Water

Psalms 120:7 says I am a man of peace, but when I speak they are for war. Always I seem to encounter this. Taylor Swift was right, and I fervently concur: I swear I don’t love the drama, it loves me.

I gave this a thought the other day. And my thoughts led me to water. Very specifically how water is soft, till it’s rough. Water is gentle, till it’s brutal. Water is Elohim, Phanes, Brahma until it’s Satan, Perses, Shiva. Water is Terra Mater when she’s merciful and when she’s angry. Plato had philosophized on this too a long time before I did: what is the shape of water? He’d said that in its purest form, water takes the shape of an icosahedron. An icosahedron is a 20-sided polyhedron. I supposeit means things like beauty, humanity, love have many faces. You can't judge a book by its cover, we say in a cliche now. You can't neatly box people by your own limited worldview and restricted interaction with them. Things have a way of being more than what they seem. Like how water takes the shape of what contains it.

But dear lord, how water breaks the container sometimes! 

There is no place on earth that can be a nice haven that does not have sufficient water supply. In all the places I’ve ever travelled to, I’ve noticed that my peace of mind has depended largely on whether or not I have water at my disposal – to drink, to wash up, to whatever. No village is ever nice that has scarcity of water. And my stars, how amazing to just sit by a babbling brook, listening to the music of water flowing over smooth rocks the entire day. Zen.

The nature of duality has always fascinated me. The binary code even of life and death. We cling on to life so desperately and yet we get closer everyday to the day we die. Ends of spectrums. The nice grey shades in between are something of acceptance and/or tolerance. Even in bureaucracy – the Law that stands, the Deviation that is the M.O., and all the variants that necessitate or justify that deviation. Very interesting!

Water though. The shapes it takes. The roles it assumes. The life it gives. The destruction it leaves behind. The destiny it shapes! 

I once saw an IG reel saying perhaps God is Water. Life-giving. Death-bringing. Everywhere. Assumes all shapes. Be all. In all. It makes me remember all the times I’ve ever been captivated by the omnipresence of water. Even in religion. Christian baptisms are with water – immersion or not; it’s supposed to symbolize death of a life and birth of another. Hindus would bathe in the Ganges; or otherwise symbolically bathe in it by pouring a little water on their heads to begin the day. Water is a portal of change; it is how you leave one realm and enter another. Even in sci-fi and fantasy fiction, like Mirror Mirror for one, magical portals would often be water or water-esque. Even the rebirth of Lord Voldemort was water-adjacent, in a cauldron, simmering with magic potions that gave him new life.

You have to respect water. Because water is patient. It will outlast all of us. All the smooth rocks in rivers have been smoothened by water, is all the proof you need that water will beat you. Because it will always play the long game.

I heard recently that scientists have found traces of water in Mars. Doctor Who fans will tell you to stay away. Respect.

Jesting aside, water is a force that can not be tamed, no matter how much we fool ourselves into thinking we can and have. And with all the life it gives, to me, to talk of water is to talk of Nature. You can’t tame Nature either. We think we can only at our own peril. To paraphrase Gandhi, the earth has enough to satisfy our need, but not our greed. With all the necessary civilization we are expanding on our piece of Earth, we really should consider making nice with Gaea while we are at it. Mother Earth? Khuanu? Whoever you want to call her.

Because as even a mere mortal like me who seeks only to fly under the radar gets caught in drama and then fights back, the life of bountiful peace Water offers will turn into war when we don’t consider the ramifications to our senseless actions. Senseless actions. This is, by the way, to quote Taylor Swift again, why we can’t have nice things.

What Kind of Dog Jumps Higher Than a Building?

Taylor Swift says if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. I think she’s been to carnivals. 

To paraphrase her, I think also that if you ask stupid questions, you get stupid answers. Ignore all the teachers who ever told you there were no stupid questions. There are.

Recently, there have been Questions raised in the Mizo Christian world that has upset church members. I don’t think I would call them stupid questions at all but I know also that a lot of people call them things close to blasphemy. Which I don’t think they are, at all.

Religion should ideally be able to answer questions of the Faith but often religion hates when hands are raised.

It is in the questions you ask.

I know a lot of people for whom faith is not a difficult task. They simply say they believe, no questions asked. But there are others who need more. It’s not a failure on anyone’s parts. It’s just the degree of inquisitiveness of a mind, the inclination of how a mind is exercised. I would lean more to the curious side myself, I think. 

