SUNDAY, 10 SEPTEMBER 2000
Qwert yuio plkj hgfdsa zxcv bnmn …
I wish it could have worked like that. Unfortunately, for the umpteenth time in my life I’m forced to employ the vocabulary of an actual language to express my feelings, and to use the limbs called fingers to set down words on paper so I, and perhaps you, can see how I feel.
I do it in the language known to the world as Afrikaans. I can do it in a different language, but it would have the same effect. Someone else will look at it and say: I think I understand.
Right now, you are on the other side of this text. I hope the process works as it should.
How do I feel? Anxious and lonely. Anxious because, oddly, I still believe in the god my parents presented to me with good intentions; the god about whom I learned that he was like a good father – the best of fathers any child can ever hope to have.
Then, in my early twenties, the suspicion took root in my mind that this god had been made up by people, like the golden calf the Israelites had made while Moses was on the mountain. I became convinced that people created this God of Words over the course of centuries for the same reasons the people of ancient Israel made the golden calf: They wanted a god they could see, whom they could worship, before whom they could lay down sacrifices. The god with whom Moses went to confer in the Bible story was too far – too far, too invisible, too mysterious, too untouchable. The God of Words, like the golden calf, is not mysterious. He is called mysterious, but only because it is a characteristic that people like to ascribe to their god. How can a god be mysterious if the people who call him mysterious also claim to know what he thinks and know what he has done and what he will do? (“But we know nothing of these things,” people will say with indignation. “We don’t know what God thinks! We don’t know what He will do! We don’t know a fraction of all He has ever done, and we can never understand His plans, or His intentions!”) This God of Words can also be felt. In the right circumstances, it must be added, which usually takes place in churches with plenty of instruments on stage, and a preacher who walks around with a microphone in his hand. (“Oh no,” people will say, “you can feel God in the privacy of your room, too.”) And, like the golden calf, this God of Words can be made content, and his favour can be curried for your cause by the magical power of a series of rituals. You can sing and fall down, and clasp your hands together, or do Bible study, or say long prayers, and so on, and so on. And the aggrieved will accuse me on every point that I distort everything, and that I clearly don’t know the first thing about their god, and may they pray for me, right now, I don’t even have to close my eyes.
What all of this boils down to is that I no longer believe in the God of Words. I have spelt out the case in my own version of an official declaration. And I felt better afterwards because words can make something look so official.
As time went by, though, I realised that you don’t get rid of youthful beliefs that easily. I don’t believe in the detail anymore – the Personal Salvation doctrine is one example. But every now and then, in a quiet moment, I have this vision of the god I don’t believe in anymore: an all-powerful king sitting on his golden throne, staring at me in pensive silence. I will know the way he looks at me is not that of a loving father figure. This figure will not utter a single word, but I’ll have a good sense of what he’s thinking: that I just have to wait – my day will come. “Then we’ll see who’s boss. Then we’ll see what you do with your well-thought out arguments. You want to criticise me? Because I didn’t do what? Because I said I’d do what? Who do you think you are?” And I will swallow my words, and become acutely aware of the fact that it’s all true. Who am I, after all, to stand before this majestic figure and throw around allegations? I’d want to turn around and sneak away, but he would lift his finger ever so slightly, say something that I wouldn’t be able to decipher, and the next moment I will find myself in a terrible pool of everlasting fire.
So much for my arguments.
Loneliness: theologians of a certain mindset might say that this being alone – this is my hell. To which I will reply that I felt alone even when I still believed in the God of Words!
Punishment hell or just everyday hell, by now I’m tired of this loneliness business. I believe that if a man just had someone in his life, that this person could tell him that he need not worry, and her hands on any of several places on his body would convince him it was true. It would be all that would matter.
Still, as things stood yesterday, and the countless days and nights before, I am alone. In a different time of my life I would have been praying hard every day for this god to send me someone to make the waking hours better, and to let me sleep better at night. Since faith is a requirement for someone to apply this method to find redemption from his personal hell, I am left with something much more ordinary: “Hello, my name is Brand” – or the more desperate, “Former believer now in hell of loneliness looking for someone in a similar position.”
To be in a relationship with someone means you belong somewhere. You’ll be missed if you fail to come home at the end of a day. Commitment to someone else should also be conducive to keeping your mind away from eternal damnation. And this kind of companionship can also lead to satisfying one of our strongest desires – the desire to perpetuate life. To go through the proper procedure, and then after a long wait to hold a third person in your hands – that is not you, and not the other partner in the relationship, but a separate living entity. And you will stare at this miniature version of a human being and you’ll know, you were part of a process that has given life.
Bottom line: I can think of plenty of good reasons I don’t want to be alone anymore.
Enough for now. Did I manage to communicate with the limited medium of words what I feel on this Sunday night? Does it matter? The reason I started typing in the first place was because I was a little anxious, and to a greater extent felt alone. The process of choosing words and arranging them in sentences was what had real value in the end. As is usual with these things, I feel a little better.
Why does it matter that you, the reader, understand how I feel? It will only matter if you could convince me that I no longer have to fear the god in which I no longer believe. And if you know a kind woman with an open mind that’s been hoping she could meet someone who will save her from her own hell of a lonely existence, that will be an especially happy coincidence.
Few things are ever so simple, so qwert yuio plkj! Or, so it is …
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