As I sit here on my bed, fingers icy cold, nose red and frozen, and shivers running down my spine, I realize that the shivers may also also due to the Christmas carols that I recall every year during this time. The four purple and white candles, burning incessantly, fighting against the chilly breeze; the wax sliding down and forming eerie shapes on the floor; the expanse of red blazers and caps, mufflers, scarves and pompoms visible everywhere.
The season of Advent begins four weeks before Christmas where everyone in school (actually only all the sisters and Catholics) would begin to wait for the arrival of Jesus and the eradication of evil from the world. Sister Lawrence, our Principal, would read out versus from the Bible, say long prayers and tell us stories about him. But it was always the carols that touched me the most.
There was so much of positivity in them. It's like they believe; they long and yearn for Jesus to come back to them. EVERY year. Or that some miracle will take place and all the pain and suffering will cease to exist in the world. Do we really have that kind of faith in anything anymore? Me? I have a lot of problems getting convinced by anything at all. Even if I do get convinced, the faith doesn’t come into the picture easily; which is quite ironical, because my name, quite blatantly means faith.
I don’t know if I believe in God. I still haven’t decided yet. And I would not like to get into that right now. I’ve had long discussions and debates with a lot of people, and the only conclusion I could draw was that it is a highly personal matter and you cannot question the beliefs of someone. I do not know if I want to believe in him. It’s not that I haven’t tried. But every time I think about it I feel that even this small part of me that does believe in him, believes because all her elders taught her to believe in an imaginary omnipotent being that lives somewhere in the sky and watches over us and will punish us if we do wrong.
It’s okay to tell that to a chid I suppose. But once he grows up, he has the right to choose what to believe in right?
Well I don’t know if this faith is going to get rekindled or is going to be put out forever, but I do appreciate the way people believe in something. Trust something blindly. The hope, the confidence, the conviction is really remarkable. Maybe this hope is what gets them through all the tough times.
There was this dialogue in Catch 22 which really stuck with me. It goes like this:
“There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?”
Gives you something to think about.
I want to write about school. A lot about school. Which I'm going to do in the next post. I miss school like I never thought was possible.
And yay! Christmas is around the corner. Santa is busy packing the gifts! Are you being a good kid? :)