For me, personally, reason is important and I do look for reason in almost everything I do. Even at work, even when we deviate from norms, I need to know what the reason is and how we deviate from it. It makes sense to me to look for reason. But I accept also that it is not enough that reason for something exists, because sometimes those reasons are not good reasons. Logical consistency is not the answer to everything. At work, or in Faith.

That being said, my Faith gives me solace, and comfort, and hope. And that is precious to me. Sometimes it is everything to me. So however the human-organised church fails or doesn’t match the mark, it is not enough to shake my faith. Also I have been indoctrinated enough to have the fear of the Lord instilled in me, so good luck shaking that. However much I sin, I shall never shake that fear off.

There are age-old questions raised about God. Mostly, how does an all-powerful, all-loving God not stop natural calamities and all the cancers and all the fuck ups of this world? Because things like wars, we can reason out and say man inflicted these shits on mankind. An ever growing cancer from the Garden of Eden. But to take just one example, what of the babies who died in the neonatal units of hospitals when Gaza was bombed in 2023? Where was God then?

The get out of jail card for theism is always Free Will. God can’t get rid of the evil without also ridding the world of Free Will embedded in the system. God cannot get rid of much of the evil and suffering in the world without also getting rid of morally significant free will. 

The question of whether God’s omnipotence is compatible with the claim that God cannot do the logically impossible is another concern. If God can make 2 + 2 = 5, then what would 2 + 3 equal? If God can make a rock so big that he can’t lift it, exactly how big would that rock be? What people who ask these questions want is something that is no longer itself. Each of these things seems to be absolutely, positively impossible. What they want is magic, probably. Transfiguration, perhaps. And in the vein of McGonagall turning into a cat and less of Jesus becoming radiant in the mountain top. 

There is also the question of whether us free willed creatures could have perfect lives in Heaven in the great Afterlife. Or whether to ensure perfect society, if free will would be removed from us then. Or perhaps in Heaven, the free willed creatures (angels? souls of believers?) always and unfailingly choose right. So there’s free will that can be compatible with perfect living. Technically, possible. But I guess if we get turned into that, we would not be the same as we are now anyway.

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. Or perhaps I’m not asking the right questions. Deep Thought said the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything was 42. The only problem was no one ever asked the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe and Everything. Perhaps the Answer is there. We just don’t know it yet. As for me, I’m OK for now with the Answers I have, and the comfort my Faith gives me.

The answer to the titular question, by the way, being all of them, of course, because buildings can’t jump.

Discovering Hell

It’s a good thing I’m not god or that I have any real powers because I very much doubt life would survive overmuch if I were. Free will, for sure, would not. It is a disturbing thought but if I am completely honest, I realise I would not be too opposed to autocracy if I were at the apex. The only thing that puts a pause in me being pro-dictatorship (even if the dictator would be me) is that I also firmly believe that the seed of destruction in any dictatorship lies in the system itself; that authoritarian rules cannot be absolute for long and from the very people being oppressed would be borne a saviour. Inevitable.

The other reason I would not make a very good god is that I am not that brilliant at handing out punishments. It is a sobering thought but I don’t often know people as well as I think I do. Which is very important if you are going to penalize someone because torture is a very strange concept and the same method often does not hold out universally. Even tolerance of pain is different across the multitudes. And of course, some people actively seek out thrill which others would call horror; kinks, as we say.

So what we call embarrassing or deeply terrifying sometimes do not have the same impact on other people. This makes certain prayers quite useless – or at least non-impactful. As in when you pray to god to maybe punish someone by dragging their names through the mud for, say, infidelity or monetary corruption. Clearly that infamy does not bother them because anyone who indulges in those things has already calculated the cost and has made their peace with the possible fallouts.

I’m Christian, so I am partial to: ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’, ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord’ and ‘There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed’ as I read them in the Bible. But that’s just a very lengthy, Abrahamic way of saying Karma. Anyhoo, because Karma sees all, Karma also judges all. And when she doles out her judgments, it is hardly ever in the way a mortal brain would expect but when you realise it, you think: of course, it could not have been any other way. Sometimes these penalties are deeply personal and/or incredibly secretive; sometimes all outward appearances would convince the world that sinners and criminals go about scot-free from their crimes because this is their world, but their lives are being eaten up from the inside and corroded from within.

