Missionary Centre of the Holy 12 Apostles | Katrang – B. Cameroon
Humbly obeying the apostolic command of our Lord: “Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations… teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you…”, we also go among “peoples, tribes and tongues”, trying to carry the greatness of God, the message of the Resurrection, the message of love and the promise of the good things to come, that is, the Kingdom of Heaven…
But this course of ours is foreshadowed every day, every day other than being easy…
It is a fact that, every moment we are walking between life and death, between injustice and charity, between humanity and inhumanity…
The deeper you go into the heart of Africa, the more you suffer. And it’s not so much the conditions of life… It’s that you see the appalling extent of the injustice that has been, is being and will continue to be done in this world, the African world, by the worlds of other continents…
So we go from surprise to surprise… and sometimes we wonder whether we should speak or not?
What do you really say to a young man who, before he has had time to grasp life, before he has even had time to taste it, is put on the list of the dying?
Fifteen years ago I visited the Orthodox Mission in Uganda, a very powerful experience and a pain in the back, which… I feel to this day.
So there at the Mission Medical Center I met an elderly Ugandan doctor; he had studied in Greece and, like 99% of those who come to study, he stayed for thirty years and worked in Greece. Now retired and with several sorrows, he returned around the “eleventh hour” to serve the mission…
Talking with me about my first experience in the reality of Africa, he told me the following: “In order to understand the African situation you must know one fact alone: the greatest success of the years of colonialism is not that they stole the wealth of our lands, but that they have impressed upon the African that Europeans, whites in general, are smarter than he is and always have better solutions… So we got into the habit of trusting foreigners more than ourselves… This is the basis of the problem of Africa today…”! When I heard these words, I never thought that a day would come when I would find them in front of my every step… But this is the reality and we have to face it head on… This is one of the main axes around which all our pastoral efforts must revolve… But how? And at what cost? The insistence of our Lord after His Resurrection in His conversation with the Apostle Peter to ask Him three times: “Simon John, do you love me more than most of them?” and in Peter’s answer: “Yes, Lord, thou hast said that I kiss thee…” “I love my lambs… …cherish my sheep… …feed my sheep…” …encompasses the manner and labor of this love…
It encompasses the quality to which every missionary must aspire in order to be able to truly “incarnate” the Word of God before the eyes and in the lives of our newly enlightened brothers and sisters and not be just another voice – among so many others who speak the same truth, Christ, but within the limits and measures of a mental school and tradition – which speaks unintelligibly about the unintelligible mystery of God.
This is the perspective of the Apostolic work that all Orthodox need, who, if the Lord Jesus Christ had asked us: ‘Do you kiss the majority of your people?’, would probably have spent decades before we would have found an answer…
The Cameroon Gregory
