On zen and the art of motorcar maintenance

‘So you’re a Christian?’

Rajesh asks me this as I transport him back to his house after he’s dropped the car off at my house, a car I first dropped off at his house the day before, when he then drove me home. It has been that kind of operation. Rajesh is fixing my car seat, he lives in Reservoir Hills - not an insignificant distance away from my house in Hillcrest - and this little operation has led to us spending a not-inconsiderable time in each others' presence, driving back and forth and all.

So you land up asking questions.

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘You’re wearing one of those collars.’

‘Oh.’ I had been at a church meeting just before this and had neglected to take my clerical collar off.

‘Yes. I am. And you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where do you worship.’

‘I worship at the Cement In Prayer house of worship.’

‘Here in Reservoir Hills?’

‘Uh-huh.’

 

Cement In Prayer seems like an odd name for a church. It seems okay maybe as a tagline, you know, ‘Welcome to WinePress Ministries here we like to ‘Cement Things in Prayer’’. Or WinePress: Cementing Things in Prayer since 2008, something like that, but as an actual name? I’m not so sure. But then Christian churches do sometimes adopt rather strange names. There was a church called the International House of Prayer Ministry that resided in a building not bigger than a double garage, a building that, no matter how it huffed and puffed and stretched itself, could not meet the criteria of such a lavish title. Or the Jesus Dome in Durban which, although combining two seemingly completely disparate words, is a hugely successful church held in a large building that, thoughtfully, is in the shape of a dome. Christian churches might be many things, but small scale visionaries they are not. (Only after re-reading have I fully realised the hypocrisy of this: I am a Methodist. This was a name first given as an insult to Wesley and his merry band of fellow Christians at university. It was meant as an insult, and unless history has not been kind, it does not seem a particularly witty insult. Thus, my stream is named after a jibe, and not a particularly smart one at that. So there.)

‘Have you been a Christian your whole life?’

‘No. I became a Christian about ten years ago. Before that I was Hindu.’

‘How did that happen?’

‘My father died and went to heaven. When he was in heaven he met Jesus who told him it was not his time yet, that he was to return to earth and he was to live for another five years. So we thought he was dead. He came back. He lived almost to the day another five years and then he died. My aunt too had a very similar experience. She was in a coma, met Jesus, returned and told us about it. We became Christians after that.’

There are moments in a conversation where things go from being politely conversational to something more like an interrogation, and how I wanted to move the conversation in that direction. I’m not sure what to make of these types of stories, known broadly as Near Death Experiences. I don’t particularly like the whole idea of them – and by them I’m talking about the world of online documentation and books written around this, known too as an acrostic: NDE. Only recently I’m led to believe that a wildly successful NDE book, written by a young boy who supposedly died and went to heaven only to return and recount how wonderful it all was, proved to be a hoax. (For the record I didn’t read the book or the hoax, which should prove to you what a stunningly shallow fount of wisdom you are currently drinking from.) I don’t like NDEs and I think that is part of it: the way stuff like this opens up the door for the disturbingly opportunistic to feed on the worryingly naïve. The other part of it is the way it can enforce the notion of belief in Jesus as a way to shuffle yourself off this mortal coil into the warmer and safer arms of Jesus. Or the way people always return with stories about how this place had a soft rosy glow to it, like a really bad 80s photoshoot, only without the shoulder pads and mullets (one would hope, with it being heaven and all.) Or they walked through fields of daffodils in a beautiful landscape awash with mountains and pastures, as if, had they not been recalled, they might have bumped into Julie Andrews carrying buckets of milk.

And the message is always the same: ‘Granny and Grandpa send their love.’

‘So you all converted to Christianity off the back of that?’

‘Well, you know, when it happens to two members of your family…’

I get that as well; but honestly, where NDEs are rather kinda super-rare, it does seem a little too fortuitous that the same family received it twice – this is akin to winning the ultimate lottery twice. (But I suppose only if you wanted to return. Otherwise, I don’t know, it is like being audited twice?)

And my mind then got to thinking: How did that conversation go down with Jesus? Did Jesus look up and see the gentleman standing there, a look of surprise across his face, a surreptitious glance towards Peter at the gate, a glance of inquisition, ‘How did he get in here now? We’re not ready for him.’ And when dad was given another five years, did an angel look at his wristwatch, set the timer and declare, ‘Okay, time starts NOW!’ Or was it nothing like any of this because this is heaven and people don’t communicate like this - they just knowingly nod at each other having, in a second fully absorbed the entire conversation, questions and answers alike.

I don’t know.

While studying, my Religious Studies professor had this cartoon on his door. It depicted a short conversation between a Zen Master and his student:

Zen student: ‘Zen master, what happens to us when we die?’

