"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11
The verses we memorised all served an ideology built on the doctrine of
original sin: we are all sinners. Yoko says I like the word sinner.
I do: it's appropriate to describe everyone. Romans 3:23. The wages of sin is
death. Romans 6:23. The gift of god is eternal life. Acts 16:31. Believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. It was a connect-the-dots exercise of
decontextualised sentences. The Roman Road because it was mostly in St Paul's
letter to the Romans (circa 55 AD).
And then I was 22. It was nine at night, and I was standing on a river bank in
Japan with a group of Japanese school children and some theology students from
a seminary in Tokyo. There was a bonfire and they were talking about hell. My
Japanese wasn't good enough then to follow it, but there it was: the Roman Road
in Japanese. All the fear and terror replicated in complex, passive verb
structures that I was familiar with in English: God is not sending us to hell,
we are sending ourselves. We are being sent by ourselves.
We have already been sent by ourselves. And I was losing it. We
were asked: what image do you have of god and drew pictures. I
drew a heart filled with love for the world and realised it couldn't be right.
I didn't actually believe that, did I.
A year later Yoko and I would be walking on a beach in Niigata for the first
time. I said I wanted to be with someone who wanted what god wanted for
me. I was waiting for god to open that door for me. I
didn't know what it meant, but knew what whistled. I didn't intend to stop
then: I never intended to give it up. 'What if you had dated someone you met
playing baseball and all you did was talk about baseball and play baseball and
you got married and the person you married suddenly started hating baseball.
Hated everything about baseball.' I don't know. I'm an injured baseball player,
I say: the metaphor doesn't work. I stopped playing baseball because I was
injured and couldn't play anymore. I still want to play, but I can't. The
metaphor doesn't work.
My punishment for leaving the faith is the pain it causes. My wife suffers; my
parents suffer. Sola fide: in faith alone — but only the right
faith. The dog whistle faith. The tombstones at St Peter's sink into the ground
for another year as the soil gets softer and softer. I'll pack my pipe and walk
around the block again. In another world I kept on, don't worry. You don't
suffer in that other world.