About two days ago I went to visit my grandmother--my ailing grandmother who is now struggling to maintain her lucidity. I was told by my dad, but mostly by my mum, of episodes where she behaved less than a quarter her age. She is now eighty three years old, and I believe, personally, that she is suffering from mild Alzheimer's--although (no) thanks to the conservative thinking of everybody else in the family, she is judged to be merely senile.
Nonetheless, she has recently been assigned a care-taker to look after and watch over her every need, even though the fact that the care-taker let my grandmother out of the house with pink eye shadow speckled all around my her eyes makes me shake my head little. This is an eighty-three year-old who in her prime has mothered four sons and two daughters, and used to run a Nazi-efficient operation in the kitchen each time the family came together to celebrate Chinese New Year, birthdays and the like. She used to be revered and feared as the matriarch of the family. And this omnipotent, despotic image was one that I know all my life. Since my grandfather passed away when I was too little to remember any encounter that I may (or may not) have with him, to me, my grandmother had always been atop the family tree. So, to see what her both her physical and mental capacities had been diminished to, when I saw her the other day, was truly incredible.
Another sad news: one of my grandaunts just passed away, at the age of 52. Since I had a very vague recollection of who she was (apparently I used to see her a lot when I was young), truth be told, I was not particularly distressed. Nevertheless, two days ago my parents brought me and grandmother to pay a visit to my granduncle's to show our condolences. My granduncle lived in a humble area where the government built a strip of hostels for the army. When we arrived, we saw him sitting alone with a newspaper in one hand and a bowl of soup in the other, and after an exchange of pleasantries (which was awkward for me because I could not decide whether to call him 'granduncle', or just 'uncle', as I hardly knew the man), we sat down in the concrete-floored, spartanly furnished porch, just escaping the sting of the unforgiving midday sun--although the heat swallowed us up like a fat boy eats cake. Anyhoo, listening to these grown-ups talking about my late grandaunt and the miscellanea that ensued really made me realize how much I had been cut off from all these home/family stuff.
I learnt that for quite a while I had been missing all these family rites, which I knew for sure I would have taken for granted had I been around all this while--'missing' in the sense that I was not there to experience them, not that I had sentimental yearning to be participate in them. I realized that I had been living away from my family for almost eight years now, and for those 'almost eight years' I had not been brought by my parents, by bribe, trickery, blackmail, or otherwise (I hate family functions!), to attend any of these vicissitudes of communal living. Just be clear, I did not resent coming over to meet my granduncle.
It also then made me realize how much my thought process had deviated from the people here back home. Disclaimer: I neither frown upon those people who cling closely to their superstitious/spiritual beliefs, nor do I think that my reason-based philosophy is superior to that of the former. It was intriguing to me how my granduncle relied on his belief/faith so much in processing his grief. He told this guests that he believed that my grandaunt's spirit was still with him. According to his religion (for the sake of avoiding controversy, it shall not be named), my grandaunt's spirit would still be around until the fortieth day after the date of her passing, and within this period there were certain protocols that my granduncle had to follow to ensure that my grandaunt's spirit could move on peacefully--one of which was to pay off all of her outstanding debts, no matter how small the amounts were, and irrespective of whether the creditor was willing to release the debts ex gratia. Moreover, my aunt, who joined us halfway through, believed that she had actually seen signs of the eventual preluding my grandaunt's passing, such as how my grandaunt became bashful when asked about her health, and how she snored nights before her passing.
I felt really sorry for their loss, not because I knew my grandaunt well--or my granduncle, or my aunt for that matter--but because from the passion and vividness with which they told these stories, I could tell how much my grandaunt was loved by her family, and how greatly she was going to be missed.
My aunt also told us that the local community just finished building a place of worship (note the censorship) in the area, and that they agreed to name it after my grandaunt. Suddenly, a smile came to her face. She believed that through the good deeds performed in and around the sacred place, good karmic return would flow to benefit my grandaunt in heaven. It really hit me when I saw the totality in which my aunt held onto her belief and her god. Even though I thought that I had brought myself back into believing in my God, I was not sure that the confidence which I had now in mine was anywhere near my aunt's in hers.