Zen master: ‘I don’t know what happens to us when we die.’

Zen student: ‘Yes, but how can you not know what happens to us when we die? You are the Zen master!’

Zen master: ‘Yes, but I’m not a dead Zen master.’

Exactly.

I find NDEs hard to believe. I just do. But then I think about my own faith and what I believe: a person who was God came to earth, declared Love as the only path to salvation, died on a cross, rose again, and ascended into heaven, bringing life, hope, love and the promise of peace, real peace. And I think about how atheists might listen to my argument against NDEs, nod knowingly at me with a look of, ‘See! See! Look how crazy it all is!’

And yet.

As I continued in conversation with Rajesh I asked about how tough it all was for his family. He informed me that, off the back of their conversion, much of his family disowned them outright; they turned their backs on them, and have never spoken to them again. I thought about Rajesh and his wife going faithfully every week to the Cement In Prayer gathering, and how much they were willing to give up for that little church.

And I thought about all the people who have nailed their lives to crosses right behind the cross of Jesus all the way through human history, their own lives responding to the high call of Jesus - to spend and be spent, to lay it all down for the promise of a New Day and for the birth of a New World. I mean, that should give pause to the most hardened atheist. Personally I find the whole ‘striving for the proof of the historical Jesus’ a fool’s errand, for liberals and conservatives alike. I’m far more intrigued by the notable, amazing women and men who have put up their hands to lay down their lives. That and my own resurrection experience is enough to fuel the fire in my belly and the faith in my soul.

Sometimes things are proven. Sometimes things are true. And sometimes those things align, and sometimes they exist quite happily as distant cousins.

Were these NDEs real for Rajesh’s family? I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, for what family would give up so much for a lie? And I do not know, for I have no idea really of what the Great Beyond is like. Like Paul and all the rest of human history, I am looking through this glass darkly and though I am a Christian minister, and as such should maybe know a little more than I do, I rest comfortably on the fact that I am not (yet) a dead Christian minister.

On believing in many things a non-believer says

I met a feisty student yesterday. Let’s call her Jane. She goes to Rhodes University and she has issues with God. Brash, opinionated and standing back for no one. (Not God, her.) I had half a mind to advise God to tread carefully here. A meeting was arranged by this young woman’s gran who found some of these questions beyond anything she’d had to manage before.

It was a stimulating conversation.

Jane could not understand why she needed to be in relationship with God. She could not understand why God demanded to be worshipped (isn’t that, like, just a touch too selfish?) She wanted to know why Christians she knows focus so much on sin when her life is about blessing. She wanted to know why Christians are always banging on about reading the Bible and going to church when she found Life in so many other places other than church. She wanted to know why people like me say things like, ‘It’s all part of God’s plan’ when it so clearly isn’t. She wanted to know why, when she truly sought God, God was nowhere to be found - no reciprocation, just unrequited love. (I didn’t have the heart to tell her Mother Teresa died with the same question burning in her chest, and if she couldn’t find the answer, well, what chance do the rest of us have?) Jane wanted to know why Christians talk such a good talk but when she is helping the poor of Grahamstown they’re nowhere to be found. 

She also wanted to know why Christians only side-hug - ‘Are they afraid their crotches will accidentally touch?’ - and I momentarily thought to myself, When did saying ‘crotch’ and ‘touch’ become acceptable things to say in front of a minister? I would never have said that, not even in my third year at Wits University. The candour of the young. Gran spluttered. I nodded sagely. She wanted to know why - Oh why! - do Christians demand that there be this space between a hug, ’Space for the Holy Spirit?’ she enquired disbelievingly, fairly spitting those last words out. It struck me that Jane has bumped into a fairly conservative breed of Christians somewhere along the line. I reckoned, as she continued unabated from ‘Holy Spirit’ to ‘crotch’ to ‘meaningless platitudes’, that I would find that church to this day by the dead bodies of cliché-ridden Christians lying crumpled in piles, having met their match before this vortex of liberal disbelief.

I do love Jane.

‘Oh, and another thing,’ she continued, me nodding in return, mentally calculating the distance to the door… and freedom, ‘What on earth is up with all that ‘I see God’s hand in all of it’ nonsense?!’ Sometimes crap just happens and it’s just crap. ‘God’s got a hand in all of it’, I ask you. Have you ever!?’ Cue eye-roll and dismissive glance towards gran. ‘Flip, if I hear another Christian platitude I will, I will…’  She rather left that sentiment there, leaving gran and me to ponder what course of action she would take, but that, whatever it was, it probably wouldn’t be good news for any unsuspecting Christian within arm’s reach.

