Confessions of a reluctant confident messiah¹

Keywords: god, time, depression, music, experience, south africa, cello, freiburg,
hamburg, spiritual, antichrist, psychosomatic, tendonitis, kol nidrei

I summarised my dream in a poem, Exodus, on the CD booklet:

You hear a Song from within
in a language without words,
in a dialect so ancient -
for millennia understanding has eluded you.
Words hindered you from becoming quiet enough to listen.
Longing to escape the tongue that has bound you
ever since you became aware of the Self,
since the time you first said "I",
you embark on a journey to rediscover
the Origin of your Song,
the Source of your Spirit.
Music becomes the pillar of fire
that illuminates your Exodus
to a promised land
where Heaven meets Hell
and All becomes One

My Impossible Dream is that all the aforementioned forms of Apartheid will be crushed so that the human race can re-enter a Paradise, a Rose Garden we have been promising ourselves ever since the Dawn of Man.

Since 1996 my motto in life has been the words of the Spanish philosopher and writer, Miguel de Unamuno: "Only he who attempts the absurd achieves the impossible." To attempt the absurd is exactly what I am about to do. I justify doing so because I believe the only way to show the world how absurd it is, is to confront the world with something even more absurd than itself.

The first time I experienced a magical performance of my own was when I played Max Bruch's Kol Nidrei⁴ during a music competition in the city I grew up, Port Elizabeth, in 1985. I went on stage and came off stage not being able to remember how I played. It was quite a weird experience, but judging from the positive reaction from the audience, it must have been a good one. It is an experience that I have been able to replicate afterwards at only very few critical occasions in my musical career. Looking back today it is clear that these are the magical moments that people call "artistic inspiration". These are the moments that the artist becomes a spiritual medium for the persona of a composition.

Much later, while I was studying music in Freiburg, Germany, I analysed some Fugues by Johan Sebastian Bach for a Bachelor of Music assignment through the University of South Africa. I stood in awe in front of superhuman/genius masterpieces and recognised a similar, but far more superior Force of Devine Inspiration immediately. Ever since that day I was convinced that if God=Love and music is the language of Love, then music, in a Biblical sense, has to be rated equally as the Word of God. I think it was that day that music became a religion to me. This one thought fermented a quest in me to discover the various ways God uses to speak to His children. The question I asked myself was this: "If the Bible is not the only Word of God, what else then can be regarded as the Word of God?"

My quest led me through an adventure, which at times created great difficulties for me. 11 years ago, in 1991 (, after I relocated from Freiburg to Hamburg to continue my education, I was preparing myself for an examination at the music school. For two consecutive days I practised for 11 hours each day. The following day I prepared a typical South African meal for my colleagues at our teacher’s home: Bobotie. While I was cooking I noticed that there was something wrong with my arm. It turned out that I had over-use syndrome or tendonitis in my right arm. I had to stop playing immediately. I could not handle doing nothing and I gradually slipped into a mild depression, which suddenly got worse while I was in Freiburg for acupuncture therapy.

Consequently I spent 5 weeks (July 1991, around the time of a total solar eclipse) in the Morningside Clinic in Sandton, South Africa, diagnosed with severe psychotic depression. The depression got so bad that I started believing that I was the Antichrist. I blamed myself for the Gulf War and all other bad things on the planet. I even blamed myself for Eugene Tereblanche falling off his horse!⁵ I saw my only escape was to take my own life in order to relieve the world of myself. At least 5 times a day I spent time on the roof of the clinic contemplating my own death. Every time I went up there I promised myself not to return to my bed.

This mural of a fatally wounded lioness in the British Museum
is one that I felt very strongly attracted to during the time of my illness.
I became very conscious of the fact that she mirrored
my internal agony when I visited my brother in London,
shortly before I became psychotic.
Coincidently, when I became ill again two years later
I visited her again with my family
shortly before I permanently returned to South Africa in 1993.

Another picture that comforted me
during the time before I became psychotic,
was this painting by William Turner of a steamer
in a painting called: "The Storm".

It took me six months in the loving care of my parents' home to get my health back. I never ever wanted to return to Germany, but subconsciously I knew I had to unravel the mystery of my sudden illness. I had no previous history of depression and nobody in my direct family suffers from depression. Back in Hamburg my teacher told me, though I never practised for 9 months, that my cello playing had improved greatly. Something good had come out of my Agony: I was a better musician!

I joined a charismatic church in Hamburg called Anskar Kirche. I was convinced that my depression was an attack from Satan and I fled in the opposite direction determined never to yield to the destructive force of self-pity again. 18 months after returning to Hamburg for the second time I found myself taking part in a charismatic drive for massive revival. We prayed solidly for 2 weeks each evening for 2 hours: 600 people demanding from God that He should give us tongues of fire, winds that would shake the building and a boldness to go out and proclaim Christ as the Saviour. Nothing happened… no fire, no winds and no boldness.

At the time I was also praying for a personal miracle. Coincidentally, like 2 years before I had had tendonitis for three months in my right arm after cutting wood for a whole afternoon and could not practice my cello. I was also reading for the first time my favourite book: the autobiography of a 19-year old American man called Bruce Olson, who ran away from home to become a missionary amongst the Motilone, then a stone-age tribe in the Amazon jungle. This set of circumstances catapulted me into an orbit of ecstasy. While watching over my teacher’s house,

during a prayer I was overcome by what I then called the Holy Spirit. I experienced a physical sensation, which I can only describe as something like a mild electrical current in both my arms and my face. I felt touched by God. This sensation lasted for half an hour, though it is difficult to say exactly how long I was lying on the floor in ecstasy. (Today I do not have any problem with people saying that this was a self-induced psychosomatic experience. Life is indeed in a way a psychosomatic experience! It does not really matter how one analyses such an experience – all that matters to me is the reality of the experience itself.) I came out of the experience "drunk with the Holy Spirit". The following day my tendonitis was gone. It was the Sunday a week after our 2 weeks of prayer ended and I went to church to give witness of the personal miracle and revival I had experienced. The pastors of Anskar church normally gave opportunity for members of the congregation to give witness of their own experiences related to the topic of the day's sermon. On that day, before the beginning of the service I stepped up to the pastor and calmly asked him to grant me the opportunity to give witness of the revival I experienced to the congregation. He asked me to be seated and I patiently waited throughout the 2-hour service, making eye contact with him every now and then. I waited and waited and finally was never asked to speak.

¹ I titled this article originally in reference to one of my favourite books, Illusions - The adventures of a reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach. I have realized that as long as I feel reluctant about what I would like to do, I will never end up becoming that what I would like to become. This is why I changed the title (18 April 2004).
⁴ Kol Nidre: The Jewish prayer opening the evening service with which Yom Kippur begins.
⁵ The leader of the Afrikaner Weerstands Beweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), an ultra-rightwing organization.

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