1 post tagged “misty”

Never mock a monkey

Just thought I'd post a few personal thoughts about being a toothless fundamentalist.  Religion is a touchy subject, but I’m working on the basis that nobody reads inaugural blog-posts, so I can say pretty much anything.

On an autobiographical note:

It is possible that I stole my personality from a girl named Natalie when I was four and she was six.  Later, when I became a rabid young fundamentalist, this stolen personality determined the approach I took to religion.  As my approach to religion is what I want to blog about, I should probably give Natalie credit upfront.  And if anyone finds this approach objectionable, I would like him or her to remember that its invention was not, ultimately, my fault but Natalie’s, and to bear in mind that six-year-old girls can nearly always be forgiven for the theologies they cause.

I met Natalie instead of attending my grandmother’s funeral.  My parents decided at the last moment to keep me away from the graveside, because I was going through a phase of bursting into song.  My sombre and silent sister went with my parents, and by all reports distinguished herself as an excellent funeral accessory.  My mother knew Natalie’s mother but that is all the contact our families had; nevertheless, more familiar neighbours were unavailable, and the last member of the extended arm of our family was being buried that day, so Natalie’s family was persuaded to take me in.  I was placed in their strange living room, and Natalie’s parents patted me like a dog and went into the back garden to plant bulbs.  Natalie’s older sister Harriet was put in charge, but Harriet ignored us and left Natalie and me to Natalie’s whims.

Natalie was a firecracker, fearless, the kind of person who enjoying staring evil in the face.  She wasn’t morbid, she was industrious.  She was so industrious that she didn’t think the world challenging enough, and had to create sufficiently perilous worlds in her imagination, into which she could slip at will, worlds she would visualise around her.  If these worlds contained werewolves, German stormtroopers, the undead, giant squid or any of the other vile foes she’d seen in comics, it was not so much owing to a morbid disposition as to an appetite for worthy adversaries.

It’s inaccurate to say that Natalie tried to sweep people into her worlds.  She didn’t try at all.  You would feel a whoosh of air and then Natalie would fly past, her yolk-coloured hair hovering behind her like Biggles’s scarf.  ‘I’ve found a way out!’ she’d hiss at you as she sped by, and you could either join her in escaping or stay put.

If you were Harriet, you would roll your eyes and then go back to trying to teach the family dog to follow the storylines in your Misty annual.  If you were me, you would watch Natalie quizzically the first few times she zoomed past, and then you’d follow her.

Out the door you’d go, into the chilly front garden, leaping instinctively into a pair of Harriet’s slippers on the way out, one of them not on properly, and in the process of following Natalie’s darting form, which crossed the lawn in zigzags like a hare fleeing an ocelot, you’d slip and the slipper would fly and you’d land heavily on the wet grass, and Natalie would slide to a sudden halt and turn and see you lying there covered in chlorophyll, and she’d shout, ‘Medic!’

Later on, hiding from Harriet, who was now roaming the house in a spectral fashion dressed in a sheet, Natalie and I sat in a recess under the stairs and she gave me a stern look.  ‘We’ve been imprisoned here so long,’ she croaked in a deep voice, squinting at the walls, which, it transpired, were covered with slime and manacled skeletons.  ‘Tell me again, what’s my name?’

I couldn’t remember, so I said, ‘Grandma?’ which Natalie thought hilarious.  I hadn’t seen Natalie laugh before, and it set me off, which set her off even more, and Harriet located us and chased us out of the recess and up the stairs and back down again.  When Harriet’s parents spotted her running around dressed like a ghost they yanked her into the kitchen and lectured her in low tones while Natalie and I watched her through the conspiratorially mottled glass of the kitchen door, and when she came out she was teary and sour.

