Archbishop Okeke at 18
Fr. George Adimike
The Catholic Archbishop of OnitshaValerian Okeke has just clocked 18 years as an Archbishop. It is proper and fitting to x-ray the spirituality that has contributed to the success of the venerable Archbishop. Christian life runs on grace is a sufficient warrant for Heideggerian position that nothing nothings. In Christianity, grace precedes faith. However, the Christian’s response to the gift of faith is effortful. This response entails a spirituality of an active self-surrender that snatches victory from the grip of the new age spiritualities rooted in self-sovereignty. In this way, active passivity relative to spirituality serves as the right receptive mode. Hence, in Christian spirituality, active passivity preserves the transcendence of God but at the same time appropriates and cooperates with grace in the active engagement of the whole being.
An incarnational spirituality appreciates the truth that through the Incarnation of Christ, God healed all materiality. He recreated the creation such that the metaphysical quality of being as good resonates with the biblical foundation that everything God created is good (cf Gen. 1:31). As such, materiality acquires instrumental value in the salvation mystery, implying that no genuine spirituality discountenances materiality and the world of human affairs, because they are signs of the fullness in God.
Relative to Christianity, shirking of responsibility defeats true spirituality and misrepresents Christian religion. It hides lack of response-ability under cover of spirituality and ends up distorting the correct rubric of Christian spirituality, thus providing an alibi to lapsed and weak Christians. Indeed, one of the challenges of contemporary Christian expressions is the distortion of its nature, which affects the appreciation of its spirituality. Consequently, one of the malaise affecting Christian spiritualities is a disincarnated conception of its nature. This challenge expresses discomfort with living in the body and craves for spiritualism that discountenances the mystery of the Incarnation. It is spirituality fraught with a residue of gnostic suspicion of matter or materiality, which, inadvertently, behaves as though Incarnation did not happen.
Spiritualism tends to be devoid of any contact with humanness and with earthiness in disregard for the New Testament spirituality that is rooted in the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation, in which Christ and the Spirit have a functional identity. The New Testament spirituality hinges on the ground that there is no Spirit without Christ and that Christ exists through the Spirit. Thus, it is an incarnational spirituality that is sufficiently historical, eschatological and mystical. It serves and builds the present as the imperfect manifestation of the kingdom of God, which is incipiently growing through the ministry of Christians.
The sheen of Archbishop Valerian Okeke’s spiritual texture glows with the disposition that spirituality should help man to appreciate his identity as a child of God and assume the role of the stewardship of the earth. It is a spirituality that makes one assume the responsibility of cultivating our current home in preparation for our eternal home. Additionally, it transforms one and disposes him to collaborate with Christ in bringing about his salvation to the ends of the earth. Responding to grace, the Archbishop focuses on the overall wellbeing of man by working to connect him to Christ and to empower his response-ability. He spends himself forming his flock to assume their responsibility in the world and thus become good stewards of creation. Thus, Maduka forms the rubric of his spirituality. As such, Maduka, man’s pre-eminent quality given his intimate connection to God through Christ in the Spirit, leads to calling out the greatest in man that energizes him to unleash such greatness on his world. Devoid of any guile, pretence of every sort is the Archbishop’s abhorrence while he positively encourages hard-work and honesty, industry and scholarship.
Further, the mystery of God’s definitive and ultimate self-revelation in Christ makes Incarnation the divine principle of salvation for all times. Through the Incarnation, Christ of God becomes the text, nay, the context that reveals the meaning of our particular texts. In the typical incarnational pattern, God accomplishes His salvation through, and for, man, whose entire mystery spells instrumental significance relative to salvation. Consequently, God continues to raise human instruments through whom He extends the merits of salvation. As such, in the choice of Archbishop Valerian Okeke, who has been most actively deploying Maduka principle with great success for the fullness of life and human flourishing, He equipped him to touch all aspects of life. It has been a life centred on the best of values, characterized by love and hope, compassion and consideration, faith and fraternity, excellence and empathy. He lives and ministers the full definition of Maduka with candour, giving it a genuinely Christian imprimatur.
By stretching the pastoral and leadership imagination, he has been able to let hearts soar and minds roar, thus causing the abridgement of misery and forlornness. Through his ministry, God has made his presence felt, touched and loved by sheer audacious love, generosity, faith, industry, vision, intuition, courage and singularity of devotion to God. Neither would you attribute aloofness to him, nor does he pontificate from Olympian heights. Instead, as a servant-leader, the Archbishop embodies the transformation he seeks in the society. It beggars belief the lofty contributions he has made to transform lives and peoples. Ever ready to make a self-gift for the overall advancement of humanity, his Maduka spirituality prods him to focus significant attention to formation, for, according to him, it is better not to have been born than not formed.
His incarnational spirituality is the force that sustains him. The pastoral fruits of his ministry are the indicators of the corresponding spiritual roots. The principle is simple: ‘because I live others will live better lives’. He personifies hope, encapsulates charity, exudes prudence, and radiates joy and confidence to humanity characterized by despondency and harassment. The sheen of his ministry is sufficiently God-glorifying and man-edifying. Spiritual formation, Education, economic empowerment, human development and capacity building are being aggressively pursued and are yielding enormous dividends in the society through the direct or proximate instrumentality of the Archbishop. One immediately thinks of his multitudinous socio-economic and human developmental interventions. Let me save you of the endless litanies of the accomplishments. The infrastructures he put in place pale when compared to his investment in human capital development, ethical revival and spiritual formation.
In sum, Archbishop Okeke, earlyish in life, understood man as the greatest resource, such that he deployed God’s grace to the best use and greatest advantage, making him a quintessential manager of time, talent and treasure. Through Maduka spirituality, the Archbishop dedicates his ministry to uplifting the dignity of man to the glory of God and man’s salvation. Clearly, he typifies this dignity through his response-able steward of creation as a son of God and brother to all humans.