ARTICLES

 

The Postcolonial Eternal Day: A Pentecostal Psychotheology of Everyday God's Victory - "... a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (2 Peter 3:8)

 

 

Chammah Judex Kaunda

University of the Western Cape

 

 

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ABSTRACT

The primary objective of this article is to formulate a Pentecostal psychotheology centered on achieving triumph in everyday life within the context of the postcolonial eternal day. To accomplish this, the article employs metaphorical analysis as a tool to scrutinize the content of God's Victory Prayer, a prayer that is recited daily by the congregation of the Bethel City Church International (BCCI) located in Ndola, Zambia. This particular approach facilitates a critical discourse that amalgamates positive psychology and theology from a realist vantage point. The intent is not to establish the efficacy of the daily prayer, but rather to delve into the intricacies of constructing a potential Pentecostal psychotheology by focusing on the therapeutic aspects embedded in BCCI'sproclamations of healing (catharsis). The analysis how God's Victory Prayer can serve as a tool for BCCI's members to consciously confront the challenges posed by the postcolonial eternal day. Furthermore, the prayer assists them in approaching these challenges with agency and realism, thereby enabling them to effectively perceive meaningful strategies and seize the latent possibilities inherent in each day.

Keywords: Zambia; The postcolonial eternal day; Pentecostal psychotheology; Bethel City Church International (BCCI); God's Victory Prayer; Postcolonial trauma

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Introduction: Dreading the day

Humiliation and traumatisation are the incredible conditions that characterise the postcolonial era in Zambia. Zambian people are constantly looking for psychological resources to help them confront and face everyday postcolonial trauma which has relegated them to experiencing life in itself as the fullness of death. According to Olaniyan (2004), the "'postcolonial incredible' inscribes that which cannot be believed; that which is too improbable, astonishing, and extraordinary to be believed. The incredible is not simply a breach, but an outlandish infraction of 'normality' and its limits. If 'belief,' as faith, confidence, trust, and conviction, underwrites the certainty and tangibility of institutions and practices of social exchange, the incredible dissolves all such props of stability, normality, and intelligibility (and therefore authority) and engenders social and symbolic crisis" (Olaniyan, 2004:2). Postcolonial eternal trauma has become a de-rhythm of every day with its deeply entrenched, negating forces ever lurking and encroaching in the shadows of the day, inflicting terror, helplessness, and hopelessness. Many people dread the dawn of each new day and wish they lived in perpetual slumber. Fear of the day has become a lived anxiety in response to the humiliation, hopelessness, and dehumanisation embodied in the day. It brings nothing but postcolonial eternalisation of the day. It is a life suspended in nothingness and always lived in the loop of one and the same day - what I describe as the postcolonial eternal day in which people are zombified as the living dead; the metaphor of a lived judgement day.

In this article, I seek to construct a Pentecostal psychotheology of everyday victory over the postcolonial eternal day. I employ metaphorical analysis of a daily prayer, God's Victory Prayer (hereafter, the daily prayer), prayed by the members of Apostle Robert Bwalya's Bethel City Church International (BCCI) in Ndola, Zambia (Bwalya, ND:44-45). I will discuss the methodological approach in the third section of this article. The intention is to bring into dialogue positive psychology and theology from a realist perspective without seeking to prove whether the daily prayer works or not, but to explore the contours for constructing a possible Pentecostal psychotheology in BCCI's declaring cure (catharsis,) as confrontation with what can metaphorically be described as the postcolonial eternal day. I interrogate the notion of the postcolonial eternal day extensively in the next section. The focus of the daily prayer, as demonstrated in section four, is constructing daily auto-narratives as an agential and spiritual response to the "timelessness, meaninglessness," the annihilated and ontologically fictionised postcolonial self (Pizer, 2016:91). This is a form of resistance against complete erasure and part of the search to regain some connection with the real and gain some control over the "onflow of time, including the possibility of meaningfulness and agency and continuity of the self as a narrator, witness, or member of a community with some expectable order" (Pizer, 2016:91). The question is, how does the daily prayer help us to formulate a Pentecostal psychotheology of everyday victory in the postcolonial eternal day?

