Of spiritual fathers, husbands and wives, by Clem Oluwole
I am no great shakes as a spiritualist. So, I will treat this topic from the point of view of a layman. Long before now, when you heard about the escapades of spiritual husbands and spiritual wives, many folks easily dismissed them as pranks by Morpheus, the god of sleep and dreams. But, believe me, it is beyond pranksterism by this primordial deity.
Spiritual husbands are spouses married to physical women in the spirit world. In this part of the world where desperate mothers are blessed with female children by some deities on the surface of the earth or underneath the seas or rivers, it is believed that such kids are forbidden from getting married let alone bearing children in their lifetime on earth. Where such women defy the rule and get married, their husbands become attack targets.
The spirit husbands come around at night as incubuses to perform their conjugal duties with the women married to them in the spirit world. The lives of the physical husbands are not even safe. They are exposed to all manner of dangers. Some even lose their lives in a competition they did not bargain for. It requires a serious battle to deliver such women from the grips of the spiritual husbands.
It is common to see pretty ladies wallowing in spinsterhood. Most girls who are pretty, it is believed, usually come from the spirit world, covenanted to spiritual spouses. If you see a beautiful lady that has remained unmarried for far too long, do not jump to conclusions that she is proud or too choosy. It could be that she is bearing on her forehead, a spiritual label reading: “I am not available”, “I am already taken,” etc.
If such ladies defy the spiritual orders and manage to get married or are allowed to get married, they would not be permitted to conceive let alone bear children. If they do, such kids would not survive, leaving the women to contend with “abiku” stigma. Anyone whose wife is fond of moaning in her sleep, chances are that she is having a nice time with an incubus spouse.
As for men who are sourced from the spirit world, and they are few, the spirit wives would be out to torment the earthly or physical spouses. Such men might not be able to impregnate their wives. The succubus spouses would see to that. They can only be free through deliverance by true men of God that are as available as a cock with teeth!
So much for spiritual wives and husbands. Today, we are going to be concerned with the phenomenon of spiritual fathers. These fathers are not from underneath the seas; neither are they lodged inside the trunks of iroko trees. No, they are found in our churches. Early in the week, my attention was drawn to a video of a South African cleric whose preachment on Tik Tok left my jaw literally on the ground for an unusually long time. I had to thank God his message did not hit me at an abattoir where a battalion of flies would have found refuge in my mouth! I tell you.
The cleric took his fellow men of God to the cleaners, berating them for supplanting biological parents with spiritual fathers and brainwashing their congregants to honour the latter with their resources at the expense of the former.
Spiritual fatherhood is a creation of Pentecostal pastorpreneurs intended to reap where they did not sow. As espoused by the South African pastor, clerics that brainwash their congregants to turn their backs on their biological parents are practitioners of witchcraft using their churches as covens.
Using the tree as an analogy, he described the biological parents as the roots which the children must water in order to sustain their growth and continue to bear fruits, failing which the trees would wither, their progress would slow down or grind to a halt completely and then they would blame their misfortunes on bewitchment by imaginary foes.
The angry cleric cited the scripture to buttress the bitter truth which Nigerian clerics would never preach. The Bible says children should honour their fathers and mothers so that their days may be long. In other words, the secret of long life is to honour your biological parents. He said the prayers of biological parents are more potent and acceptable to God than those of these spiritual versions, many of whom are not even called by Him.
He condemned a situation where a man would give a miserable R200 cash to his parents and shell 10 per cent of his earnings to the church and by extension the pastor. They do so in the belief that the remaining 90 per cent would be protected from the devourers and serve as a guarantee for their income sources.
It is a common topic mouthed from the pulpits from time to time that if you do not pay your tithes, things would be tight for you. That is a homophonic fraud. It is a strategy employed by the pastors to clean up the stew in their plates with dry bread.
A relation who is a dyed-in-the-wool tither was robbed along with other passengers on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway a few years ago. The first thing that came out of her mouth was: “…And I pay my tithes ooo!”
Tithing in this dispensation of grace is a scam. It is not recognised in the New Testament. Even Prophet Abraham, referred to in the Old Testament as the original tither, did so once and for all from the spoils of war. And he did it of his own volition.
Here is a typical instance of a spiritual father reaping where he did not sow. A family friend in Jos narrated to me how their first son, trained to become a medical doctor, was lost to the church. The young man had gone to Calabar for his youth service. At the end of the exercise, he ended up with a lady that caught his fancy. No thanks to her culinary skills which helped her to navigate her way to the boy’s heart through his tummy.
Eventually, the two lovebirds got married.
The doctor’s biological parents thought it was time for them to begin to reap the fruits of their (hard) labour that lasted for many years including five years at the medical school. How wrong they were! The doctor’s spouse got brainwashed by the senior pastor of her Pentecostal church. She, in turn, succeeded in uprooting him from the Catholic system where he was born into and nurtured until he got married to the Calabar girl.
Incidentally, the pastor of the church was also of Calabar descent. The parents of the doctor watched helplessly and in disbelief as their son paid more attention to his spiritual father who was wallowing in opulence. Ministering their substances to the spiritual father was like pouring water into the Atlantic Ocean.
Women are the most gullible in this regard. Or could they be under a spell? Some of these men of God cannot be trusted. There are those who operate with powers sourced from the world of darkness. When Satan wanted to get to the First Couple in the Garden of Eden, he went through Eve. The foxy spiritual fathers know this too and they exploit it to their benefit. It is sad that most men have not learnt from Adam’s folly till this moment.
Some animals are more responsible and humane than humans. Or how does one explain the Yoruba clique that says, “When bush rats grow old, their offspring generously offer their breasts to them for sucking”? Anyone who does not possess the bush rat sense and offer his or her milk-rich breasts to their biological parents is, to borrow the words of the South African cleric, worse than an infidel. And there are millions of such infidels held captive all over the country.
Clem Oluwole is the Managing Editor of Blueprint Newspapers in Abuja.