It is hard to not wish harm on some people. Some people are just very disagreeable and generally overall non-likable. You want to maim them; not kill them, you understand, because of the moral implications of it and all the brevity of the retribution et cetera (read with eyeroll). Also if you indulge in these avenging business, Karma will have to sock it to you too and you don’t want to find out what kind of bitch-slap Karma has in reserve for you. In short, you never want to find out what hell is for you. So you do good. And take deep breaths. And hold your tongue. And all those things.

It’s a funny old world we live in. Sometimes I think heaven and hell are already here with us. (Also, sometimes I think it’s a bit like a multiverse, at the cost of sounding very MCU-y, but let’s leave that for another time.)

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?

Everyday Miracles

I always wanted God to perform magic for me. Instant knowledge. Instant cure. Instant smiting. To recall a few prayers. The last one for my enemies.

Today I know better. I still want magic but I know enough to not expect it. I may have faith the size of a mountain but I doubt if it could allow me teleportation. So I leave the ultra-amazing to sci-fi and fantasy fic.

I implore for quiet miracles now. Not magic.

I’ve made karma my new religion. As you sow, so shall you reap. Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. This thought has deeply affected how I have come to conduct myself. Tried to, at any rate.

I still believe in miracles but I no longer think God performs tricks and magic, bending the laws of nature, weaving illusions and defying logic. It is all just knowledge, I guess.

If we are to accept that God is the beginning and the end and everything in between, then foreknowledge is included in the package deal. So someone who already knows what can or what will happen can ensure a lot of things.

I liken it to a great many things we do in office. From experience and from the rule books, we know a bunch of stuff that can potentially happen. Which is why we methodically work to ensure that the negative is avoided and the positive encouraged. Most of us, that is. Take election, for example. Election rule books are heavy and detailed, accounting for almost all the things that can possibly go wrong. And it keeps giving you solutions to those problems. Should they occur. So when something out of the ordinary happens on Election Day and the officials readily know how to deal with it, it was not magic. Just preparation and foreknowledge.

The best thing I’ve learned about adult life is that nobody knows anything. We’re all just shuffling along, faffing and pretending we know shit. So it’s alright if you don’t know something either. Nobody really does. It is a huge burden lifted. All you have to do is the best you can and leave the rest to God. The Universe. You’ll be fine.

Someone who already knows the plans for you will have prepared the way for you. You just have to live a little on faith. Faith. How simple a concept and yet how complicated and intricate. And if you have a little, how much stress it can lift off of you.

In the end, I suppose the best thing we can do is just be kind and invest in good karma. None of us are islands. Every bit of support counts. And every bit of non-support also affects. We are never useless, unless we choose to think of ourselves thusly. We can be parts of quiet, everyday miracles.

And those are the best kinds.

Chengkawl Policy

I was thinking about how Jesus taught us to give to God what belongs to God. Seems easy enough. Who would dare to steal from God? The counterpart is where it gets tricky: to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. And Caesar has so much! And Caesar demands so much! I don’t know who came up with the analogy but it is a very popular saying with the cynical Mizo Christian that a person who wouldn’t dream of taking one paise from the church would not have the same qualms when it came to taking money from others or the government. Would that it were not true!

Nothing is ever truly black and white because the world is blue.

Jokes aside, in adult life, one of the saddest things I find is that you just have to, by necessity, learn to lie. And you get to be so good at it – toeing the line, stopping at white lies and gossamer cover-ups, never fully hot, never fully cold; exactly what the Bible teaches people not to be. Be hot or be cold, it says. (Deep sigh) The Bible is a very difficult book to live by.

Unless you want to be a rather unpopular celebrity, sooner or later, you learn to keep mum. You start to selectively choose the ears you pour your tea into. Otherwise you keep mum. And because no matter how much someone revolts you, you might one day need their help, you learn to look the other way. And keep mum. The Stepford husbands got one cynical thing right – if you want things to run perfectly smooth at all times, you have to sacrifice your ethics along the way and lobotomize (or robotize?) everyone who stands in the way. Life just isn’t designed to be perfect.

And, as always, you keep mum.

Like snails. Snails do not indulge in auditory communication. It’s a very solid policy to abide by, given how much the tongue can land one in trouble. The Bible would concur. Do like chengkawl. It’s a good policy.