My torrid love-hate affair with God began when I was seventeen, and one of the many people that I turned to in order to find the answer was Julia Sweeney. I watched her TED talk some years back, and it got me started to re-think and re-evaluate my view of God and religion. And happy accident: last night that I managed to get my hands on the full version of her talk, titled Letting Go of God, all thirteen parts of them, which lasted for two good hours. Just for the record, she is an excellent speaker.
Sweeney was born and raised Catholic, and growing up she had more an affinity toward Catholicism and nun-hood than do a typical teenager toward alcohol and porn. Later on she enrolled in a bible study group, which turned out to be nothing she had initially bargained for. She found the bible inconsistent, incongruous and incoherent: like how there were two versions of the creation of Adam and Eve; how in the Sodom-and-Gomorrah story Lot offered his daughter, in lieu of the two angles who had come to visit him, to be raped by a mob outside his house (the mob initially demanded for the angles which had taken the form of two male humans); or how Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son belies our instinctive and modern standard of ethics. Moreover, according to Sweeney, the New Testament did not show much improvement: Jesus appeared to be impatient and angry most of the times, and St. Paul's sexist view on women did not help to win Sweeney over either.
So, after all of that, Sweeney tried to find God elsewhere. She turned to Buddhism, but was terrified at the sight of a mother somewhere in Bhutan who callously said that she did not feel sorry for her son's deformity because she believed that it was justly caused by karmic retribution. To her, the god that encouraged that could not possibly be her God. She then turned to nature, but when she saw a Blue-footed Booby's brain being pecked clean by its stronger sibling in the course of natural order of things, she concluded God could not be nature either. She even turned to Deepak Chopra, consciousness and quantum mechanics, but based on her findings, they all panned out to be horseshit. Ultimately, she turned to science, through which she found out that man could stimulate the brain to artificially create a visceral encounter with the spiritual, which of course cheapened the notion of spiritual encounter with God. This was the last straw.
At this point, Sweeney was ready to break up with God. This was an experience where she imagined that an aged, white-bearded man was sitting right outside her house refusing to go away. Sweeney reasoned with the old man, and after much cajoling and abandoning, he finally left. Subsequently, she told her devout-Catholic parents that she did not believe in God anymore. This, coupled by an expose splashed in local paper where her parents lived, labeling her an atheist, her father went ballistic. He was so angry that he even said that he wished she had told him that she was gay instead, because that would at least be socially accepted. Nevertheless, time healed all wounds, and Sweeney ultimately managed to make amends with her parents.
One of the most beautiful things that I saw in her talk was the realization she had at her father's funeral:
I look at the altar through my father's eyes, and it was rich and beautiful. I was baptized in this very church when I was one week old, and in so many real ways, I will never stop being Catholic. I mean, Christianity has helped shape my brain. It seems inevitable to me, that after all this searching, I have return to the Catholic church. I unexpectedly am right back where I started, surprised like Dorothy back from Oz.
After all when I left the Catholic church, I did not realize that I would be giving up on God altogether. I just thought that I would find another church that would make more sense to me. May be this time, it would be more meaningful somehow, because I wouldn't be debating all the time, about what I believed and didn't believe. I would know that I just didn't believe in any of it.
I mean, after all, may be objective reality is not the most pleasant prism through which we can view this world. And may be, by using fantasy, we can allow ourselves to glimpse at something greater than what we otherwise would be able to. Let's face it: truth is such a poor competitor in a marketplace full of ideas, and the love and the community and this church are real, and potent. Even if God isn't.
To me, this seems to be such a painful reconciliation, worse than what I have ever had. Perhaps it is because I never took God and religion as seriously as did Sweeney with hers. And perhaps my relationship with God was, is, and can never be, as potent as I want it to be because of that. Unlike Sweeney--at least for now--I am okay with leaving the true existence of God to chance. I am okay even if deep down, as much as I do not want to, I still think that my belief is simply a protective psychological construct with which I process the not-so-great things that come my way. All I know is when the going gets tough, and I pray, I feel better. And so, given the pathetic state of my relationship with God, as much as I want it to be the opposite of that, this is good enough for me--at least for now.
