Sunday Muse: Worship

Amy Farrah Fowler of The Big Bang Theory had this line that I found hilarious: I don't object to the concept of a deity, but I'm baffled by the notion of one that takes attendance.

It often reminds me of a woman I met a long time ago who gave me a conundrum to chew on. She didn’t think of it as such though. For her, it was quite straight forward.

Let’s try to set the scene: Church has decided to embark on Christian Family mission and wants to ensure that all families should try to promote Christian family values. And one of those values is daily Family Worship. In fact, church would go around and ask all families if they have family worship. I think there might even have been a separate register for this. If your family said no, you didn’t have family worship, you guys would be considered weird and outliers.

This woman I met was a church women leader. Following such, she was gung-ho about family worship. To paraphrase her, though: My family is very invested in the importance of daily family worship. But all of us have different engagements all the time and we can’t even eat meals together, leave alone set aside time to sit and pray together, neither in the morning nor at night. But this has not deterred me. Sometimes I’m the only one at Family Worship but it happens every night.

My conundrum therefore is this: Is worship about the attendance?

Now with attendance, I attend church once a week. Anybody else in any novel I ever read would think this was a character that was very church oriented. Not in Mizoram. Not by a long shot. In Mizoram, you're not considered a regular church-goer unless you attend at least 4 times a week. I'm not even kidding. There are 3 services on Sunday. Let's say you attend 2 of those. There’s Wednesday night service and Saturday night service. So that’s 4 (of 5) already. But those are only the services for EVERYONE. It doesn’t make you special. You have to attend one more in a week depending on your station in life, youth on Monday, women on Tuesday, middle-aged men on Thursday. I almost forgot – in between Sunday School and Sunday Afternoon service there’s an additional fellowship service, again depending on your station. Maybe Friday night is the only true Night Off. Friyay indeed.

When I was in SDA Inter-College Roorkee, we attended a lot of church services. Every morning and every evening, we had Hostel Prayers. Quite beyond this, Friday night was Vespers, Saturday morning was Sabbath School, Saturday afternoon was main service, all of them non-optional.

Then in Mount Carmel, Anand Niketan, I again attended hostel prayers every night; in my second year, I was even Chapel-in-Charge! I actually learned to play guitar because of this; I learned a lot of choruses! Sundays we attended church with our hostel warden’s family; our warden’s husband was pastor. I think that was CNI.

Since college, I really haven’t attended a lot of church anymore. It’s not that I have lost faith or anything. It’s just something that has happened. It is what it is.

Add to this my cynical and outspoken nature and a lot of people have asked me point-blank if I was atheist. I really am not. I like the idea of not knowing for absolute certain. It is all in the word: belief. You take something at faith value, pardon the pun. I like for my faith to not be blind and fundamentalist but I take my comfort in short burst of prayers and meditation on Bible verses; Ecclesiastes and the Gospels, usually.

On Bible reading, I don’t know about others but I’ve often heard people say: simply reading the Bible isn’t enough, you have to meditate on them. I respectfully disagree. I have read my favourite books time and again until I can quote them. The Bible is one of those books. When I am sad or lonely or angry, it is passages from these books I’ve familiarized myself with, that comes to the rescue and comfort me. I don’t know the difference between reading and meditating, maybe.

I have wondered, when I was younger, if faith was compatible with science. I no longer do. Where they are compatible, it is wonderful. Where they aren’t, I compartmentalize anyway. It’s alright. It is what it is.

Just to be controversial, and because we’ve talked about Religion and Science in Sunday School for two Sundays now: my take on Evolution v. Creation. I take a lot of the Bible as metaphor; even Jesus always taught in parables, after all. Genesis talked about Creation in seven days. I don’t believe in seven twenty-four hours days creation. But evolution would concur with the general loose theme of how things came into existence in Genesis – the Big Bang of light and everything, everything settling down, life beginning with the plant world, then in the water, then on land, finally culminating in Homo Sapiens, your basic Adam and Eve.

Or the Tower of Babel. Technology and science rise so high that God struck the people and cursed them with a change of language so they can’t communicate. Throughout history, language has changed courses of development dramatically. I believe even now, people are encouraged to learn Chinese? Because while us old British colonial nations still consider English as the language of development, this has not been necessitated by other nations. Interesting. Maybe Babel is about to strike again.

Or Karma. I believe in Karma. Or more biblically, ‘as you sow, so shall you reap’. And that the LORD says ‘Vengeance is mine’. I rest my mind now. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but sometimes we know what some people are truly about, how inherently corrupt they are – either materially or morally or both – but they seem to thrive in the world and people dejectedly think: this world is profitable for sinners. Either that, or sycophantically to their face: God is favouring you so much, look at all your blessings as Signs of Favour. But no, we know so little of people. Karma knows. And Karma doesn’t strike how we wish it would (Job comes to mind) but rather where it hurts people. I’ve had my fair share of bad Karma bitch-slapping me; believe me, I know.

Anyhoo. I digress.

Church Attendance. It is definitely necessary to form your societies, your prayer circles, your pillars of support, your chance to give back to society, your chance to be part of a greater community… Very true. I wholeheartedly agree. But is it the same as worship?

LAYGA

Some people peaked in high school and would never quite fully recover.

 

However, in today’s materialistic culture, unless they occupy some sort of a substantial post, they are more a nuisance than real hazard. It is the people who topped their high school classes, graduated and got the good jobs and now can’t understand a world in which they are not the only smart people that you have to watch out for. Now these are hazards.

Most of us grew up in college and came to the realization that we don’t know jackshit. In fact, the more we kept learning, the more we realized there was even more we didn’t know. It was the shit that kept shatting. We of course do our best to what I call LAYGA – Learn As You Go Along. But that is not a 100% foolproof plan. Some of us have learned better to quietly LAYGA when we are faced with challenges and new adventure. Every adult is just adulting the best way we know how because none of us really know what anyone of us are really doing.

But there are just some people who will always think of themselves as above the hoi polloi. And many people would thoughtlessly agree (because we don’t have time to reflect on things and we mostly just accept Image at face value; that, or to avoid confrontation) even as they sneer at them behind their backs and thank their good fortune they don’t have to be in constant touch with them. Meanwhile, these delulu populace will think about how they did well in school, and earned respectable degrees, and got good jobs that pay well and earned them social status, you know the drill. They will pat themselves on the back for having done everything right.

After a point, all the praise and adulation go in their heads. Somehow they can’t seem to get down from Cloud No. 9. They start thinking of themselves as mini-rajahs and minor-maharanis. Distinguished from the great unwashed. The Elite, as it were.

I think this line of thought is extremely worrisome in a small social and economic backwater of a hill region as Mizoram. I think it also could be a symptom of Insecurity. If I have this Image, people will think it is real. I must work on The Image. It becomes all consuming. And then no one benefits. Because literally no one can know everything and no one person or group can be the best at everything. We have to realise some people know things we don't, so we have to team up and learn from each other. But that is a pipedream. Because with zero self awareness, there is zero growth.

Damn that’s some cynical thoughts so early on a Friday morning! Maybe all of this is just me.

Happy weekend, everyone!