LAST SUNDAY
My Epiphany
I remember that it was a Sunday morning. I must have been 15 years old, I'm not sure. But I do remember that it was a Sunday morning because I was lying in bed waiting for my mother to come in. I was listening out for the sound of her black leather court shoes as they made their way from her bedroom to mine. Like clockwork, the door whispered open and my mother leaned into the room. She was dressed in her red blouse, jacket draped over the shoulders with a white cloth that to me always looked like a tiny baby cape.
'It's time for church,' she announced. I don't exactly remember what it was that I said to her in response but it was enough for her to open the door wider and step into the bedroom. It was something along the lines of not wanting to go to church. Granted, this plea was one she had heard throughout my entire childhood, but there was something obviously different in my demeanour, voice or tone. In her annoyed yet gentle way, she asked me why I didn't want to go to church.
I was never a particularly stubborn child nor did I have any notable sense of defiance, so the engagement was not a combative one, at least not in the way I remember it. So, I perched up on the bed as she stood by the door and said, 'Because I don't know why I am going.'
What made this moment memorable to me was not that I had the courage to say this to my devout Methodist Church-going elder, member of just about any committee in the church, and mother. It was her response. Without lashing out or dismissing what I was saying and calling in my father, himself a virulent church delinquent, she simply said, 'If you do not know why you are going to church, then don't go.' I never set foot in that church until about 10 years later as I stood in front of the congregation, one hand on my father's coffin, avoiding eye contact with everyone just so that I could make it through my speech without choking up.
That conversation marked a pivotal moment in my life because it was the first time I thought deeply and purposefully about spirituality and how it related to me. To be fair, this realisation is apt only in retrospect. Back then, I really was just a lazy teen avoiding sitting in a hot and humid church mumbling through hymns that I never allowed myself to learn. And, at the same time, sneaking gleeful, pubescent glances at my friends as we spotted a bit of thigh flesh revealed by a too-short skirt down the long benches. This was something our reverend must have picked up on because Moruti Sibi's sermons were always heavy-handed when he spoke about the loose morals of the youths of today. I never trusted Sibi. He smoked cigarettes.
This moment with my mother was not about my leaving Christianity nor was it in any way about my questioning God - that would come much later. But from that Sunday onwards, I was no longer a member of the Methodist Church of Mohlakeng. The only glances exchanged in those subsequent Sunday mornings were between me and my father, who could never quite put his finger on what was odd about my not going to church while he sat and watched television.
A few years later, in the second year of my studies at the then Cape Technikon, now called the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, I got wind of a church that was essentially on the University of Cape Town campus. UCT was, back then, and not so much now, a prestigious university with an enviously self-important culture about it. That's where the rich, cool kids went. So, when some friends invited me to come and visit the church, it was without hesitation that I went. For one thing, it was the perfect excuse to go and see how the other half lives, and for another to leave the dreary life of my own university residence that was aptly nicknamed 'Afghanistan'.
I distinctly remember walking into the church for the first time. For one thing, the campus was situated in a leafy suburb that felt as though the cool air was being pumped directly from Europe, the smugness was sharp on the nose. The church was housed inside a performing arts theatre, so it was visually striking with its curving rows of pristine red velvet chairs that were grotesquely comfortable, a far cry from Moruti Sibi's wooden benches whose incessant creaking betrayed the dignity of our ample mothers. The cushioned chairs enveloped a semi-circular wooden stage that hosted a full band. Above the stage hung cascading speakers suspended from the ceiling.
When I walked in, the worship service was already in full swing and I remember being utterly awe-struck at the spectacle. The closest to a band that we ever got in the cigarette-smoking shyster's church was the choir and the only church instrument I had ever known was a tiny leatherbound cushion that fitted in the palm of your hand that we dramatically called 'Doots', after the 'doots' sound that it makes when you smack it.
It was the music bearing down from those speakers that hit me somewhere between my heart and my stomach and which shifted something in me. The bright lights washing down from the ceiling made the place glow. It was a totally different world than the one I had spent my entire church-going life frequenting. The music they were playing was loud but bland, the guitar riffs reminding me of 90s boy bands, more Westlife than Boyz II Men. It lacked the tone and depth of the church music I had grown up with. It was strangely celebratory and jubilant - made the stranger still by seeing a black choir singing white people's songs - the music gave a sense of a different kind of God, one that I had never met before. This was not my mother's God. This was not a God bathed in the laments of the downtrodden faceless horde that I grew up with.
What was abundantly clear in the church was the race ratio. The congregation was 90 per cent black, mostly young students from different institutions around the area. The pastoral team, in contrast, was 90 per cent white, mostly middle-aged white men clad in blue jeans and T-shirts like a once-famous boyband. This wasn't necessarily odd for me since I had spent my high school years in an institution that had the same racial mix. What I did not anticipate was how this would affect the way spirituality itself was expressed in the church. But more on this later.
I will admit that I absolutely loved the sermons. Of necessity, the messages were directed at, and not against, the youths, as was the case with Sibi's yellow-toothed snarls. The pastors understood the ebbs and flows of teen angst and the pressures of varsity life. They gave heartfelt advice to young people struggling to find their feet in the world of adulthood. Many of us were far away from home and, while we were rebellious teens, we still needed and yearned for guidance. For us, spirituality was what we called upon during those long nights when assignments were due and the prospect of failing exams was a terrifying possibility. Also, for many of us, family relations were strained, especially with our parents, as we tried to find our own version of ourselves while pulling away from what our families wanted.
I had had a tumultuous relationship with my father. Why, exactly, I am not entirely sure. I carried a deep pain and resentment towards him but deep down inside I knew that I did not want that kind of relationship with him. I wanted us to be okay, whatever that meant. But the pain was deep. So it happened that one day during a sermon the pastor spoke about those who wanted to repair relations with people that they cared about. He had flooded the church with a poignant prayer and when he finally asked who was willing to lay down their pain and pick up Jesus' light yoke, I didn't even realise that I had raised my hand.
Someone ushered me down to the stage as I heaved heavy sobs, my feet feeling as though I was wading through quicksand. I was asked if I was willing to accept Jesus Christ as my lord and saviour and something, something. I said yes. Yes, to whatever it was that would relieve me of the pain that I felt and the hurt that I carried. Yes, to having a decent relationship with my father and to having someone help to guide me through life. Yes, whatever that meant.
The term 'born again Christian' was one that I was vaguely aware of. Well, I knew it and I knew a few people who described themselves as 'born again' but, apart from not drinking alcohol, abstaining from sex and being violently boring, I had no idea what being born again meant. Nonetheless, I was about to be adopted into different church structures that any God fearing and socially awkward born-again would join like cell groups, and bible school, and I became a member of our campus branch. During this time, I did everything from evangelising to creating promotional material like posters and flyers. I even featured myself on one of them. Yes, I was literally the poster boy of our campus church.
In time, however, I could not shake the odd sense of being in a majority black church that was led by majority white pastors. It became more and more evident that whiteness was a benchmark of spiritual purity: if you wanted to live a righteous life, just do what the white people do. The white pastors preached as though we, the black youths who came from the townships, lived the same exact lives as 40-something-year-old white men who had never set foot in the hood. Beyond understanding the academic challenges of being a varsity student, they were clueless as to what life was like for any black person. They spoke harshly against African cultural practices, apart from during those...
