Don’t let sin become too comfy a habit

FAIEZA Desai, may she know the bliss of paradise, died at 10am on Maundy Thursday.

The notice of her Janaaza drew hundreds to her home in University Estate a few hours later.

The day of her passing had been preceded by a heavy downpour of much longed-for rain, the gift of it emphasised by the sound of thunder and streaks of lightning across the dark, cloud-shrouded night.

I was part of the congregation that stood on the pavement of Beatty Road as the prayers of the farewell Ziyara were incanted inside the house of bereavement.

An elderly woman, noticing that I had not been able to progress beyond the gate, assured me that it was best to “remember her as when you last saw her”. She added, “Faieza never said an unkind word about anybody.”

I will remember her for her grace and beauty. Her kind and gentle smile. Her easy laughter.

The funeral cortège made its way to Tennyson Road Mosque and I was able to offer a few words of condolence to Judge Siraj Desai before returning to the cathedral.

That night as I sat in my study – the smell of the lit stick of miaang defeated by that of the pickled fish that had permeated the house since Monday – I thought of the foot-washing ceremony that accompanied the last meal Yeshua of Nazareth had shared with his disciples.

It emphasised servant-leadership and the ritual cleansing that recognised that which we needed to be cleansed of, the sin that clings to our being as we walk, literally and otherwise, along the ways of our daily lives.

Ma Elizabeth Storkey taught me, in the first two years of my still-wetbehind-the ears priestly ministry in Factreton, the importance of accompanying the dying to that moment of their passing.

I sat at your bed in the room I had entered when the dawn

still crackled with the stars of the night that led me to your home.

I sat at your bed too young to know what not to say.

Your silent smile. A sigh of readiness, over time, taught me the strength of the prayer book’s bidding for you

to venture onto the guiding way of angels.

I sat at your bed. We prayed the prayer that Jesus taught.

Your skin, fevered and oilanointed as my voice fades into the forgotten familiar where love hushed you into newness.

When a person dies in my faith in the community, I anoint the body, cleansing it like the Tukamanie of Cape Islam – the person who washes the body after death.

In my prayers, I ask God’s forgiveness of the hands that had touched that which was sinful, the feet that had strayed along forbidden paths, the eyes and ears that had been deployed in a sinful cause.

The tongue that had feasted on the forbidden.

It’s an inversion of the prayer of Teresa of Ávila, the Carmelite nun and mystic:

“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”

We begin to enter the heaven we long for whenever we confront, as Saint Paul says, “the evil I do not want is what I do”.

But sin becomes a comfortable habit. So much so that our faith is reduced to that of a religion of creedal statements observed in the mouthing of it and not evident in the way we live.

The person who seeks forgiveness is able to do likewise.

And we will find, as did the women gathered outside the empty tomb of Jesus on that first Easter Sunday, that the risen Christ is not among the dead.

He lives in the lives of all who struggle and conquers the sin in our hearts and that which makes for hell on earth.

Jesus Christ is risen when we live as an Easter people, resurrected from the shackles of easy lies and the false victory of the complacent.