God tings
Recently, despite several complaints, I was loped into a conversation about God, a conversation I haven’t had in years and one I most definitely did not want to have in that moment. Re-entering that space was like revisiting a once familiar language and being stumped by verb conjugations and syntactical structures that once felt so familiar.
Religion and I have a very odd relationship.
My father’s a religious fanatic. His fanaticism destroyed everything it touched, it destroyed his chance at making a successful career out of a skill he’d honed for years, it destroyed his marriage and it tore through our family like an Egyptian plague.
I remember the night I got baptised like it was yesterday. I was wearing a pink shirt and my hair looked a mess.
But more than that, I remember the day I decided to give my life to the Lord. I remember exactly where I was, under a tent on the lawns belonging to a Deacon I soon grew to dislike. I was wearing my favourite blue dress, the one without the sleeves. Back then, this was my rebellion against my church’s rules. I remember ripping that dress apart years later. Even now, I still have pieces of it in the bottom left drawer in my room, right beside the crumpled box that houses a game of checkers.
I also remember how it felt to be “unsaved.”
I remember how “unsaved” rolled off the heavy, forever over-enunciating tongues of the pastors of my church as they wiped their sweaty faces with thick cotton rags. “Unsaved” was unsavoury. It was dirty. It was a word that welcomed judgement in the very place where even judgement was permanently branded unwelcome.
My church had this practice I will always hate. At the end of every sermon, the presenter would call for all the “unsaved” to walk to the altar. I’ve made a thousand steps in my life and I will never forget that walk. The walk of shame of all walks of shame. The day I decided to become baptised was the day I decided that I would never make that walk of shame again.
I’ve forgotten many things about that day. I’ve forgotten who was preaching but I’ll never forget the feelings bouncing around the empty walls of my stomach- ricotcheting because of the force of fear- the fear of going to hell, the fear of looking into the disappointed eyes of my father and my grandmother. Sometimes, I wonder if my motivation for getting baptized was to put myself out of that particular misery.
I felt relieved when it was all through. In the spirit of full disclosure, I felt something. I felt renewed. For the weeks directly after my baptism, my steps felt lighter. I sat in the front pew of the church where the new converts were supposed to sit and I sang the loudest, clapped the loudest. I was saved.
Even then, before and after I gave my life to the lord at 14, in the 8th grade, I had so many questions. I was an avid reader back then. Very few things surpassed my love for words on a page. Understanding was one. I craved to understand. I craved to understand why the God I encountered in book number 2 differed so wildly from the God I encountered in book number 45. I wanted to know so so so many things in a place that only encouraged a certain kind of knowledge- a curated knowledge- a knowledge that was unquestionable. I had so many questions- all of which have remained unaswered.
I wanted to know why his love favoured some people but didn’t favour others. I wanted to know why the omnipresent and ever powerful God made the children he was said to love, suffer. I wanted to know why those who suffered had to wait for a paradise that has never been proven to exist, in order to find peace. Why not now? Why not save the people you love from misery now? Better yet, why not save them before the onset of that misery? And even as a young teenager, I understood love. My mother’s tears burnt my tear ducks and rolled down my cheeks, my father’s broken finger was my own, my brother’s agony was a shared one. I dreamt of having children and wanted to save them from everything. I learnt in church that my love was conditional and small, unlike God’s but my love didn’t want my loved ones to suffer. Why didn’t an unconditional love want the same? Why did the unconditional love sacrifice to teach lessons. Why didn’t it save?
As the years passed, my relationship with Christianity warped from hope to one of bitterness and cynicism. I sat in church and felt relief at not being one of the unsaved, I sat there with hope in my breath every Sunday until every Sunday I sat in church and glared at it all, until every Sunday, my seat, the 3rd seat from the middle section, kinda close to the door on the left sat empty.
I believe in GOD. All caps.
I might not believe in every word in the Bible but I don’t think Science explains everything. There’s a realm of experiences that science, with its hard lines, and abbreviations and numbers can’t explain. I believe in GOD everytime I fall in love with a song, or everytime I connect with somebody, or everytime I look up and watch the clouds melt into shapes that only I can see. But church?? Yeah, bredda, doe talk to mi bout dat.