 

The postcolonial eternal day

When Zambia became independent in 1964, there was a general sigh of relief among the people; hope of a new beginning; a fresh birth of possibilities. Many looked forward to a Zambian government that would create conditions which allow all to have access to the public resources for transforming their lives with dignity. However, despite the immense natural resources, postcolonial Zambia has been inescapably marked by misery, material deprivation, disease, and chaos. The hope for abundant life for all that was embedded in the struggle for liberation from colonialism, has yielded nothing but a sense of hollowness, an abyss of shattered dreams, and landscapes of despair. The excitement of independence was short-lived, as the nation swiftly fell into the trap of neo-colonialisation with its corruption and oppressive ethos. Most Zambians feel they are victims of the liberation (Kaunda, 2019). The foundational liberationists - Kenneth David Kaunda and Frederick Jacob Titus Chiluba - who people hoped would bring about just liberation, became oppressors or neo-colonisers. Zambia is still characterised by existential trans-colonisation. One of the famous Zambian gospel singers, Nathan Nyirenda, released a song of lamentation in 2006 titled, Mwe Makufi [My Knees]. He sings:

My God, hear my cry for help,

Suffering, hunger, and famine

Fill our nation's landscape

Agony and sorrow,

Poverty and materially impoverished

Pour like the latter rain

Thoughts of suffering are written on the faces of both humans and animals alike

[. . .] we work like slaves and donkeys from dawn till dusk

Is it because of our black skin?

Or we've inherently low intellectual capacity?

I have struggled my Father, explain to me.¹

The expectations and hopes of many Zambians have been crushed by great cynicism and frustration. The Zambian writer and poet Charles Mwewa (2023: xiii) queries: "Are we better off than we were before independence?" He laments:

We have done much to quell and curb repression and the rule of emergence regimes; we have instituted a working two-tenure presidential regime; and we have removed excesses in the quartered regime vis-a-vis our copper mining sector. But we still are tormented by the huge number of our people living in abject poverty, with hunger in rural areas, with lack of or poor and inadequate education, and of course, our precious people dying from curable diseases. From whatever angle you look at it ... politics aside, we have a long way to go to create conditions that favor a much more magnanimous and prosperous society. Zambia is still bleeding internally. (Mwewa, 2023: xiii)

The rise of Zambian Pentecostalism as a spirituality of confrontation with existential negativities or anti-life forces or forces of death, is connected to the challenges of the postcolonial eternal day. Nimi Wariboko demonstrates how African Pentecostalism in its confrontation with postcolonial trauma has often reproduced and perpetuated it through the epistemology of "it doesn't make sense, but it makes the spirit". Wariboko (2023:106) argues that the perennial desire for miracles as the answer to postcolonial trauma is "a threat not only to human flourishing but also to the polity". Wariboko describes how many Pentecostals, in their fight against postcolonial monsters, have themselves become monsters. In the Friedrich Nietzsche imagination, they gazed too long into the abyss. The abyss gazed also into them, colonising their souls, which have become the personification of the abyss. Many of them are themselves a trauma, an affliction to many Zambian people.

As indicated above, my focus in this article is not to delineate the kind of trauma experienced in postcolonial Zambia but rather to construct a psychotheology from BCCI's declaring cure (catharsis,) as confrontation with the postcolonial eternal day. I first heard about the idea of postcolonial eternal day from Apostle Robert Bwalya when I visited his church in 2016. He handed God's Victory Prayer to me and told me that this prayer is prayed daily for confronting what seems to be perpetual trauma among many Christians in his church. I did not understand what he said at the time. But the idea kept nagging in mind and, over a period of time, I have finally made sense of what he meant by the postcolonial eternal day. In Apostle Bwalya's imagination, the postcolonial eternal day unfolds as a demonic force that counters "the day the Lord has made" as an inexplicable abyss of timelessness. It is a suspension of being and becoming, to merely existing because one is accidently already existing, a noncreative quest for nothingness, a devasting threat of a total void and "emptiness, meaninglessness, haunting proximity, and heightened vulnerability to sudden death or disability" (Wariboko, 2023:120). The postcolonial eternal day is in itself a demonic traumatic womb - a traumatic affliction, the sickness unto death, a perennial wound, and an actual suffering of many people.² It is an incarceration, a lived hell. As womb it cocooned the postcolonial societies as graveyards of zombies and the living dead or lived death - life-in-death and death-in-life - which the postcolonial day now embodies as personified trauma. According to Mbembe, the postcolonial eternal day has become a deeply entrenched, demonic system which ever creates "death-worlds, that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead" (Mbembe, 2019:92). It is the shadow of death that many have to walk through without a choice. Here, there is no stench of death, for everything is death.

Frantz Fanon (1952/2008, 1961/2004) already underlined Black psyche trauma and critiqued its "invisible" causal structure of colonialisation from a psychoanalytic framework. Fanon's (1952/2008:77) theory of colonial trauma integrated the effects of systemic and symbolic violent oppression. He argues that the white coloniser "inflicted an unmistakable wound" on African people. This colonial psyche trauma relocated Africans in a fictionalised ontology in which they fundamentally ceased to exist (Fanon, 1952/2008:77). Postcolonial Africa is a continent in search of the cure for the Fanonian unmistakable wound, which could be described as transgenerational trauma, which is "transmitted and somehow transfigured" (Kearney, 2016:78) and seems to have metamorphosed from psyche wound to personified postcolonial eternal day. The unmistakable wound has been amplified by the postcolonial era into what is described as everyday postcolonial trauma.

