“Life is precarious.”, By Rev. Fr. Omokugno Ojeifo

The first time I heard the word “precarious” was from the mouth of Fr. Benedict Etafo (now Monsignor). This was probably in 2005, at one of his Rector’s Conferences at Bodija. Etafo was a really fine gentleman who made a deep impression on me as rector of our major seminary. Later I went back to check the meaning of the word. It had/has something to do with “dangerous,” “risky,” and “uncertain.”

Fr. Etafo had made the statement about life being precarious after we lost a seminarian in a road accident on that short (but long) journey from Ibadan to Lagos during the Easter holidays.

From Etafo’s statement I’d come to see very clearly how really precarious human life is. Within split seconds it can come to an end.  There is nothing that tells us that our time has come. The writers of the ancient Psalms and the other Wisdom books of the Bible understood this so well. They had this stoic reserve about life: We are here today, tomorrow we are gone; the same fate comes to the wise and the fool; human life is like a puff of air; placed on the scales it carries weight, but it actually weighs less than a breath; we are like grass that springs up in the morning but by evening withers and fades. This is the precarity of life. Add up the gains and losses of human life and we are better of dead, is the stoic realism with which the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes approaches the question of life and living. He probably was a wise man who had been dealt the tough and rough hand of life. He was both pessimistic and realistic at the same time.

Since those early days in the seminary, I have come to live in the tension of both resignation and hope. Plying the Abuja-Ibadan road for 8 straight years, I somehow knew what life’s precarity was about, especially at those times we had close shaves with death.

Normally, I hope for better days, but I also know that life can happen suddenly. Life has its ups and downs, its joys and sorrows, its highs and lows. When times of joy come, we enjoy those moments and thank the Lord for them. When sorrows come, we learn through the school of hard knocks, work to alleviate our condition (if we can), and offer up our sufferings to the Lord.

But what are we to say about a young man who wakes up on a Sunday morning, gets ready to go celebrate Mass for his people only to be found later in the day in the pool of his own blood? He didn’t even have the luxury of celebrating the Liturgy last Sunday! He didn’t have the privilege of saying at Mass with Jesus, “This is the chalice of my blood…” before his abductors splashed his own blood on his cassock, the final chalice of his life?! He was violently catapulted to meet his Lord and Judge, to join in the heavenly liturgy, without his consent!

We all look forward to the joys of heaven, I should imagine. But should our journey to heaven be preceded by a gut-wrenching, heart-breaking memory of mayhem and murder? How is one to really feel about Fr. Odia’s victimhood? What is one to say about all our people who have been made victims of the evil regime that now bestride our land? Why is Nigeria a country with an inexorable capacity to feed on the blood of her own children?

“O priest, celebrate this Mass as if it were your first Mass, your last Mass, and your only Mass,” is the inscription I found in the sacristy of a parish church at Kent many years ago. That’s a way of telling the priest to put his best foot forward in the way he executes his sacred tasks. That powerful admonition can be a timely reminder about the need for us to do our best and to be at our best at every second, every minute, and every hour of the day. Why? Because as Fr. Etafo says, “Life is precarious.” We know neither the day nor the hour when the Master would come calling! We can only hope that when that day comes He finds us at our place of employment, as Fr. Odia was.

But until then, we each have a duty to resist the tyranny of evil that bad leadership has foisted on our nation. We who are Christians have a higher calling. I have just started to read the prison writings of Fr. Alfred Delp, a 37-year-old Jesuit priest who was executed by the Nazis in Berlin in Feb. 1945. Somewhere in his book titled Advent of the Heart, Delp insists that Christians must understand that their responsibility is not for their own private security and personal existence, but that they bear a mission for the salvation of the world. We are authentic, he says, when we are “concerned about the destiny of the world… we must know that we gamble away our own individual salvation if we don’t play, or, to word it better, if we don’t fight, for salvation and order in the world.” We must never cower in the face of the forces of evil, but actively work to transform evil from within. We have a right and indeed a duty to wrench God’s good earth from the hands of bad people.

In 1941, four years before Fr. Delp was executed, he had concluded his homily on the first Sunday of Advent with these prophetic words: “those who are watching for the Lord will not be affected, in the eternal sense, even if they are hunted off the face of the earth.”

I have read that line over 20 times!

If there’s a declaration of shame to pass around, it is for Fr. Odia’s murderers. Because in the eternal sense, Fr. Odia remains unaffected! He has been hunted off the face of the earth. But he rests in the sleep of peace.