Thursday, June 16, 2005

wah the weather finally cleared up today!!!! YEY!! well although it was still kinda humid n wet i still went to run.... well, all i hav to say is that the run was..... exhilarating, and liberating.... haha, esp since its been ages since i ran... like 5 days cos the last 5 days hav been rainin non stop...

oh yeah, came across this entry written by a person called spenz... so credit goes to u friend, but i just wanna share it... cos its kinda well written in my opinion.. so here goes:

City Harvest Church is moving to the Singapore Expo: a grander vision there is none: replete with rows of card-swiping tellers to ease the process of emptying your bank accounts and spiffy toilet bowls cleaner than your face. It was quite an amazing sight, really: 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 grandest 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 institution labelled as a religion), a friend (or rather, my friend's cell mate - haha!) drew me away to indulge in a little heart to heart talk. Unabashedly, I questioned the necessity of so elaborate a palace, with prinstine walls and black-collered security: looking more like bouncers designed to keep the people in rather than to keep the demons out. But of course, he went on to defend the place of the Church as a home, and how it should rightfully convey the sense of comfort and such, and 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 wishes 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 on external stimuli: seeping inwards through the pores of your skin into your blood vessels and combusting in the euphoria of your being. It is a joyous addiction, even, and I see these peeps as rapturous addicts returning weekly to get their fix.

Of course, addictions of this kind, nobody gives a hoot. I 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. It be only drugs, and sex, and rock and roll that is the problem. Everything black is bad, everything white is good. We are all addicts in someways or another, but what displaces you from the norms of 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 22 years old, not young, but still within the demographics of their intended market. But I believe that when churches take on the mantle of a new generation and embraces the attitudes of quantity; that is, to sacrifice rustic beauty 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 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 whiles 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 their 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.

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ahtong signing out
@ |6:35 PM|