By Banji Ayoola
There can be no reconciliation between two human beings following parallel lines that can never meet; between two who stand back to back, each following a chosen path in which he is convinced.
For reconciliation to be genuine, justified and helpful, there must be a meeting point, a common basis. This meeting point is the conviction.
For any genuine reconciliation to be possible at all, there must be a voluntary, honest, and most serious examination of one’s inner life, of one’s conviction, of one’s path.
And if after serious weighing and examining, this is found to be a deficient conviction, a true human being will, in humility, dump his deficient, present conviction and embrace the old one, from which he had ignorantly allowed himself to stray.
This implies that he has to change deep from within, abandon his present conviction, and embrace the conviction he formerly held, his former path from which he had diverted, and thus reconcile himself with his former conviction, his former path.
But this does not happen overnight. It is a serious work.
The cries of ‘Hossana’ today’, ’Crucify him’ tomorrow have no place here. Nor the frivolous deceptions popular among today’s human beings, which we often indulge for the purpose of achieving mere earthly aims of acquiring power or wealth.
The issue here is more serious. Here the inner life, which truly determines one’s path, one’s salvation or destruction, is involved.
The questions are: Is the person now to be reconciled with really convinced in the old path he claimed to follow, or he seemed to follow?
Or was his so called conviction in the old path genuine?
As to provide the only basis for a meaningful reconciliation with the other person, the other party, who all along has been faithfully following the old path, striving honestly without compromise, to live in his conviction?
If the answer in either, or both cases is negative, if the basis for true reconciliation does not exist, it is better the two parties keep to their separate paths.
