shadow from unlit bulbs. I count three reverend sisters, about four choristers, two more seminarians, and a Mass server. The altar is well lit and emits a warm glow in harmony with the white chasubles and cassocks.

On the Sundays that follow, we saunter in and out of various parishes in the state from the living room joining Masses holding at whatever hour we’ve agreed to attend Mass. On one of the Sundays, Bishop Adewale gives an impassioned sermon about how bleak it must feel to not be able to attend Masses for so long, how he hopes that in a future not so distant, the state government will allow citizens to congregate again. It’s a sour topic that has persisted week after week since the lockdowns. For a country as religious as ours, a month without religious gatherings is deeply unsettling, four months without is atrocious. But all that I miss and long for is the smell of incense.

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; 
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away; 
Change and decay in all around I see;
O thou who changest not, abide with me.

Kay Ugwuede is a tech journalist, creative writer, and photographer living in Lagos, Nigeria. Her writing has been published in Bloomberg CityLab, the Smart Set, Eater, the Forge Literary Magazine, Taxi Drivers Who Drive Us Nowhere anthology, and has been a part of a group exhibition at the 2020 Dhaka Art Summit. She is the author of a travel chapbook, A Substance of Things Unseen.