After lunch we were allowed out to play, although Harriet was still sulking about the ghost incident and stayed in her room.  Outside, Natalie was drawn to the challenge of confronting a legion of make-believe mummies armed only with a twig.  Then I watched Natalie ride Harriet’s bike no-handed until she fell off.  Invisible winged things, she said, had attacked her.  She killed them.  Later, back indoors, she picked up the house phone and then covered the receiver with her hand, turned to me with a haunted look that she activated by creasing her forehead while flaring her nostrils, and said, ‘It’s the devil himself.’

My parents came back from the funeral to pick me up.  That night, back at home, my parents peculiar, I lay in bed playing the day over in my mind and wondering what the devil might say on the phone.  I had seen the whole span of human strangeness in one day, and in that space of time I had also become a different sort of person: not, alas, fearless and intrepid, but rather the sort of person who sees no fundamental contradiction in living in a suburban housing estate while considering one’s life a sort of adventure.

I became religious before I learned to tie my shoes, and it is probably thanks to Natalie that I came to view Christianity and its holy scriptures as dungeons or labyrinths or haunted catacombs that spiritual adventurers are called to explore.  Lurking in the torchlit tunnels of the bible, I discovered, are doctrines every bit as terrifying as vampires and mummies.  Hidden in parables are balms that heal wounds; treasures glitter in orisons and genealogies.  There is gold there, and fool’s gold.  There are traps and snares and maddening puzzles.  Some say that the whole thing is a trap, its treasures illusory, and that we should help one another to escape.  Others claim that the meaning of the universe can be found at the heart of the maze.  You can lose your soul, or at least your mind, within the dungeon walls - that's the risk people take when searching for imperishable prizes.

The difference between Natalie’s imaginary fiends and the monsters that I encountered in the bible is that the latter are really dangerous.  Everyone knows that a single belief can cause Godzilla mayhem.  A rogue religious idea can occasion vast misery and bloodshed, and a contention about predestination or prophets or patches of land can pull down cities and empires.

As a churchgoing youth I met lots of religious people who seemed to spend their lives running from monstrous doctrines.  Others set out to slay any beliefs that look suspiciously fiendlike - to retain the best bits of religion and ditch the bits that lead to militancy, gay-bashing and televangelical frosted hairdos.  And I learned that there are plenty of fundamentalists who feel that the point of their religion is to organise their religion’s monsters and send them into battle against other religions, other monsters, and bystanders.

Thanks to a succession of accidents rather than decisions, I ended up taking an alternative approach to faith.  Too timid to tamper with or reject any of my religion’s nastier or more bewildering doctrines, and yet too timid to actually put these doctrines into practice, I started trying to defang the monsters in my religion - to accept them, grapple with them, understand their significance and their roles within the labyrinth, and then steal their teeth.  This, in short, is what I mean by toothless fundamentalism: the quest to be unimpeachably orthodox while seeking out orthodox reasons to prevent your beliefs from harming anyone.  If Natalie was attracted to the prospect of fighting mummies armed with a twig, I became drawn to the prospect of confronting my own belligerent beliefs armed with some pliers.

Religious fundamentalism can and does breed intolerance, blind fanaticism, horrible music, triumphalism and terrorism.  I'm going to blog about how I arrived at the conclusion that fundamentalism also has the potential to be the most benevolent, progressive, expansive, credible form of religion.  What’s more, I think that the ‘toothless’ approach that would tap this potential is precisely what religion – or at least all dangerous religions - itself demands of us.  Toothless fundamentalism is the project of making ole-time religion benign, the project of becoming ‘as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves’.  I've come to believe that this approach to religion comprises the only safe route through the labyrinth.

The monsters in our religions - those dangerous and divisive doctrines - are precisely the kind of worthy adversaries that Natalie dreamed of confronting; and though I haven't managed to defang my own creed with the flair that Natalie displayed against those invisible harpies that attacked her while she rode Harriet’s bike, I have had my moments, some of which are worth blogging about.  And I have enjoyed the company of numerous other wonderful people whose merits it has been my honour, and habit, to try to steal - hopefully this blog will be a way to meet a few more.