Jane had questions and she wanted answers dammit! She looked at me, tucking her leg up on the couch suggesting a readiness to pounce on any half-baked, sorry-assed response to this slowly growing conviction that I, as a religious person, and the circus I brought to town, are in need of a truth-telling overhaul.

I told her that I figured before we met, that her problem might be more with the church and less with God. I told her that the problems she spoke about I take exception to as well (mostly) and I offered those words: tell me the God you don’t believe in and the chances are that I don’t believe in that God either.

 I told her that maybe, instead of God not speaking to her, God was in fact speaking to her all the time and that a couple of prayers of thanksgiving might open her to that blessing. I also told her that all those things churchy people do – praying, reading scripture, worship – are less about checking boxes and more about opening oneself up to the Great Awakening, and that most Christians could with reminding on this score as well. I told her that God was keener on relationship than worship, perhaps, and that God really cared about how we handle the less fortunate. I told her that, despite some pretty bad press, the church actually was not that bad at helping those in need - that many churches were taking the Matthew 25 injunction really rather seriously. I told her that I also think the Original Blessing is a good thing to keep in mind (you know, before Original Sin) but that sin is real and I need to deal with the demons that run amok within me in order for me to see God, and, you know, also just to be decent to other people, for left to my own devices I’m a rather self-involved son-of-a-gun, a slightly dulled apple in need of a spritz. I told her that Christian platitude is a real thing, unfortunately, and besides apologising for it, I’m not sure what else to do about it. 

Oh, and I mentioned that parts of the church had done a pretty good job all too often of taking Real Sin – the sin that threatens us all, our planet, our lives – things like Greed, Selfishness, Naked Ambition at the expense of others, Fear and Judgment – and had wrapped them up neatly, cast them in the trash, and chosen to focus almost exclusively on Sexual Sin. (Here, let it be known, I added the vignette that Sexual Sin is a real thing and that one should not be unnecessarily bumping into people’s nether-regions, and that space for the Holy Spirit might not be biblically mandated, but still stands as a pretty solid suggestion.) 

And so I prattled on.

She seemed enamoured by most of my responses. I draw this conclusion by the fact that I escaped in one piece. 

I did close by encouraging her to keep her critical thinking intact, to not be persuaded by tired and unconvincing arguments and to ‘keep on keeping on’, which struck me as I said it as a touch ironic, considering my previous statement on platitudes.

And had I a little more time to think through my responses, I might have suggested, considering the wide array of pronouncements we were both making, that, channelling Fred Craddock, we should probably be careful about talking about God in a manner that suggested we’d ‘walked all round God and taken pictures.’

Later that same day I sat with a beloved member who has seen so much in her lifetime – good and ill. She has suffered much, persevered through much, and by faith and an unyielding, beautiful perseverance has ushered in a season of absolute blessing in her own life and the lives of her loved ones. Her closing remark to me? ‘Andrew, I see God’s hand in all of it.’

‘I do too Jen,’ I told her. ‘I do too.’

On turning 39

So I turned 39 this week. 

I don’t know how to feel about that. I think, when I was young, quite unsurprisingly 39 seemed ancient, but now that I’m there I’m not so sure anymore. I mean, it is old compared to 21 but really quite young compared to, I don’t know, anything over 40. Is it just me or does age seem less about maturity as well? I think of 39 year olds when I was young and I don’t recall them acting this, well, young – or immature, if I was to be critical. The whole bar on maturity seems to have been pushed back. I saw a surfer, skin like leather and not a day under 80, carrying a surfboard and hobbling along; what was he doing carrying a mini-mal when he should’ve been at home re-gripping his Zimmer frame? It all seems out of whack.

But you try to stay with it. So as part of my post-38 rehabilitation, pre-40 shake-up I’ve started gym. Not your usual kind of gym which would be okay because people leave you alone, but the kind of gym where you have a young, muscled gentleman in your face the whole time asking if you’re okay. Well, would I be white as a sheet and complaining I want to vomit if I was really okay? This was Thursday and he was the same gentleman who, on Monday had taught me how to use a kettlebell.

