Counting presidential ‘Amen’

The gentle, but firm knock on the bedroom door came after midnight. “Who is it?” I asked. The nocturnal visitor announced herself, and then she added: “Dad didn’t pray with me.” I elbowed the said Dad. He stirred from Dreamland. I relayed the message (like a faithful megaphone): “You didn’t pray with your daughter.” He grunted – in affirmation or irritation (it was not clear). For a few seconds, the universe stood still as mom and daughter waited to see if dad would rise to his obligations.

An eternity (or so it felt) passed. I nudged him again: “Are you going?” Knowing he couldn’t “play sleep” all night when two females are on his case, he threw his legs over the edge of the bed, and the rest of his body followed. He opened the bedroom door and walked with his daughter back to her room. He returned some ten minutes later and the world was at peace again.

Over the years, an unspoken arrangement has emerged in our household concerning the younger children. The son is mine and the daughter is his — speaking only in terms of which parent each child hangs out with the most. This division manifests particularly in the bedtime rituals. He reads with her, prays with her and sits on the foot of her bed until she falls asleep. When he works late, she often turns down my request to pray with her opting to wait for him. On the few occasions that she lets me do it, she considers my prayers as mere appetizer. If she falls asleep while waiting for Dad, she wakes up at night and hunts him down – like she did this night.

The process is easy with my son because his routine is set: he eats his dinner, takes his shower, brushes his teeth, gets into his pajamas, climbs on his bed and he is out like a light. Often, by the time I come up from the kitchen, he’s either fast asleep or pretending to be. I know when it’s the latter because when I turn off the light, he’ll whisper from under his pillows: “Don’t switch off the light.” Most evenings though, I get there before he falls asleep and we pray.

When he became old enough to say his own prayers, I would “encourage” him by interjecting “Amens” after every sentence. He would say with indignation, “I am not done yet!” I explained that “Amen” doesn’t have to occur at the end of the prayer. He was not convinced and still believes it is a prompt to “cut it short.” I must confess the impulse to use Amen this way with him especially when he gets on his “Milky Way routine:” thanking God for the moon, the stars, and all the people of the world, “not forgetting Jesus … thank you Father Lord for Jesus.” I have since learnt to keep my Amens to myself as they often get him starting the prayer all over again.

My son, who turned eight last month, intuitively knows what Nigerians only found out this week: there is a restriction on the number of Amens one can say during a prayer. For my son, too many Amens are a rude interruption and prompt for him to “limit the length of his prayers.” To politicians in Aso Rock, too many Amens is not presidential and may breach protocol! To the rest of Nigerians though, Amen is really what it is: an “agreement” with the words of the prayers (and the pray-ers).

One can therefore understand the curiosity about why President Goodluck Jonathan did not say Amen at all the appropriate places during last weekend’s religious event to mark Democracy Day. The explanation is that there is a quota on the number of Amen a Nigerian president can say. I’ve wondered all week about how the tally is kept. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that someone in the protocol department at Aso Rock has a job just for this. That might actually be a more complex task than what our brother, Dr. Reuben Abati, does. It seems that his job consists of a daily defense of the indefensible … and he didn’t even need his law degree for that!

Perhaps the presidential assistant in charge of Amens sends text messages or Tweets to the president while a prayer is in session to alert him when he has used up his Amen quota. The code could be “Oga, e don do!” or something more erudite like, “Enough already!” Or perhaps, the president checks his “Amen credit” during a prayer session by dialing *611# on his phone. If the Amen limit is reached at the point where someone is making some declarations about corruption in high places, all the better! God forbid that the president would “Amen” the entire Nigerian political class to hellfire and brimstone … not that he is averse to a few stones aimed at his political detractors every now and then!

Rather than be upset that President GEJ didn’t say Amen to a prayer on corruption at a church event last weekend, Nigerians should be organizing a “high-powered” delegation to religious leaders to request that they respect the separation of church and state and stay in their pulpits or podiums. If they insist on palling with Ceasar though, the least they can do is take Abati’s counsel and “familiarise themselves with government protocol and … limit the length of their prayers and sermons.” They don’t want to show up at a presidential event sounding like the longwinded reverend in the dream scene in the opening pages of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The response to that sermon was not a conversion or multiple Amens but (in the words of Lockwood): “Drag him down, and crush him to atoms, that the place which knows him may know him no more.”

Dwelling in a landscape of the new reality of rationed spirituality and faith, Nigerians are abundantly blessed that their President didn’t choose the Lockwoodian response, but instead opted for silence-is-golden. His spokesperson could adopt the same principle and not feel a compulsion to respond to every little whisper of criticism directed at his Master. We believe we are running a democracy, right? Can someone say Amen to that? Oops … today’s Amen quota has been exceeded.

Patience Akpan-Obong, Punch