Booyah! I'm ranting about your church!
City Harvest Church is moving to the Singapore Expo: a grander vision there is none, replete as it is, with rows of card-swiping tellers to ease the burdenof emptying your bank accounts. It was quite an amazing sight: standing from a distance, beholding lines of faithful sheeps awaiting their turns on the box-like abattoirs, I felt remotely alien and broken, as if somehow my curiousity had betrayed me and left me to die on the doorsteps of the greatest corporation in the universe.
Anyhow, Pastor Kong was amazing - his charismatic ways were hypnotic and pervasive, and he spoke with such vigor, passion and righteousness that you cannot doubt for a second, his sincerity in trying to move you with his proselytising wisdom. He knows best of course, for he communes with the one true god! All of you! Say Amen!! Ohhhhhh...yabalah shikalaki huggaashagaa ugguggmoanmoan shukulidicko watevermajig. And so on and so forth.
But I was not impressed.
After the enlightening ordeal (which reaffirmed my love for the god of small things, and my disdain towards the dogmatic religious institution) , a friend (or rather, my friend's cell mate - haha! What irony!) drew me away to indulge in a little heart to heart talk. Unabashedly, I questioned the necessity of so elaborate a palace, of prinstine walls and black-collered security looking more like bouncers hired to keep the people in rather than to keep the demons out. But of course, he defended the place of the Church as a home and an abode, and how it should rightfully convey comfort and such, thus justifying the need to fortify themselves in sheaves and layers of beautiful, porcelain materialism.
To top things off, he went on (with a sigh, no less) to address the "pitiful Pastor Kong" (exact words) who has to preach sermons four times a week, because the congregation is too gargantuan to hold in one sitting, and how he wished that they'll have a place as big as the indoor stadium someday soon! Wow. Im pretty sure they'll want a whole off-shore island to themselves before long.
Ok. Maybe I sound prickly, but harken this: the kind of hysterical elation infused in these boys and girls is almost clinical, like an infection hopping from one host to another, afflicting them with the disease called joy (the hopping variant). But this is a joy that is based off an external stimuli seeping inwards through the pores of your skin into your blood vessels and combusting in the emptiness of your being. It is a joyous addiction, and I regard these peeps as rapturous addicts returning weekly to get their fix.
Of course, addictions of this kind, nobody gives a grand hoot about. You dont see any religious rehabitation centres out there, do you? When you encounter fanatics, it is usually assumed to be O.K. and that he is merely, intense. Nobody will entertain the notion that religious rapture can be an addiction too. Drugs, sex, and rock and roll! Now, that is the problem. Everything black is bad, everything white is good. We are all addicts in someways or another, but what removes you from the acceptability lies in the packaging. And thus, it stands to reason that the more an institution deigns to divert your attention with spires of gold and turrets of ivory, the more insidious the problem lurking beneath it, is.
I am not that young, but still well within the demographics of their intended market. With this perspective, I believe that when churches take on the mantle of a new generation and embraces the attitudes of quantity: that is, to sacrifice rustic spiritualism for charismatism, to fill their coffers and stands, to package the good word and to align themselves with the forces of a new paradigm, they've become something else altogether: something smaller and starts but on the surface of your skin, something that crawls amidst the comfort of numbers. They call themselves the fisherkings, the fishers of men, and in an insane race to outfish each other, they irrevocably destroyed the most beautiful river. And so, in their quest for the bountiful harvesting of souls, they deemed it acceptable to suffer the collateral damage of a few injured faiths and a few battered hearts (your faith werent strong enough in the first place!), that it is acceptable to lose a few whose faith were destroyed by vulgar and rough intensity, to control the many lost in the bosom of euphoric praise.
You see, I recall rapturous joy on the eaves, under the benign eyes of god slanting through the windows as the golden evening while away. I do not recall loud noises blasting into oblivion my senses, leaving a soul so empty it cries to be loved. I do not recall visions, so narrow in ambit, that it demands but the endeavours of one church. I do not recall such pomposity, that when I lay myself humbled, all I hear is the collective drone of godless voices. Mayhaps I am still atad traditional, and though no longer in tandem with the doctrines, still believes in the quietness of christmas nights, in the memories of a warm, and gentle church bathed in the heady afterglow of a perfect noon-day shower, with soft piano and sandalwood, with me and god and a beautiful peace, with a joy and warmth that arises from deep within, like fingers of god reaching outwards of me in a gentle sunburst, like I was waking into a dream.
Come on ladies! One for the church!
My alterego says that the digital presence one exudes on the net is proportionate to the limitations imposed by external and/or internal duress encountered during the blogging process. If people are reading your blog, chances are, whatever you say has now found an incredible medium by which to traverse a hundred willing/unwilling ears in the shortest possible time. Thus it stands to reason that opinions will be formed of you, and words oft-misunderstood. For fear of having to deal with the possible backlash of an invigorating rant, many have chosen the path of least resistance and downplayed their choice of words, perhaps even eschewing the elan once prevalant in many of those beautiful, angry entries. It is a public realm afterall, and the delicious irony lies in the delicate balancing between the desire to be read and the need to be forthright and honest on the tablet of your name. How honest should I be? To where do I belong?