dry grass singing

On being a Christian in multi-religious Singapore

This post has been a long time coming. I've kept my silence so far on the Pastor Rony Tan issue, mostly because it seems to me to be a fairly straightfoward, obvious case of a zealous fellow Christian crossing the line between zeal and civility in his comments on other religions. Pastor Tan has apologised publicly for his comments, and his apologies have been accepted by Taoist and Buddhist leaders in Singapore. Can we leave Pastor Tan alone to sort out his thoughts on the matter, and move on to the larger issues that the whole debacle has unearthed?

But this note is not about these larger issues at all. It's about me. Necessarily so, because, as it has been said, all writing is autobiography. And this is the part of my autobiography that has to do with my spiritual journey as a minority Christian in a multi-religious, secular society like Singapore.

I came to the Christian faith through a long, slow process that took at least 11 years, if not more, and so I can honestly say that I've looked at life from both sides now - through the eyes of a skeptic, as well as those of a believer. I can equally honestly say that I have not forgotten what the world looked like through the skeptic's eyes, and I pray that I never will. It was with a mixture of horror and grudging fascination that I looked at my Christian friends back in my non-Christian days. How could they allow a religion, a system of beliefs, to pre-determine and dictate their behaviour in every possible life situation they found themselves in, regardless of the specific circumstances governing the matter? How frightening, and how wonderful, to be so certain of everything, to have the answers to all of life's questions down pat to just those few simple formulaic responses!

In the close to three years that I've been a professing, baptised Christian, I've come to know the certainty that I used so much to fear, and I've also come to know the limits of that certainty, the way there is room for mystery even within the fortress of faith. But (and perhaps I flatter myself here - only my friends can tell) I also like to think that the arrogance that so often comes with certainty is kept in check by memories of those years spent questioning everything there was to question. So when I listen to discussions about issues like last year's AWARE episode, and the latest Rony Tan controversy, my instinctive response is to look at them from the perspective of the non-Christian, to look at myself, and my fellow Christians, from the point of view of the outsider. And I readily admit that to the outsider, some of the things that we Christians do, do not look very Christian at all.

So what I'd like to do here, is to set down, as fairly and objectively as I can, the way things stand as I see it, and to talk about how I've been trying to negotiate the complexities of life in multi-religious, secular Singapore while maintaining my sense of religious integrity.

Firstly, let me just state for the record what I do believe, because nothing else will make sense otherwise. I believe that there is one God, and that He has made Himself known to humanity, first in His interactions with the Jewish people and through the revelations of the Jewish scriptures, and finally in the historical person of Jesus Christ. I believe that humanity is hopelessly flawed, and that all the problems we face on the individual and communal levels are the result of a fundamental selfishness and corruption in our nature. And that this personal corruption is the result of our turning away and estrangement, on an individual, personal level, from the only source of good - the God who created us. I believe that this good God is also a just God, and that left on our own, we would all have to be punished by this just God for the wrong we have done. I also believe that left on our own, our failure to meet this God's standards of goodness keeps us from communion with Him. This has consequences both eternal and temporal. Eternal separation from God is, literally, what we call hell. And in the here and now, this separation mires us in a hopeless cycle of attempts to save ourselves from ourselves - through self-discipline, through good works, through religious rites. But anyone who has tried all these things knows that they never work for very long. The malicious thought, the selfish, grasping impulse, the impurity of even our best intentions - these never go away for long. It is impossible for a drowning man to save himself.

And finally, I believe in the preposterous proposition that is the Gospel: that out of love for us, God Himself, in the person of His son, Jesus Christ, has already atoned for the wrong we have done by living the perfect life and taking the punishment that is ours upon Himself, in the historical event of the crucifixion. And that He proved His power over the death and corruption that is our human heritage by rising from the dead on the first Easter. And, most preposterous of all, I believe that the same victory over death and corruption can be ours too by association, if we ally ourselves with Christ by admitting that on our own, we are hopelessly corrupt, placing our trust in Him and submitting to His authority over our lives. I believe that this alliance -- and ultimately, union -- with Christ has the effect of changing us for the better from the inside out - and that this is the only way that we, as individuals and as a society, can find salvation.

Now that's a whole lot of pretty unbelievable stuff to believe. But it's crucial to get it all down, as accurately and fully as possible, because it goes some way towards explaining, though not necessarily exonerating, the way Christians sometimes behave.

