A Stone's Throw Away

Dear Kate,

There is this old lady (over 90?) from the Chinese congregation who had shown up two weeks in a row at church, probably knowing there was no in-person Chinese worship service.

I think she knew because as she was sitting there alone and after I affirmed her twice what she could plainly see, she would still ask again to verify, as if with her question, her words, something good can be spoken into existence to break the spell of material "facts," the tyranny of what-you-see-is-what-you-get.

Every time we talked, which is every time we met in the church foyer, she would guide our conversation in such a trajectory, a "meta-narrative" if you will, of first asking me about my parents, wishing them well, then speaking about how she misses her dead husband so very terribly, and finally attesting to the faithfulness of God.  Tears and kerchief were what I saw, lucid intelligence and stalwart loyalty what I felt.

Can you hear how her Story swims easily from the Other to the Self and back, at once personal and universal, intimate and "epic"?

"I know Jesus loves me, and He loves you too," by the time she reached her denouement, it's no longer about the assertion of "facts," but the possibility of hope.  "I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see..." she sang for herself as she sang for me, for the world, but first and last to no one but God.

"My kids told me not to get out of the house," she told me last week, "but God will take care of me."  She literally bussed to church so that she could sit down on the same chair to rest her legs and bus back.  The rain was heavy.

Now we should laugh at her, for what she said there.  It is this kind of sentimentality and blind faith that give religion a bad name.  It hardly matters she took all her vaccines without question and stayed peaceable for the sake of others' weak conscience and delicate sensitivity, because what she claimed is dangerous.

To us the educated, enlightened, progressive, peace-loving servant-leaders, if God is to speak He speaks first and foremost and actually exclusively scientifically.  Technocracy is the new theocracy, how God rules this world, if somehow we still find it sensible to keep Him in the picture.  We observe mandates in the name of love, for the sake of humankind, and would out-mandate ourselves what was actually required of us, just to make sure we could get "back to normal" and find the "light at the end of the tunnel" soon enough.  We might have no tears or kerchief for props, but we wear our hearts on our sleeves.  We are obedient citizens, better Christians, friendly to all, reasonable always.  We are no trouble-makers.

If I am to tell you our community has no immunity against even the slightest challenge, that we are like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, that any stone "cut by human hands" could topple us to the ground, that this community could vanish into thin air as if nothing has ever been built in the location, how would you object?  How would you want to throw your stone at me?

You would probably say, Who the hell are you to say that, you are not God!  God will sustain us!  God will take care of us!  God will do what only God can do!

Oops.  Have you become too sentimental in your religiosity?  If I remember correctly, our church has been toppled to the ground before, rather spectacularly.  I was only giving a sociological analysis, suggesting scientific possibility, that's all.

Hope you will consider the "facts" I presented.

Yours, Alex