Thursday 24 September 2015

Losing my religion

This may come as a surprise to many of you, but I don't really do religion. 

As far as I can tell, religion is a "system" to get you into God's good books.

It can be rituals, sacraments, and ceremonies. Christen or baptize your baby to ensure he'll go to heaven - or be baptized yourself in order to validate your faith. Say a mass for a dead person to shorten their time in purgatory. Have your marriage sanctified by a minister to make it valid. Don't get me wrong here - I know symbols are important reminders, and that as humans, rituals help us through the various stages of life, but they can never replace deeper realities, nor make us acceptable to God.

For some, religion is a set of rules to abide to. One side of that coin is pride: because I follow those rules to the letters, I am a better person than others, and surely God loves me more. I become judgemental of anyone who doesn't follow those rules - and I end up rejecting certain categories of people. The other side of the coin is a huge burden of guilt, because no one is perfect. No one can strictly adhere to any moral standard. We all slip up, and when it happens, we feel crushed: surely now God no longer loves me. I am worthless.

It can be praying, singing, fasting, reading a holy book. It can be charity work. At the end of the day, though, it's fundamentally flawed: religions are trying to get God to do something. Magic uses the same premises: you can somehow manipulate the surnatural to your own ends. But if there is a God, surely he is no puppet. You cannot manipulate God into doing what you want through prayer or fasting or good works.

When you get to the bottom of things, religions are man-made. I do not think they are inherently good. Human beings need to take responsibilities for their own actions, and maybe atheism helps in that one cannot use religion as an excuse for being bigoted or intolerant when one is an atheist. 

Even the apostle Paul didn't put any value in religion:
 
If others have reason for confidence in their own efforts, I have even more!
I was circumcised when I was eight days old. I am a pure-blooded citizen of Israel and a member of the tribe of Benjamin—a real Hebrew if there ever was one! I was a member of the Pharisees, who demand the strictest obedience to the Jewish law. I was so zealous that I harshly persecuted the church. And as for righteousness, I obeyed the law without fault.
I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done.  Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage. - Philippians 3: 4-8

It's worth noting that the Greek word politely translated as "garbage" or "rubbish" in most English versions actually means "dung" or "excrement", and may have been as offensive as the English word "shit".

So basically... the Apostle Paul says religion is shit.

You see, faith is very different from religion. Deep faith is about relationship, not about religion. I believe God is a person we can somehow relate to. I could not love or respect a God who has to be placated through rituals and sacrifices and self-loathing. But that is not the God I believe in. I believe in a God who got his hands dirty. I believe he made himself man. He went through what we go through and made himself approachable. I would even go as far as to say that God learnt from this experience - now he knows what human life is like, because he's lived it. To me, that is an immense comfort, because it means he is not a far-off judge wagging his finger at me. He knows what I'm going through. He understands. He suffers alongside us. That, to me, is what makes him worthy of my love and devotion.

I believe in a God who loves us. No ifs or buts. God doesn't say, "I'll love you if you go to church" or "I'll love you if you fast for 40 days" or "I'll love you if you quit smoking" or "I'll love you when you're perfect". God's love is not conditional. We don't need to deserve his love: he's already given it to us. I believe in a God who came to live and die for us. That's pretty big love! And he didn't do it because we loved him... he did it because he loves us. 

 This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. [...]We love each other because he loved us first. - 1 John 4: 10, 19



Wednesday 23 September 2015

The language of my heart

When I was 18, I spent a year in London, studying and practising English. The experience shaped the person I am today in many significant ways. The most obvious one is that I became a Christian that year. My faith is the foundation of my worldview, of my values, and of the character I strive to develop. Yet, that is not the only door that was opened in my heart that year.

I fell in love with the English language and its culture. I made friends in London and learnt tidtits of British history, as well as odd British habits and foods - I have become a heavy tea drinker (with milk, please), and I love mince pies, beans on toast and mango chutney (OK, strictly speaking that's not English, but I learnt to love Indian food when I was there).

I started watching movies in English and reading books. Lots and lots of books. Over the years, I've discovered numerous authors and immersed myself in the worlds they created. I walked in the shoes of hundreds of characters, wept with them, laughed with them, trembled for them. As George R.R. Martin puts it in A Song of Ice and Fire, "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one." Of course, I already was avidly reading French books, too; but reading in English imprinted the structure and flow of the language into my mind.

Partly because I was discovering faith in English, and partly because I was completely immersed in the language and culture, it created a strong emotional bond in my mind. English wasn't just a language I had learnt academically. It became part of me. It became the language of my heart and mind, sometimes even more than my mother tongue.

Like a cuckoo, I had hatched in a nest that wasn't build by my biological breed - but I felt at home. I returned to Belgium vowing I'd go back to the UK, and I spent a long time feeling homesick. Eventually, several years later, I moved to Swindon and lived there for 6 years, weaving English more and more into my personality. I worked with special needs children and discovered autism. English also allowed me to communicate with people all over the world through the internet, further opening up my mind to different cultures, ways of life and of perceiving the world.

Because I went to London, I learnt a new language that became part of me. I became a Christian. I made beloved friends. I opened my heart and mind to different cultures and ways of thinking. I got to know I had autism.

That gap year yielded outcomes that reached far into my future. I would not be the person I am today if I hadn't decided to go.




Roman Road, Eastend of London, where I lived for a year