Trauma has been defined as an experience "not located in the past, but instead is located in the gap between the occurrence of the traumatic event and a subsequent awakening to it. The suffering does not solely lie in the violence of trauma's impact (in its happening) but in the ways in which that happening, that occurrence, was not known or grasped at that time" (Rambo, 2010:20). However, the ongoing postcolonial trauma in Africa could be captured in what Jacques Derrida (1986:268) describes as "unthinkable, irrepresentable, un-localizable" non-spatiality. It is an anesthetised awareness in a zombified state of nowhere-ness, never grasping anything, including the self, but experiencing the totality of violence, where "the trauma's impact (in its happening), and the ways in which that happening, that occurrence", is always outside time, trans-human, beyond known, the mind totally locked to ungraspable experience. We are dealing with the impossibilities of the possibility of figuring out what is existence and what is not existence. It can only be described as the postcolonial eternal day, happening again and again and again in the perpetual now. This is a more-than-human trauma which Engelbert Mveng (1994:156) classifies as "anthropological poverty" - a pathological split or broken imaginaire in being and becoming-in-the-world and being and becoming-the-self - a thingification or zombification. It is transgenerational trauma because it is both trans-ontological trauma³ - the manifestation of existential horror, and terror - traumatic confrontations with reality (Boaz, 2014). It is "the death that happened in the form of an interruption in the continuity of being" but never experienced outside the burden of the body (Winnicott, 2018:93). A form of waking up dead but still "alive-dead" in an alternative perpetual day. Maurice Blanchot (2000:5) relates this to "the encounter of death with death"; the fear of the self as a black spectral presence in the world. This could be described as horrific and terrifying confrontations in every sphere of life - the black self as the very reality of negation. This general anthropological trauma's impact is on political-socio-economic level as the trauma of "what we have", on religious-cultural-relational level as the trauma of "who we are", and on the becoming level as the trauma of "what we would become"(Mveng, 1994:156). Kã Mana concludes that there is an existential wound, an ontological breach, and radical split in the flow of reality in contemporary African experience. The "natural wholeness has been broken, a natural unity fragmented, and natural relations impaired" (Dedji, 2001:158). A traumatic confrontation with reality always leads to traumatic existence or being-and-becoming-in-the world.

It is a gap in the passage of time, a split in the cosmic psychic, a void in existence, a trauma in culture, an obliteration of the ubuntu ("I am not because we are not"). The affliction or the suffering of existence. It is in the inability to grasp where the mysteries of postcolonial trauma lie. The very fact of seeing the story of one's country in the story of another African country generates traumatic experience beyond the reach of the mind. Trauma does not happen in the past, is not experienced in the present or in between, it is experienced as nowhere-ness. It radically obliterates time and space and relocates everything in a radical hell of nowhere-ness - inhabited only by everything that negates and contradicts life: creepy bogeymen, villains, monsters, demons, and all non-alliable anti-life forces that project their own fears, hopelessness, and negations into the traumatised souls and voraciously feed on them.

Hence, the postcolonial trauma remains a challenge to African theology - to account for the excess of colonial death which can only be understood as a new postcolonial eternal day. The challenge is to account for what has remained after the colonial shattering of indigenous frameworks that shaped and oriented African people and communities in the world (Rambo, 2010:8). Today, we talk the language of decolonisation or postcolonisation, yet in actual fact most African people experience life and reality as being trapped in a perpetual postcolonial eternal day. How do you preach the gospel of Christ to the living dead? Can these bones live? How do you articulate the salvation of the postcolonial eternal day? How do you construct a theology of redemption for facing the dreadful day? How do you talk about the Judgment Day when a judgement day is experienced by many as a daily reality? How do you perform exorcism when the demon is the eternal day in which everyone is trapped with no clear exit points?