As Christians, we share our faith because we believe it actually makes a positive difference, and that in fact it is the only difference that lasts, the only difference that counts. In his letter to Christians living as minority members of non-Christian societies in the 1st century A.D, the apostle Peter tells believers to 'always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have'. That, we do most readily - perhaps sometimes too readily, or without sufficient consideration. But we are also told to 'do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience' (1 Peter 3:15-16). I think that categorically excludes all forms of disrespect (mockery, name-calling, unfair discrimination) and aggression (anything along the spectrum from verbal insults to war). It also excludes all behaviour that goes against God's express commandments - because any such behaviour should of course weigh heavily on our consciences as violations of God's will. So, laughing at other religions is out; as is being economical with the truth in the attempt to do what we think is God's will; as is singling out a particular group of people for special condemnation as if we were not all equally guilty of failing to meet God's standards and equally in need of mercy. All of which Singaporean Christians have been guilty of in the last few years since I became a Christian.

But I think it's fair enough to say that the proselytisation that can be so annoying, pushy, insensitive or downright nasty in its expression is often the result of a (sometimes misapplied) concern for the non-believer's well-being, both now and in eternity. I think the problem is that Christians often fail to consider one of the most fundamental elements of good communication: connecting with the other person. In focussing on the relatively abstract truths of eternal salvation or damnation, Christians forget the living, breathing truth of the person standing before us - with all of his life history, his hopes and fears, his doubts, and his faith. (Yes, faith: because we all have faith in something - God, or gods, science, economics, politics, art, love, other people, ourselves.) What results, then, is a failure to speak to that person as an individual. Instead, he becomes an archetype, a stereotype, a straw man at which we hurl our pre-packaged expositions of the Gospel, leaving him at best bemused and bewildered, or at worst, permanently hostile to the very faith we are trying to share.

I remember one especially bizarre incident from my pre-Christian days, when I found myself on a bus next to a colleague I hardly knew, on our way to another colleague's wedding. I can't remember what small talk we were exchanging at the start of the conversation, but I do remember her very suddenly launching into a 5-minute speech on sin, damnation and salvation - a speech that left no room for me to say even a single word. It came out of nowhere, and ended just as abruptly - and I was left literally speechless, utterly flabbergasted, and thinking that if I hadn't already been relatively receptive to Christianity, what she did could very possibly have turned me off the faith forever.

Conversely, I remember equally clearly yet another incident on a busride with a Christian classmate who remains one of my closest friends to this day. A street evangelist approached us, and started on her spiel without so much as a few polite preliminaries. My friend, a devout Christian then and now, saw the look of discomfort on my face, and stopped the street evangelist, saying "She's from a mission school - she already knows the Gospel. Thanks very much but we can't listen to this right now." I was so grateful to my friend for her sensitivity, and for what I now recognise to be her wisdom. Now, lest anyone should misunderstand, she is no lukewarm Christian. In fact, she is the same friend who first tried to explain the Gospel to me two years after that incident - but only because I asked. She is also the person who, at various points in my life, invited me to Bible study discussions and other suchlike Christian activities when she sensed that I was ready to attend them. And she knew when to stop asking.

These incidents, together with other encounters with Christians and non-Christians over the years, have shaped my atttitudes towards evangelisation, especially in the context of a multi-faith society like ours. Yes, of course I believe that the God I worship is the only true God. I wouldn't worship Him otherwise. And of course I believe that Christ is the answer to all of humanity's fundamental problems. I've given up so much for the faith - all that giving up had better be for something really good. And of course I would love for my friends and loved ones to share the hope that this faith has given me. They are my friends and loved ones, after all, and I care about them.

But I also know that I live in a society where freedom of worship is guaranteed and safeguarded (within certain limits - more on those some other time). That is the basis for the sense of security I feel as a member of a minority religion in a dominantly Taoist/Buddhist society. And just as I want others to respect my freedom to worship the God I choose to worship, I also extend the same courtesy to them - they are free to worship whatever or whoever they choose to worship. I may be concerned about them, but that concern will express itself outwardly in dialogue that first seeks to know them as people before talking about God, that seeks to understand their concerns and share their lives regardless of whether they share my faith; and inwardly - in prayer, which is purely a matter between my God and me, and none of anybody else's business.

I understand very clearly that I cannot impose my faith-based ethics and practices on people who don't share my faith - if, for some reason, I feel that those ethics would be useful ones for society to adopt, I'll have to persuade others of this via the use of reason and logic, rather than by appealing to faith-based values. And I know that the Gospel is as much about living as it is about proclamation, and that the ability to live it is not my own. Very often, I fall short of even the standards I set for myself, let alone the standards that God sets for us. So I try to remind myself as often as I can of the words attributed to St Francis of Assisi because, hopefully, they'll help to keep me humble: "Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words."

posted by eothen @ 11:42 PM 0 comments

window-shopping

I've started a new blog.

