By Charles T.M.J. Dube

I AM sure the title of my story this week has attracted many, especially among those of the drinking fraternity.
Hold on, it is two weeks down the line and so how could I be talking of a hangover only now!
I am talking of all the wisdom we absorbed about these holidays and not that stuff you were thinking of.
After all, a hangover is nothing but that uncomfortable after effect you feel after the act.
I spent my Easter holidays as a religious tourist, itself nomenclature for not attending my usual church, and boy, was it quite an experience!
It was an unusual kind of Pentecostal Church located somewhere at the end of the new settlement called Stoneridge.
At a time when there is so much debate about prosperity gospel, the pastor of this church just has no room for it and apparently takes no offerings at his church as he believes offering gifts for church business is serious business which must not be done perfunctorily but from an understanding heart and spirit.
You do not get the usual excitement, sensationalism, amens and hallelujahs typical of Pentecostal services as everyone will be onto their notepads and pens as he delves deep into the scriptures.
I enjoyed and learnt a lot from the testimonies and from these, you begin to appreciate the spiritual side of life.
Remember in one of my earlier articles I contended business was spiritual and so is our life in general, including governmental or even the marriage institutions.
And this very interesting testimony was from a ‘Dr Somebody’ with a PHD in Mechanical Engineering who was doing big design consultancies for the motor industry in Europe and yet he had nothing to show for it, as like the prodigal son, he led a bohemian life of dissipation which virtually left him a pauper.
The family and friends had made a spiritual diagnosis and a friend from Kenya had directed them to this church.
I leave the experience of the power of prayer, sensations and all, to another day.
The long and the short of it though is that he had been delivered from his problem.
What a long digressing introduction to my article for the week on hangovers for the two holidays.
In his teaching on the significance of the celebrations of the death and resurrection, you could tell he was conscious of some of the criticisms like on the exactness and pagan ‘origins’ of the festival or otherwise.
That was my first point of hangover too.
As I address this hangover, it is important that we begin from the premise that the last census indicated that over 90 percent of our population subscribe to the Christian religion and as such, if we are not overly arrogant, we should be a bit guarded and cautious in touching on the religious beliefs of nine out of 10 of us.
If the idea is to communicate a message, then we need to be wary of how we package it. In these areas, it is very easy for some people to simply switch off and pretend the communicator has not said anything, and who, wanting to be influential and change mindsets, would in his or her wisdom ignore his impact on 90 percent of the population and hope to be effective while confined to a 10 percent biased sample only?
The Christian religion is founded on the acceptance of the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and Christians decided to celebrate this event annually.
That there could have been some political or other considerations in coming up with the day for such celebrations is neither here nor there and should not be allowed to form a basis for an attack or disparaging of an event which itself forms the basis for the faith itself.
Besides, it is not even in doubt that the period in which this event is celebrated is the very same one in which the Jewish Passover was celebrated, save for the scientific definition of a date as proposed by the Catholic Church.
The Christian calendar also has some other events in the life of Christ, like Christmas that it chose to celebrate.
That such dates might have been deliberately made to coincide with popular ‘pagan’ holidays for purposes of crowding out the ideas behind such holidays and displacing them with a Christian narrative cannot be considered damning at all, but it is a clever tactical maneuver in dismantling opposing schools of thought.
Besides, one of Jesus’ instructions to his disciples is to rise and shine and be salt of the earth.
By changing popular non-Christian narratives by substituting important Christian ones, the Church does just that; rise and shine against the opposition.
Even in our culture, we will need to use the same approach to rise and shine by making our own Christian adaptations of practices that are strongholds, whether as opposing or complimentary to our faith.
Accordingly, we will need to pick and sanitise parts of our own popular cultural practices in tandem with our Christian faith.
There must be a Christian alternative or equivalent of all the popular practices in our culture and these should reflect in the family, community and national calendars as we must still retain who we are, even in our Christian faith.
Instead of complaining about other people’s pagan practices that have been sanitised by the Church, we should be identifying which ones of ours are in sync with Biblical teachings.
That is the only way to handle strongholds in matters of faith and with that, I quench the Easter hangover.
My Independence Day celebration hangover was over the idea that because there have been failures since independence, therefore there is nothing to celebrate, with some even crying over ‘Egyptian pots of flesh’ and contending it was better under Ian Smith.
On Independence Day, we do not celebrate successes or failures of the post-independence era.
We celebrate an event, that is, the transition from minority to majority rule and the dismantling of a racial superstructure and its replacement by a broad-based one.
We also remember what we sacrificed to get us to that day.
The day should be reviewed as a refuelling day.
True, we will do a revaluation of our strides and failures, but that only as a reflection to correct our mistakes and move forward.
It is therefore a misnomer and incongruity for some people to shun the day because in their opinion there have been errors in the way we have managed or mismanaged our affairs after independence.
To the ruling party, it should be an opportunity to celebrate as they review how they have gotten it wrong and how they could get it better by the next celebrations or elections.
Likewise, to the opposition it should be an opportunity to celebrate while reviewing/drawing up a better and more appealing alternative agenda by the next celebrations or elections.
You cannot refuse to celebrate your birthday on the premise that you have encountered challenges in your life whether caused by your own acts of commission or omission or other exogenous variables.
Addressing our challenges should act as a springboard towards a prosperous nation as opposed to cause for not celebrating such an important hallmark in the history of our nation, which puts done to the last hangover.
I feel relieved of my hangovers after this write-up.