 

On methodological orientation

The postcolonial eternal day as trauma has an unimaginably damaging effect on the psychological and social well-being of many African people. To pass through the shadow of postcolonial day requires an impossible psychotheology of the day that can empower the masses with positive psychology for nourishing an impossible courageous attitude that allows subjectivity, "creativity and freedom to manifest, disrupts the hierarchical distribution of places, and makes space for persons to creatively resist obstacles to human flourishing" (Wariboko, 2023:117). Apostle Bwalya emphasises that the daily recital of God's Victory Prayer is a form of positive psychotheological realism which seeks to reorient everyday human imaginations and actions into liberatory principles for interrogating and subverting the postcolonial eternal day in search of reconstituting 'the day the Lord has made' in the name of a flourishing future. Empirical studies conducted in positive psychology show that an everyday positive outlook on life rather than focusing on the negatives improves human well-being (Seligman, 2016; Seligman, Ernst, Gillham, Reivich, and Linkins, 2009; Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2014). Apostle Bwalya's daily prayer is about an everyday positive outlook on life. Hence, it must be prayed every morning to provide believers with a form of orientation and a framework for thinking about the various challenges of the day and remain positive about the possibility of good things arising amidst impossible circumstances. This daily prayer focuses on the day ahead. It is constructed as daily cathartic mind-orienting prayer for confronting the postcolonial eternal day itself and not necessarily the eschatological desire. The emphasis is: "[p]lease pray this prayer daily" (Bwalya, ND:44-45). No empirical research has been done regarding the impact of the daily prayer and how it shapes the everyday life of members of the church who take it seriously. This offers an opportunity for important future research on empirical studies on prayer in positive psychology, which tends to suggest that prayer has potential for health and well-being depending on the believers' beliefs and commitment to positive prayer.

My focus here it to analyse God's Victory Prayer itself from a position of theological and positive psychology, to construct a Pentecostal psychotheology of everyday victory or psychotheology of "the day". This daily prayer was created to function as an everyday apparatus and framework for orienting and improving believers' reality outlook and encouraging them to work consciously and realistically on how they can contribute positively to improving their lives and encounters with others, and possibly, flourishing. Positive psychology pays attention to how individuals make sense of their daily lives and the virtues that help them to confront their daily challenges with a positive attitude.

Research has shown that prayer in relation to health beliefs of an individual is a psychological health asset (e.g., positive emotions, life satisfaction, optimism, life purpose) and is often associated with possible psychological and mental health (Spilka and Ladd, 2013). Some studies demonstrate that prayer has positive psychological benefits for improving well-being and reducing depression, anxiety, or stress (Bolier, Haverman, Westerhof, Riper, Smit, and Bohlmeijer, 2013; Carr, Cullen, Keeney, Canning, Mooney, Chinseallaigh, and O'Dowd, 2021), to contributing to a positive outlook on life (Kour, El-Den, and Sriratanaviriyakul, 2019), to reducing distress in people diagnosed with clinical disorders (Chakhssi, Kraiss, Sommers-Spijkerman, and Bohlmeijer, 2018), or even promoting resilience and hope (Platt, Kannangara, Tytherleigh, and Carson, 2020). It can be argued that positive psychology practices have constructive impacts on people's everyday lives such as reducing stress and anxiety, increasing resilience, and promoting self-growth, well-being, and quality of life. However, scholars are not conclusive on whether prayer as positive psychology interventions can improve physical, intellectual, and mental health, and contribute to healthy relationships, forming of good work ethics, and meaningful economic development of an individual or nation (Edwards and Cooper, 1988; Vázquez, Hervás, Rahona, and Gómez, 2009; Park, Peterson, Szvarca, Vander Molen, Kim, Collon, 2014). This gap remains in religion studies and theology, particularly in African studies. This study points to many gaps in the interdisciplinary approach (especially in dialogue with psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy) to African religious and theological studies.

The spiritual-theological approach to everyday positive psychology is crucial given a common understanding of spirituality as "a universal set of possibilities, vast and unbound, actual and hypothetical" (W ariboko, 2023:15). Spiritual modes of thinking and engaging the world are dominant in many African contexts. Spirituality has a pervasive influence on psychological and social conditions of many people (Ellis and Ter Haar, 2007). Empirical evidence suggests that "it is largely through religious ideas that Africans think about the world today, and that religious ideas provide them" with everyday critical epistemological resources and pragmatical tools for engaging and making sense of the postcolonial eternal day (Ellis and Ter Haar, 2004:2). Therefore, scholars propose that the religious ideas held by so many Africans need to be taken seriously and considered in their own terms in the parade of social sciences and humanities and especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). I make use of metaphorical analysis of Apostle Bwalya's daily prayer to extract meaning and construct a Pentecostal psychotheology of the day.

