BEING CHRISTENED

I'm not religious. I don't believe in God. Or, as I rather like to put it: I don't know if there's a God out there.

I've been to a christening recently and I can't believe that God is the only one giving a human being strength and the capacity to do good.

At said christening, the woman pastor claimed that having strength and doing good is only God's work. God's trust in us. God's help. It sounded as much reassuring as it sounded like abdicating any responsibility of one's own life. It was repeated over and over again. And every time it was said, my head wanted to shake dramatically just to make sure that my free will was still there. The woman pastor in her white and green robe was smiling all the time. I must have looked very grave.

Unfortunately, half way through the ceremony, she also had a slip of the tongue. Instead of talking about God's promise (Versprechen), she said crime (Verbrechen). The people in the church started laughing, a guilty laugh though, cut short by the knowledge that in church you are not supposed to laugh out loud. But somehow it seemed like a sign that whatever had been going on before, this was a small outburst of relief

I don't believe in a God, but when other people do, I'm torn between admiring their certainty, their sheer will to believe, and the uneasy feeling that believing in something so constrained must result in building barriers more than freedom. Often, however, it is not the belief which is cooped up in strict policies and whispered ideologies. The institutions, no matter what sort of belief, are far more efficient in promoting their "one and only true" belief. And if this sounds slightly like a marketing strategy and economic relations: I agree.

The green and white robe continued the ceremony and spoke words that could roughly be translated to: God and this christening will help you to evade being attracted by other, evil forces. What is this "evil force" then? Apparently, it is all around us. Everywhere where God is not. In everyone who is not christened (yes, I took it personally). In any case, the reassuring voice dropped for a second and laid bare a belief behind the belief: that anything that is deemed "evil" from one institution (and maybe not from the next) will be condemned. Why is it that we always have to define ourselves by defining the vicious "other"?

The christening, however, had a happy ending. The robe remembered her humanitarian strength when two boys, aged 10 and 12 perhaps, were christened in a circle of their family. Both boys started crying and what first seemed like an over-dedicated reaction soon turned out to be the sadness the two boys felt because of their missing father who had passed away two years ago. The people in the church started sobbing (crying, at least, was allowed). Kindly, the woman pastor squeezed the shoulder of the younger boy and reassured them that their father surely looks down on them now, glad about their well-being.



I'm not religious. But I believe in the truth of the human heart.

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