Tales of the Homily

There are those days as a child. On Sundays, my father would summon us after we got home from mass. It would be in our little parlour where we pray and converse on matters of concern. There was a single spring bed, armchairs, a high table against the wall packed with holy books and personal items, a small mahogany centre table used both as a footstool and for meals, a tripod cased 'Sanyo' television that can be locked with a key. We could only watch it when the Eagles of Nigeria are playing a football match, during the news hour, or a decent family show. Everything in the parlour was sacred because of an altar set up on a wooden attachment to the wall. The altar contained a wooden cross, a rubber statue of the Mother of God, and a frame of Mary's apparition to the three Children at Fatima. 

My father would ask each one of us in turn, "What did Father preach in church today?" When there was no light, he would set a lantern dangling in front of our faces. Our eyes in turn would be set to insects dancing around the glow, our hands clasped behind us as we try to recall. At that moment, the tick of our wall clock would be the only thing speaking aloud while we listened trying to understand its mechanical rhythm. There was always nothing we could remember that the priest at church had said, except, of course, if he had told a tale in his homily. 

On such occasions, our senses and imagination are piqued by the details. We see ourselves not just listening but involved in the event and would want to act it out. We would tell the tale excitedly and reconstruct it to suit our situation. Our response to him then would be, "Father told a story" as we recreate the tale and its moral lesson. The driving force in the tales is the moral lessons learnt and these lessons have been the guiding light of godliness to our paths through life. 

 Just as spices to food or moonlight to darkness, tales are the impetus to the message of the homily. Ingenious preachers use them as an instrument and they appeal more than a mere biblical oratory could achieve. Many preachers believe that persuading their audience is by eloquence or fluency, wordage, biblical quotations, and drama with the accompaniment of music. But there often is a concavity between emotion, understanding, remembering, belief, lessons learnt, and practice which only stories of life, real or imagined, could fill or bridge. 

Do you know more believers than not are familiar with the stories of the bible and not its injunctions? Many believers would prefer to listen to these biblical injunctions and the message would be peaked if buttressed by stories or tales in analogy to these injunctions. 

'Tales of the Homily' is a collection of didactic stories or tales by Solomonthrone. These stories are composed by the author or recreated from stories and tales told by priests during the homily. These stories are true or imagined experiences; though, some may be well-known tales which have lost their authorship in time and their originality through reconstruction. The goal of these stories, however, is to teach people moral lessons and call them to action to live a moral life in consonance with biblical injunctions. Time, inventions, and globalisation have created a new social order. There has been exponential awareness of biblical teachings but a continual eroding of morality. People, particularly the young are not easily convinced that God exists. 

Morality does not directly teach you to know God, it rather proves that God exists and is present. What this means is that people may not know about God but their lives reflect God; there are the lives of people who claim to know God but are far from God in action. With the prevailing decadence in the world today, what we need is not eloquent sermons but godly lives which moral tales promote. Of course, we learn and act from experiences and out of examples. It would be better to see and hear about God through the lives and experiences of people.

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