As indicated in the introduction, in many African societies the metaphorical and literal languages are not regarded as opposites, but relate to the quest for maintaining the intricate balance of cosmic life. Life is fundamentally an unresolvable riddle. Life in itself is not primarily about transmitting a specific meaning, or seeking to mean something, but rather to expressing an enigma veiled within the material reality (Scholem, 1966). It is an invitation to enter the realm of curiosity rather than to resolve the riddle. In this divine riddle, it is the material world that gives the spiritual realm a wealth of meanings. As Gershom Scholem (1966:31-32) argues, reality is "itself without meaning, it is yet quintessential interpretability". Hence, this analysis is fundamentally a positive psychological realism which gives attention to the radical intertwinement of the spiritual and material in making sense of the psychic facts and factors at work in the world (Yong, 2002); Yong (ed.), 2009; Yong and Smith (eds), 2010; Smith, 2010; Yong, 2011). Scholars are increasingly demonstrating that there is no outside and no inside to reality for "the outer reveals the inner even as the inner directs, shapes, and informs the outer manifestations" (Yong, 2011:88). This means these cultural and embodied psychic factors "permeate all human activity. They are 'real' with 'real effect.' They operate in the individual and in the collective" (Rollins, 2003:298).

The above discussion is important in the context of psychotheology as many Africans perceive the universe as "both simple and complex" and yet "embraced as a totality" of both the real and unreal things, whether or not any human being knows them (Bediako, 1995:92). This includes all material things - all reality constituted of themselves by their own essence and all things (the real, possible, or imaginary). The imaginary exists, not necessarily because it is real in itself, but because it has direct or indirect influence on humanity and human conception of the world. This means God, angels, witchcraft, ghosts, Satan, demons are not merely metaphors but are substantive reality - things with presence in the world. They are functionally or substantively present in the universe in so far as they have relationships with human beings. For example, a child's imaginary friend is real to the extent that the friend can give a certain meaning and orientation (even if it just brings fear - fear is real) in the child's interaction with the world and other human beings. Anything that has direct or indirect influence in the world is real, not of itself but in its impact or influence in the world.

Hence, in many African systems of thought there is no dichotomy between the reality of the spirit world (metaphorical order) and the reality of the material cosmos (literal order). The material world is a partially real anteriority, and the world of human construction is a real constitutive of all existence, and thus even imaginary and spiritual things are not only sources of meaning, but rather have intrinsic meaning in themselves (Dussel, 1977). This totality is present in every concrete human act. The world of today is what it is because of the contribution of the otherworld presence-things. These presence-things cannot be exorcised out of this-worldly existence. Hence, Klaus Nurnberger (2016) is right - whatever has real consequences in the real world is real and must be taken as real and seriously. This is because the human has the potential to interact with the integrated presence-things in a trans-cognitively constructed virtual reality that constantly becomes real and something objective to the extent that specific beliefs allow. Meaning and authentic existence arise out of the belief that presence-things have no inside and outside. Human beings are emotionally and intellectually dependent on the existence of all presence-things. Therefore, this article gives serious attention to the cultural nature of human embodiment as the shaper of the "very possibilities for conceptualization and categorization" of reality (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999:19).

I now turn to analysing God's Victory Prayer and underlining some possible contours for a Pentecostal psychotheology of everyday victory.

 

Pentecostal psychotheology: God's Victory Prayer

The focus of this article is not to demonstrate whether or not Apostle Robert Bwalya's God's Victory Prayer could have positive effects on health and well-being but to construct a Pentecostal psychotheology of the day, or everyday victory. The prayer reads :

Dear Heavenly Father, I pray this prayer in the power of the Holy Spirit. In the name of Jesus Christ, that today is my day. It is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. Today, I will become the best God created me to be. I bind, rebuke, cast out and bring to no effect all spirits of division, discord, disunity, anger, wrath, murder, criticism, complaining, pride, envy, jealousy, gossip, slander, evil speaking, lying, false teaching, false gifts, poverty, fear of lack, murmuring spirit, hindering spirit, retaliatory spirit, deceiving spirit, religious spirit, occult spirit, witchcraft spirits (including Jezebel, Delilah, Queen of Heaven and Apollyon), and spirits of antichrist.

I bind and break all curses that have been spoken against me. I bless those who curse me, and pray blessings on those who are spiteful to me. I bind all judgments made against me and judgements I have made against others. I bind the power of negative words from others, and I bind and render useless all prayers not inspired by the Holy Spirit whether psychic, soul force, witchcraft or counterfeit tongues that have been prayed against me.

I am God's child. God is for me and not against me. I resist the devil. No weapon formed against me shall prosper. I put on the whole armor of God. I take authority over this day, in Jesus' name. Let it be prosperous for me, let me walk in the love of Jesus.

The Holy Spirit leads me and guides me today. I discern between the righteous and the wicked. I take authority over this day in Jesus' name. Let it be prosperous for me, let me walk in the love of Jesus ... I take authority over Satan, all his demons, and those people who are influenced by him. I declare Satan is under my feet and shall remain there all day.

