CHURCH

Everyone is so proper when they are in church. At their best behaviour. As a child I loved going to church with my father because he always faked a good mood, he gave me money for snacks and I remember consciously making my first fashion decisions because of church. I remember my blue dress that I had to struggle to enter because of my big head but once in it I looked so great. I almost always stained with my melting ice lollies and my mother made sure it was clean again for yet another Sunday. I’m still one of those people, when I love something I wear it over and over again until I fall in love something else. After the blue dress came the maroon one, as soon as I grew into it I wore it every Sunday.

I have been a church goer all my life, sometimes for no reason, sometimes to escape chores, sometimes to mingle with my cousins and sometimes because of some strange conviction that didn’t seem like it was of me. I have also been a serial church hopper. I have said Hail Mary, I have looked on at people feverishly speaking tongues, I have raised my arm to answer questions at the Kingdom Hall and I have eaten cold Sabbath rice with an accappella quartet. Do I regret any of it? No. my perspective has been widened and I have discovered that one can skirt the earth looking for meaning and never find it until they find it in themselves.

That is not the purpose of this note anyway, I wrote to say that never in my church going years in Lusaka have I heard certain words spoken. Words like race, homosexuality, HIV, ugly, mentally ill, gender. The church has the tendency to put a blanket over an issue so that it doesn’t have to be confronted. Gender has been reduced to woman must submit while the rest is demon possession. I’m not old and I’m not very wise but I have eyes. My eyes tell me that broken, ugly and confused is the nature of the world we exist in. How exactly can the church cater to people who have been broken by the world and are now riddled with ugly and confusion if the church says ugly does not exist, confused does not exist.

Racism is ugly, HIV is ugly, oppression is ugly and from what I have seen, nothing is uglier than conducting an exorcism for a person who just needs counselling and hormone regulation to cure their mental illness. I know of a woman who started acting crazy, her prophet prayed for a tray of eggs and told her to take one every day and if she broke any egg her healing would be relinquished and made null. As fate would have it, she broke an egg. She got worse, started biting people, forgetting people, throwing faecal matter at her visitors. Her daughter was fed up and took her to Chainama, the doctors diagnosed a well advanced case of Syphilis that affected her brain. Treatment was commenced.

I know of a man who refuses to believe in God because he is mixed raced and growing up in Germany was hard for him. He is absolutely gorgeous, hazel eyes, wide smile and a beard that can make any woman swoon but he can’t look past the fact that he lost a finger to a group of racist kids who wanted to see if the darkie bleeds too and if the limb would grow back.

People are born with the need to be perverse, it is a natural need that presents itself differently. Others like to steal, other like to watch pornography, others love money more than life while others just love the curve and bounce of women while they themselves are women, others need to be loved by men while they themselves are men. That’s why according to the good book, grace is there to give a new nature to those who believe, not a better nature. With a better nature all that is achieved is perversion mixed with a few days warming the church pew.

I love to read, so I was bored and on my bus ride to town I read the first five books of Genesis. From what I grasped. Initially before sin joined the game, the relationship between men and women was different than it is today and after sin joined the mix, woman was made to submit and there was to be a sort of enmity between the sexes. Now use your imagination with me, if your complete obsession with your boyfriend is less than what God designed imagine what it was like originally. I’m sure there was breathing in simultaneously, hand holding and thinking together because as one fell, the other fell too, it was some “I jump, you jump” kind of thing. These days even a relationship with one person in Chelstone and the other in Kabulonga is considered a long distance relationship and it can’t work. LOL. Humans.

Again, according to good book Christ came to fix, to give life and give it abundantly to give people the opportunity to live life the way it was designed to be lived. (Again, pinch of salt guys, it’s my opinion). According to what I learned during my Sunday school days, Christ was a strange man; he was out there asking for water from adulteresses, touching lepers and speaking blessings upon unclean women on their periods. Nobody was too nasty, nobody was too far gone, nobody was a lost cause and nothing got swept under the rag. I like to think that we aren’t sure his race, relationship history or looks because it didn’t matter. It still doesn’t matter. What mattered was that he loved above and beyond.

In my view the problem is that people aren’t loving. We are lusting, liking, getting infatuated and fancying but we aren’t loving. Love sees beyond what someone can offer you and makes you give of yourself whether or not you get something in return. If people loved each other all the ugliness in the world would disappear but that’s in my fantasy utopian world where Lions lick gazelles. I think the church should take its place and show love and create room for people who have gone through the ugliness and just want love.