Here. Take a look at the windows. :)
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posted by eothen @ 11:00 PM 0 comments

back in business

Ok, I'd like to declare this blog open and back for business again. It's been too, too long since I've gotten any real writing practice - and it took a reminder, from a particularly sharp-minded former student of my dad's, that writing loses its edge (in Chinese, 'bu2 li4') once you stop doing it for too long to scare me out of my complacency. Writing is the one thing I know I do well. I cannot, will not, let it go.

The other thing that has hindered me from writing in this blog is that, honestly, after all a while it stopped being a place for me to practise, and started being a place for me to show off instead. I became so conscious of the quality of the writing that I posted here, that it became impossible to really write anything for "practice". So this time I'm gonna try to leave me ego out of this, and really make this a platform for practising my writing, which was the original purpose in the first place.
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posted by eothen @ 11:03 PM 2 comments

a man for our time

‘Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord,
and our hearts are restless until they find rest in thee.’

(St. Augustine)


There is a restlessness that cannot be stilled by any peace the human heart can know on its own, a thirst that cannot be quenched by any water we can drink. More than any other novel I know, Pär Lagerkvist’s Barabbas tells of that restlessness, that thirst. And it is this novel that prompted me to begin the journey that would bring me, eleven years later and almost to the day, to the altar rails of a small church in an obscure corner of Singapore, against all I had ever known of myself, to be baptised into the life offered by the only Person who has ever been able to satisfy that thirst.

It seemed innocuous enough, the slightly grubby paperback half-hidden beneath other similarly battered books in the ‘For Shelving’ book-bin at the Geylang East Community Library. It was the week before Easter. The stylised picture of a man’s face, his beard a dark angry red set against the dirty-white background of the book cover, caught my eye. As did the fact that its author was a Nobel Prize winner. But most of all, I was intrigued by the title. Barabbas. The acquitted. The one who should have died. I knew enough of the Gospel to know the name and what it stood for.

Of course I had to read it. It was almost inevitable. The novel’s premise is simple. Told from the perspective of Barabbas, the criminal who escapes death when Jesus of Nazareth is crucified in his place, the novel follows the life of the eponymous anti-hero as he struggles to find rest, acceptance and faith in the wake of his unexpected and undeserved release from punishment. But Barabbas never finds rest. Instead, he spends the rest of his life haunted by the memory of the cross, unable to forget, yet unable to believe. In the stark, spare language of the novel, there is a thirst that is never slaked, an intense longing that whispers in the dry spaces and silences between the words. There is also a terrifying emptiness – the emptiness of not belonging to anything larger than one’s self, of being unable to love, of living without God.

So Barabbas wanders from prison to robbers’ den, desert to metropolis, slave-pit to palace, his life seemingly dogged by a sort of blessedness, a kind of grace. Is it grace that orchestrates his meetings with the man who turns out to be the apostle Peter? Is it grace that has him chained next to Sahak, a devout Christian, when they are both working as slaves in the dreaded Cyprian copper-mines? If it is, why then does this same grace not work deep enough? Why is it that, when asked to explain the ‘Christos Iesus’ carved on the slave-disk hanging from his neck, Barabbas can bring himself to say no more than, “I want to believe”?

Lagerkvist was wise enough to leave these questions open. The modern mind resists pat answers, and when the questions touch at the very heart of mystery, it takes a certain wisdom and humility to admit that the answers may simply be beyond the reach of even our human capacity for reason and discovery. This humility is something that many Christians would do well to learn in our ongoing discussions and debates with non-Christians who demand irrefutable evidence for our faith. We may offer historical records, logical proofs, personal testimonies; but ultimately, there is no irrefutable evidence. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. This is at once the easiest and the hardest thing about the Christian faith that non-Christians have to come to terms with.

One need not be a Christian, however, to appreciate the novel’s almost prophetic insight into the human condition. The novel speaks urgently to our world today, as the foundations of even our most basic beliefs about our identity and our place in the universe are shaken with each new scientific discovery, each new philosophical speculation. Those of us who struggle to find meaning and truth will see our own lurching, homesick wanderings mirrored in Barabbas’ geographical wanderings; those of us who have stood, paralysed, on the knife-edge between knowledge and faith, will find ourselves empathising with this all-too-human man who cannot find faith. In fact, I dare say that it would be almost impossible for a Christian to truly understand and empathise with the novel’s troubled core. A faith that has always been secure cannot possibly know what it means to long for faith in vain. Yet this is why Christians need to read this book, if only so that we can better understand what it means to want to believe, and in doing so, to be more sympathetic in our approach when we reach out to our non-Christian friends.