I am the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. I am God's property. Satan, you are bound and you've no authority over my family, my mind, my body, my home and my finances. I confess that I am healed and whole. I flourish, I have a long life, stable, durable, incorruptible, fruitful, virtuous, full of peace, patience and love. Whatever I set my hands to do shall prosper. God supplies all my needs.

God, I pray for the ministry you have for me. Anoint me God for all you have called me to do for you. I call forth divine appointments, open doors of opportunity, God ordained encounters and ministry positions.

I claim a hedge of protection around my life, spouse and children (names) throughout the day. I ask you God, in the name of Jesus, that you dispatch angels to surround my spouse, children and me today and put them throughout my house and round our possessions, and our bodies. In the name of Jesus, I pray that you protect me and my family, friends from any demonic or physical or mental attacks. I ask this prayer in the name of Jesus. AMEN.

This prayer is rooted in the assumption that it encompasses not only people's actions but also their psychological well-being and their agential attitude or consciousness towards the reality they face. This includes being alert to agential concerns, which serve as a prerequisite for engaging with reality in a transformative manner on a daily basis. The trinity serves as a structured foundation for reframing reality, accessing the seemingly impossible, and deriving the motivating power to assert one's vitality and to act in defiance of the negating influence of the postcolonial eternal day in the world.

The trinitarian God is perceived as the framework of possibility - the potential for embracing a life-affirming way of existence, a time that celebrates life, the emergence of a new creation, a fresh way of living, and the potential to shape a novel human experience in Christ, following the era of Atlantic slavery and the grievous disruptions caused by colonialism. As Eric Santner (2001:9) argues, Apostle Bwalya's perspective seems to encompass the belief that "in our daily lives, we are often not receptive to this presence [of God's transformative action that dwells within us], to our existence in the 'midst of life.' Daily life presents opportunities to retreat from, to defend against, its inherent connection to vitality in the world. It includes the potential for, so to speak, not truly being present, for losing touch with the presence of the Other. The energies that constitute our connection to vitality in the world are, in other words, subject to numerous alterations and transformations." The postcolonial eternal day can never obliterate life. Instead, it scorches minds, much like a searing iron, obscuring the ability to perceive life (2 Cor. 4:4).

The initial two segments of the daily prayer are dedicated to unveiling the spirituality inherent in the postcolonial eternal day, achieved by acknowledging the framework of possibility: "Dear Heavenly Father, I offer this prayer through the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit. In the name of Jesus Christ, I recognize that today is my day. It is the day crafted by the Lord, and in it, I will find reasons to rejoice and be glad."

Hence, for this congregation, the daily prayer can only be understood in the context of Zambia. It is contextual - focusing on concrete psychic factors that people encounter in their daily lives. These are the things they fear and are anxious about. The day is constructed as uncharted territory, and believers can only enter it through the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit, affirming, "The Holy Spirit leads me and guides me today." The Holy Spirit serves as the empowering resource to confront the unknown or mysterious aspects that the postcolonial eternal day embodies. At the core of the postcolonial eternal day lies Satan and demons (spirits). It's almost as if the postcolonial eternal day itself represents satanic death, or the essence of the day is synonymous with the principle of death. The concepts of Satan and demons hold significant importance in this prayer. However, these systems or entities are not to be understood as anti-life forces or a negation of God's presence in the world. Instead, Satan and demons embody a unified principle of death, which cannot be fully grasped through the sphere of logic alone, nor can it be exhausted through metaphorical or literal explanations. The death principle lies beyond the scope of logical explanations. It is the essence of death within the postcolonial eternal day, a concept that defies complete articulation due to its surpassing of logical boundaries. Therefore, metaphorical explanation becomes meaningful as it creates space for immanent possibilities in the world that go beyond rational understanding. The death principle represents the very trauma that manifests within the postcolonial eternal day. It serves as the systematic anti-life force of outlandish, unfathomable, and inexplicable negation, opposition, contradiction, and eternal non-beingness. The death principle points to something beyond this worldly realm, and metaphorically, Satan and demons can symbolize various aspects within this world. This includes another interpretation as "the inner aspect of material or tangible manifestations of power," as argued by Walter Wink (1984:104, italics added). According to Wink, "Satan is the actual power that forms around collective idolatry, injustice, or inhumanity, a power that waxes or wanes depending on the extent of collective resistance to higher values." The death principle "confronts us with a singular domain, personal and collective, internal and external, archetypal and institutional. It is the experience of the forces of fragmentation's unity, and not religious obscurantism, that prompts us to acknowledge the Prince of demons and his kingdom of death" (Wink, 1986:68). Therefore, the postcolonial eternal day constitutes a comprehensive structure of inexplicable woundedness and an irreducible cosmic trauma. This very trauma exists within the divine itself.

