Whose God is it anyway?

My mother spent last week trying to emotionally blackmail me into going to church. I don't think it was altogether deliberate --- it never is, with the best moms --- but that's how it felt like to me. Actually, it's been going on for several years now and the latest impetus to her efforts: my brother was showing his video of a recent church recce trip to Timor Leste and also sharing saying a few words about the trip during last Sunday's service.

First Mom asked me over the phone two weeks ago, "just wondering" if my brother had invited me yet. (He hadn't.) Then she asked us at Mother's Day dinner the following weekend. (My brother still hadn't technically invited us yet.) Then, a few days later, this SMS exchange:

The Bro: ... Mum said u can leave early on sun after my presentation
Me: You and Mom are funny.
The Bro: She said don't disappoint us

!!!

I haven't been to church properly --- as in, for religious reasons, as opposed to social reasons (weddings, to 'visit' people, as a favour to someone) --- since some time in the mid-'90s. I don't remember the exact moment when I decided to stop going. It probably had something to do with all the usual things that go on in the middle of one's college career: the constant questioning during liberal arts classes of previously unchallenged views and values, a precious search for identity that leaned towards a distrust of institutions and large organisations, the premature sense of independence that comes from living away from the parentals for prolonged periods of time, the growing need to sleep in on Sunday mornings after either excessive homework or excessive partying on Saturday nights. And then there was the boyfriend.

I graduated, I got home, and I still didn't go to church regularly. My mother still has hope. Every Xmas and Easter, she invites me. Every time I'm asked, I decline politely. For this Timor Leste presentation, I'd tentatively agreed, thinking it was just an event held in church, only to find out that it was taking place during the service itself. As I told my brother in a separate SMS, I wasn't keen on sitting through a service in which there'd be many opportunities for me to roll my eyes.

And why would I roll my eyes, I was recently asked. Some of the things are, admittedly, my own pet peeves: the peppering of "Oh Lord"s in prayer like so much packing material; the excessive repetition of the same song during the worship session; the sermons stacked around ingenuous acronyms ("the 4 Ps of marriage", "the ABCs of discipleship", etc.); the gross oversimplification of thousand-year-old church doctrine, with its inherent historical and cultural biases, into nuggets of take-home truisms.

Then there are some of my doctrinal differences, some of which I confess might not be fully thought out and/or ill-conceived and/or born of human conceit. I won't get into those here.

Then there's the plain fact that the moment anything gets institutionalised --- education, social assistance, healthcare, exercise, religion --- it tends to go straight to hell in a handbasket (pun intended). Where personal liberty and rational thought once existed, enter legions of structures and systems, or for the more romantically inclined, rituals and traditions. I love me some traditions --- Xmas carols, for instance, and I'm talking old school church ones, not these modern "All I Want For Christmas Is You" ditties. But those don't get in anybody's way. It's people insisting on the "right" interpretation of a particular Bible verse and certain behaviours becoming canonized that get my hackles up. And let's not forget all those churchgoers who choose to see the Boxing Day tsunami as a sign of God's wrath against those stubborn heathens and idolaters in Asia. I'm not sure if they've figured out yet that Aids isn't a plague on homosexuals.

Outside a church that I pass by sometimes hangs a banner that reads:

The world isn't going to end today.
Not till I say so, anyway.

--- God

I don't believe for a moment that the God of the Christian faith would adopt that sort of smug and arrogant tone in talking to men. I don't believe that if he sent his only begotten son to save the world, that he would also taunt the world into believing in him. I can't believe that churches put up this sort of ill-thought-through drivel and then wonder why they have difficulty convincing people that God is good.

Let me take a moment to breathe, so I don't hyperventilate, and point you meanwhile to John Scalzi, who articulates some of these issues a lot more thoughtfully than I do: My Jesus forgives your Jesus.

Anyway, yesterday was my brother's big moment and when I called the mater about other things the night before, she of course slipped in one last solicitation for our attendance at the service. I declined politely, murmuring about other engagements, and got immediately called on it, as I knew I would be. She tried one last stab of emotional blackmail ("your brother will be so disappointed"), I didn't budge, and we left it at that, as we always do.

She'll try again at Xmas, because she's my mother. And I'll give it due consideration once again, because she's my mother. God is somewhere in the midst of all that.