This is not advanced actuarial science, I thought to myself, as he placed a kettlebell on the ground pointed at it, and said, unremarkably, ‘This is a kettlebell.’ He didn’t exactly take it to the next level when he meaningfully offered, ‘It is basically a weight with a handle on it,’ again pointing to the ground, to the kettlebell, which is self-evidently, exactly that - a weight with a handle on it. I half expected him to start pointing out others things: ‘That’s a chair. That over there is a window. Those are glasses for drinking water. Say with me…’ But then he proceeded to lose me at every turn: ‘You pick it up like this, there are six points – up like this, then swing to here, then drop to there, then activate this muscle, then lift to here and place in this groove before elevating it to this position.’ It was WTF. He lost me at point two, like when you do the fine dining thing and the waitress loses you in the explanation of the second main meal which was a line-fish you’ve never heard of sitting on a bed of some previously unknown vegetable that has inexplicably been reducted, and you lose your way because you’re listening out for fries and none of these dishes seems to come with a side order of that and that worries you and you get distracted wondering whether it would be okay in a restaurant like this, where each dish is filled with such ornate stuff, to order you know, just a side order of fries.  Part of maturing in years is not being able to keep up, in any sphere. It didn’t help that the woman sharing this newbie class positively glowed, swinging the kettlebell around like a baton and exclaiming, ‘I think I’ve got it!’ which, the gym instructor proudly proclaimed, was so. And this young woman, who up till this moment I’d rather enjoyed having in class, became Arch Enemy Number One.

So, when I went to the first class, was practicing the art of not vomiting while telling the trainer I felt like vomiting, and receiving a meaningful diagnosis of what I was doing wrong, which involved something about shallow breathing, I began to second-guess this whole undertaking. The instructor I really like but in that moment I could’ve punched him except for the fact that I was so exhausted I probably would’ve missed and buried my head in the massive canister of magnesium carbonate powder standing like a shrine in the middle of the floor - gym chalk I would’ve been using had I actually achieved the goal of lifting the kettlebell above my head.

‘I will get there.’

 I tell you this because this is what the trainer told me. I know I’m not the only one; I used to do spinning and saw a guy, an Ancient One – at least mid-forties – being carried out of the spinning class, feet hanging limp behind him, arms over the shoulders of two noticeably younger, more virile human specimens. He was being dragged out like a soldier returning from the beaches of Normandy with a story to tell. He too, now that I think about it, should’ve been breathing more deeply. As they passed me by, presumably off to the Virgin Active rehab centre, or onsite mortuary, I thought to myself, now there is a poster you never see in a gym. No, it’s all smart, successful looking young things, glowing just perfectly as they lift, squat, and punch themselves to even greater heights leaving others, like me, covered in the feeling of guilt at never getting there. There is no poster with a picture of a guy like this with the slogan, ‘Come join us, we’ll help you stare into the yawning abyss of your own mortality’. No. That’s why they call it advertising.

This, folks, is a kettlebell.

 

So it is hard. But life’s journey is obviously more than the shape of our bodies and the depth of our lungs. I buried a man this week. He died at the age of 92 and had a dry sense of humour which freed me to crack my favourite old person funeral joke (What is the best thing about old age? No peer pressure). He was medically boarded at 40, died at 92. That is 52 years of retirement. That is 14 years longer than I’ve been alive, I thought to myself, a thought that made me feel young, so I held on to it for a bit. 

But the most remarkable thing was his kindness; people commented on how kind he was, compassionate, transporting the elderly, sharing his time, remembering birthdays, listening.

And it made me think of a story. Jeff Bezos, in a commencement address at Princeton, mentioned a life-altering conversation with his grandfather; a man of few words. Jeff, given at a young age to analytical thinking, recalled being on a trip with his grandparents. He noticed his grandmother smoking, remembered reading an article on how smoking shortens lifespan, quickly did the mental arithmetic considering the amount she smoked over against its detrimental effect, and proudly proclaimed that, at this rate, his grandmother would lose nine years of her life. His grandmother began to cry. His grandfather stopped the car, took him outside, and utilising the few words he had set aside for the day, said to young Jeff, ‘It is harder to be kind than clever.’

It is harder to be kind than clever. This is the kind of profundity you could build a meaningful life around.

As I inch towards the middle years, and as it gets a touch harder to do the stuff that came naturally to me as a younger man, I see some things are getting a little simpler. That maybe the whole thing has been a lot simpler than I ever thought.

I love Fred Craddock’s consideration of life’s meaning that came to him in his twilight years:

“When I was in my late teens, I wanted to be a preacher. When I was in my late twenties, I wanted to be a good preacher. Now that I am older, I want more than anything else to be a Christian. To live simply, to love generously, to speak truthfully, to serve faithfully, and to leave everything else to God.”

 

I love that. I hope to grow into it.

There are all sorts of questions that we will be asked in life. Some very important, some about what our lives will be like and what our meaning will be, questions around our contribution, and our legacy. Questions about what we consider to be the Deep Truth of our lives and existence. Then there are other questions, questions designed just to get us through the day, questions a gym instructor might ask while slapping your face and calling for water:

How many fingers am I holding up?