What I said to him must have been like an incurable itch.
He frowned at me, his face creasing up like his skin was paper-thin and ready to tear. I remember his shock of white hair above a commanding brow. At the time, he was still leading the Malacca-Johor diocese.
Anyway, this was years and years ago. When I was barely a teenager, barely a boy, barely the pubescent pervert I was to become. I had, at the instigation of my Sunday school teacher, taken goodly advice to heart, and went ahead and read the Bible like it was some old, gaffy storybook. You’ve got to understand: I was goofy in that way.
(No, I don’t remember a word from the Bible except for the usual stock quotes you fling at atheists and other proselytizers (um..), I didn’t understand a thing I read (I was a kid for chrissakes!) and I certainly won’t make claims to reading commentaries, I’m not the Jerome Commentary kind, hor.)
Things got particularly boring past the Gospels, past the letters (correspondences that last millenia: now that’s a thought) and right on to the exciting bit, the Book of Revelations. My friends, angelic morons with a penchant for all things altar-boy, would intone with awe-filled faces: “the scariest book in the world, man!”.
Uh-huh. Even way back then, I wondered whether they said it because it was true or whether they said it because Father Thomas — this fierce, patriachal, intolerant priest of a man with hell-hound eyes and a tongue to match — said it was true.
Or maybe not; I wasn’t such a cynical bastard at the time, so my curiousity was piqued. Hence the fact that I couldn’t wait to get past Judges, Song of Solomon (eeewww, poetry?!) and traipsed through the Gospel of John. And when I began reading Revelations, I devoured it like the newly-baptized LOTR fan that I was. No Gandalf’s though, just very scary angels doing very scary things to women on dragons lah, creatures with funky horns and lots of trumpet-blowing.
(I’m being sacrilegious aren’t I? Oh well.)
So anyway, I grew afraid because I believed that the world would end the way John of Patmos put it, and the obligatory visits to Haw Par Villa when my relatives would come down from KL didn’t help. Haw Par Villa, Tiger Balm gardens, one of those lah. The one with lots of beneath-ground-and-exposed carvings and clay statues depicting scenes from hell (bloody scary) in Singapore. I haven’t mentioned tiresome visits to the Singapore Zoo, but nevermind.
But it was a very detached kind of “afraid”, now that I mull over those feelings I had at the time. Maybe time has telescoped the event too much, and my present situation imposes a false cast on my memories of that time, but yes, detached. I didn’t understand distinctions like ‘bemusement’ or implications of the word ‘herd of sheep’ etc, but maybe I was afraid because everyone said they were. How’s that for the blind leading the blind?
So back to our bishop. I was never comfortable around him, even when I served for high mass and such. And before my involvement with altars, thurifers and delicious church wine (!), I went up to him one Good Friday service, after the crowds were begining to thin. My parents have always encouraged me to be forthright with priests and such, so I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned around.
“Yes?” he said, in his rich, slightly raspy voice.
“Your grace, I’m scared the world’s going to end, like in the Revelations,” quoth I.
He frowned at me. I had the feeling his eyes were searching for an answer in my question. It wasn’t a long pause, but it was eloquent enough.
He said: “You’re afraid of The Apocalypse, when in truth the day you die will be your own personal apocalypse”.
He smiled, patted me on my back and swished away looking grand in his immaculate cassock.
How’s that for an introduction to the truth of your own mortality, and impending judgement?