Hence, the daily prayer is about declaring cure by engaging the day with assurance and determination that divine agency and power has been extended to humans, and humanly constructed understandings of life must be called into question. The unswerving self-assurance is simple, "Today, I will become the best God created me to be." The Pentecostal belief that the divine agency has been distributed through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit means that believers are ontologically intertwined; their individual actions are inherently interconnected through their participation in the name of Jesus Christ. Therefore, their agencies are also divinely intertwined. In Christ believers no longer act autonomously but share in the divine agential nature together as pneumatologically entangled subjects. Hence, the daily prayer is not individualistic, as it looks on the surface, but a shared approach to the postcolonial eternal day. Declaring cure as one voice in the morning strengthens the whole local church to function not as individuals but as a local body of Christ.

The everyday prayer of victory is designed to help church members consciously confront the day and in agential realism seize the possibilities locked in the day. According to the prayer, this requires the person praying to "discern between the righteous and the wicked". Everyday victory is conceived as discernable building blocks to a successful life. Instead of looking for abstract victory in the future, the focus is the management of the immediate experiences of the day. Whether you win or lose today, you can always start again tomorrow. "This is the day the Lord has made" - the power to control the day is the power to control every day, every month, and every year and the entire life. Recognising the forces of negations and factors that hamper progress and need to be resisted every day and re-setting the mind for victory. "In the name of Jesus, I pray that you protect me and my family, friends from any demonic or physical or mental attacks." This daily victory prayer seeks to provide congregants with the empowering capacity to imagine the unfolding of the day from morning to evening.

This is what I have classified as Pentecostal psychotheology of the day. It is about transforming how people live each day in order to change how they live throughout their lives. People do not live a year at once, they live a day at a time and days make a year, years make a lifetime. I think this is what the scriptural injunction means, "A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day" (2 Pet. 3:8). The daily prayer gives people an opportunity to take full responsibility for the outcomes of the day but translating a thousand years into the actions of today. It is a more viable way of transforming a thousand years into a meaningful today. Taking a positive outlook of the day by cultivating the right beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and behaviours, and meaningful actions. This is what it means to "take authority over this day in Jesus' name. Let it be prosperous for me, let me walk in the love of Jesus ... I take authority over Satan, all his demons, and those people who are influenced by him. I declare Satan is under my feet and shall remain there all day." The authority of Jesus over the day is a shared authority with all other local believers; it only exists in relationship with others. Therefore, "I bless those who curse me, and pray blessings on those who are spiteful to me."

The daily prayer focuses on constructing an effective system of personal life through a collection of daily habits to define and create a positive spiritually intelligent outlook on life. This positive spiritual intelligence is the capacity for mental robustness and emotional creativity and the ability to discern circumstances and act wisely and compassionately while maintaining inner and external serenity and equilibrium (Wigglesworth, 2006). In the prayer, it is recognition that "I am the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. I am God's property." And this is key to flourishing because positive human action binds the death principle. The prayer declares, "Satan you are bound and you ve no authority over my family, my mind, my body, my home and my finances. I confess that I am healed and whole."

The psychotheological grounding of this declaration is not an abstract future, instead, it is about making the most of the congregants' day. The daily prayer itself also helps them to evaluate their experiences of the day and discern how they can engage the new day. Andy Core (2014:19) writes, "Nothing in your life gets better until your daily patterns do. But, when your daily patterns get better, everything gets better." This embodies a psychotheology for changing the day - but only for those who take it seriously and consistently evaluate their actions in the light of the prayer. It seeks to promote everyday transformation of the way believers think, feel, or act - making every decision intentional to focus and refocus their imaginations and patterns of thinking, refreshing their motivation, energy, productivity, optimism, and creativity, and creating more rewarding relationships with others. ⁴ The focus is not just on others but on the self in relation to the day and every aspect of only that day. The way people approach and live in the day has implications for their life outlook. You cannot live a flourishing life in a year without paying attention to how you live each day. "I flourish, I have a long life, stable, durable, incorruptible, fruitful, virtuous, full of peace, patience and love. Whatever I set my hands to do shall prosper. God supplies all my needs." It is envisaged that the daily prayer will promote an optimistic outlook on the world so believers can face every day with confidence and contentment knowing that they have set the Lord before them.

Postcolonial trauma is so deeply entrenched in the fabric of everyday life that it can only be confronted as the unfolding of the day. Every day that the Lord has made that is lost contributes to eternalisation of the postcolonial eternal day, making it more complicated than before. Psychotheology assumes that gradual accumulative victory has the potential to guarantee human flourishing in history. It is about taking possession of the day. "Today is my day. It is the day the Lord has made." It is about faith that grasps that the day is God's creation, for realising the fullness of life, is a faith that confronts the day with confidence in achieving something new. Rejoicing and being glad over the day made by God is about concrete achievements through hard work, and positive interactions with the world and other people. It is the celebration of the day well spent.