And, beyond all that, we would do well to remember that, in a sense, we are all Barabbas: guilty as hell, deserving death, yet somehow miraculously acquitted and given the gift of life, because Somebody else has already died in our place, on a hill at Golgotha almost two thousand years ago.
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posted by eothen @ 4:18 PM 0 comments

the heart has its reasons

This was written in response to an article in a local newspaper on a Singaporean guy reading English at Oxford. The article made me angry. i rarely get angry, even though i do a fairly good imitation of it when necessary. (And in my previous job, it was often necessary.)

It's quite a purple poem, and a little inconsistent, and not totally polished, but i thought i'd put it up anyway, partly because i've been receiving complaints that i don't update this blog quite enough. i hope this has at least a temporarily mollifying effect.

And, for those of you who want to know, all the images in the poem are indeed taken from real life. These are images i've carried around with me, for years in some cases, awaiting articulation. My hope is that the next time you, Gentle Reader, see the things described here, you will see more than what others do, (and this more need not be the same as the more that i saw), simply because you know there is more to see.

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Given his smarts, I can't help but wonder why this former Gifted Education Programme student from Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) chose English when he could have easily picked from a wide range of more 'marketable subjects' for his higher studies overseas. – Jasmine Yin, 'Today', 11 Aug 2007.


"There is no why," I want to say, but the mind
rebels against wearing the heart on sleeves.
I will not speak of love or truth; decline
the defence of a poet's art. Which leaves,
instead, this song of rain trees laced, wet-black,
on grey velvet skies; cities rising, rose-
blushed, on the wings of dawn; a snail's long trek
across pimpled tiles cracked where moss still grows;
golden french fries jewelled with salt; blood-veined
marble in a silent church; a broken
bell that tolled the hours before the bombs rained
down on the town where once it was spoken:
"The heart has its reasons, of which reason
knows nothing." The last prayer of the season.
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posted by eothen @ 12:47 AM 2 comments

the music of chance

[Good grief. It's been so long since i've written anything here that i think i've lost the ability to write altogether. Ah well. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Let this March holiday be a time for building up what i've allowed to break down over the last year.]


This post has been a long time coming. The patterned unlikelihoods that i've grown accustomed to ever since they first started occurring, just after university, have finally reached epic proportions that demand articulation. i've been wondering for the longest time about what these strange coincidences might mean. Earlier on, it was easy to dismiss them - pure chance, random occurrences that the human mind cannot help but try to interpret in some kind of purposeful way. But when these coincidences start gathering force through sheer frequency and fortuitous timing, one cannot help but wonder.....

Someone asked me, after i'd told her about the more notable incidents that have happened in the past few years, if i saw these incidents as random or purposive. My answer, that they are evidence of God's manifest presence in our world, was something that has taken me a long while to formulate. For me, it's the only satisfactory answer. Being as i am, the notion of a random Darwinian universe that is purely material not only horrifies - it simply does not make sense. It fails to explain too many things. So, the alternative to that, that there is a higher power that guides the affairs of men, is something that i have always held as true. Yet, the idea that everything that happens happens for a reason also seems to fail to make sense. There are things that happen that don't appear to make much difference in the grand scheme of things, incidents like meeting a long-lost acquaintance on the street the very day after you've dreamt about her, that honestly do not seem consequential, no matter how you look at them.

So what do i make of events like the Vienna encounter with TBS, or the serendipitous discovery of Mark Doty's 'Heaven', that really have had very little impact on anything of importance in my life so far? It seems to me that they are visible manifestations of God's guiding hand in human affairs. Our Creator, i am convinced, has a sense of humour, and if all good things come from God, and if fun, properly understood, is a Good Thing, then i am certain that God also has a sense of fun - and all these gratuitous coincidences are His way of reminding me, gently and with a twinkle in His eyes, that He is there, and that there is no need to fear because He isn't planning to go away.

Of course, i may just be superstitious. And that is no doubt what many would like to think. Still, it seems to me that life does fall into patterns, that it does have its own silent music - and music, by its very nature, is never the result of pure chance.
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posted by eothen @ 1:01 PM 0 comments

anniversary

It's been 2 years and a day since i first joined the blogging community.

i just thought that this needed to be recorded.

In addition to all the other things, blogging has rescued me from inarticulacy. It has given me a legitimate space to think, to test my thoughts, tame my feelings, grapple with ideas, put them into an architecture of words - words that will reach a readership, no matter how small or limited, words that, hopefully, will have some effect, that will make something happen.

Happy anniversary.
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posted by eothen @ 10:16 AM 1 comments