It also means focusing only on the day as the moral weight of an individual in the community. The "moral weight in this context," according to Kevin Lewis O'Neill (2010: 5), "refers to the shouldering of a burden in the present moment on behalf of the future". It is the capacity to recognise that each person shoulders the burden of transforming their own destiny by changing how they live and approach the day the Lord has made. The day is a gift of God which must be utilised wisely. The believer has to discern how to utilise God's gift, which constantly opens up new possibilities for flourishing. The day is the capacity for ever beginning, or new transformations without ending. It is reality's inherent capacity or power of beginning as the condition of actualising other possibilities (Arendt, 1994:321; Arendt, 1981:6). The day is not simple natural occurrences but relates to a world constituted by immanent action. The ever appearance and disappearance of the day the Lord has made "presuppose[s] a world which is not in constant movement, but whose durability and relative permanence make appearance and disappearance possible'" (Arendt, 1958:96-97, italics added for emphasis). This gift gives humans an always-already new opportunity to act differently for new possibilities. This is the moral weight of humanity. O'Neill explains, "moral weight appears lonely -radically individual - and yet (and with no sense of contradiction) collective: I - not we - am supporting the weight for us - not only me and not just you" (O'Neill, 2010:5 -6). The individual knows for sure that they are not alone, they have the support of the invisible network of their fellow believers who are equally declaring cure that day.

 

Conclusion

In this article, I have developed a Pentecostal psychotheology of everyday triumph within the backdrop of the postcolonial eternal day. This framework is built upon the Prayer of God's Victory, which is recited by the members of Apostle Robert Bwalya's Bethel City Church International (BCCI) in Ndola, Zambia. This approach holds significance as it facilitates a discourse between positive psychology and theology from a realist standpoint. It does not aim to ascertain the efficacy of the daily prayer, but rather endeavors to explore the parameters for formulating a potential Pentecostal psychotheology through BCCI's assertion of healing (catharsis) as a confrontation with the postcolonial eternal day.

I have demonstrated that the daily prayer is formulated to guide church members in consciously facing the day and embracing the inherent possibilities within each day with an agential realism. The term "day" isn't confined to a static form; instead, it embodies an ongoing reality that consistently presents opportunities for divergent actions, all the while acknowledging the pneumatological drive within the believer. The believer becomes the nexus of fresh potentials and a potential new day. Ultimately, it can be inferred that comprehending and practically applying the daily prayer could serve as a form of resistance and faith-infused struggle against the wounds of postcolonialism.

God's Victory Prayer is interwoven with the political, economic, and personal challenges of the Zambian populace. Its purpose is to actualize the Spirit's impulse within believers, fostering a state of "striving, toil, pain, and effort" (Mwewa, 2021:11). The prayer's praxiological essence possesses the potential to propel progress, prosperity, and opposition to the forces of death in politics. It has the potential to act as a catalyst for individual, relational, societal, and political transformation. Believers may come to realize that each day presents a relentless battle against the postcolonial external day. And every victory achieved in a day initiates another struggle, underscoring the necessity of maintaining their moral compass aligned with the ultimate victory that the eschatology brings into the present moment of Zambia. This moral compass inherent in God's Victory Prayer must be regularly revisited to ensure its accuracy, thus continuing to guide "Zambia towards genuine liberation, as independence was merely the first step in this shared journey called ZAMBIA" (Mwewa, 2021:12).

This can be characterized as fostering a culture of positive psychology, which in turn fosters self-accountability and the recognition that each believer bears the responsibility of promoting life-affirming behaviors, attitudes, and mindsets for a more fulfilling existence - not out of obligation, but because the desire to be truly human is the driving force behind actions aimed at societal transformation. The notion of "moral weight" signifies the ability to understand that God's victory for Zambia has already been secured through and assured in Christ. The responsibility of every believer is to shoulder the moral duty of actively participating, accompanying, or struggling alongside God in the journey towards authentic liberation and freedom. This encompasses actualizing the social, relational, political, economic, and national transformation that is already inherent in Christ.

 

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1 My English translation from Bemba.
2 This way of thinking is inspired by Nimi Wariboko's Transcripts of the sacred in Nigeria (2023).
3 These two concepts are distinguished by Martin Heidegger in Being and time (1966). For a detailed discussion of this distinction in trauma studies, see, Holzhey-Kunz (2014).
4 I have done some editing to this quotation (see Core, 2014:7).