Ash Tuesday

By a strange astral coincidence, Ash Wednesday falls on Chinese New Year's Eve this year (for the uninitiated, Ash Wednesday is the first day of the season of Lent leading up to Easter, a season which has the same motivations as the Muslim Ramadan). And, since Ash Wednesday is a day of fasting and abstinence, it would clearly not sit well with the Chinese tradition of a reunion feast on Chu2 Xi1. So, as a nod to ethnic traditions, the Singapore Archdiocese decreed that Tuesday would be Ash Wednesday too, so people can choose to both fast and feast.

In church today, the Gospel was about hypocrisy, and how one should not donate, pray or fast conspicuously. The main idea, of course, is not that we shouldn't practice religion openly and keep it private, but that our motivations for practicing religion openly should be the right ones. Rather than professing belief in the divine as a way to gain favour and respect from men, we should worship with one objective only, which is to celebrate the immensity of God. And it's true, isn't it? Who has been so lucky as to never have encountered someone else who tries to bludgeon one with the awesome scale of his alleged faith? Piousness thus becomes a salve for a sense of inferiority; one hoards salvation in order to make oneself feel superior to others.

However, this is not to be confused with a humanistic approach to religion. Regarding the responsibility of helping God's people as the central aspect of public religion is different from regarding faith as some sort of self-affirmation; the former is based on generosity, the latter on selfishness. The former is founded on spreading the goodness of the divine in the world, the latter is about competing with others for the favour of heaven. And it is fatal, I think, for anyone to regard faith as a zero-sum game. Those people who regard those who don't follow their faith as necessarily condemned, those who think that you either believe or you don't, and that there can never be a middle ground, those who think that a soul unconverted is necessarily a soul lost to the fires of the Fiend - these people strike me as dangerous, in some way. They bend the unifying tendency of faith to promote conflict. They militarise a spiritual experience.

Anyway, Christianity has always seemed to me to be humanistic, and though I know I may be mistaken, I conjecture that a similar viewpoint is also tenable with regards to other religions. We speak of tending to the flock; we work miracles on each other; we save others. And the central message seems clear to me, that religion is about people, and faith is about God. And none of it is supposed to, or is inherently wont to, lead to conflict and competition. Souls cannot be commodified, haggled over, bought and sold, as if spirituality was a stock price hovering between the bull market of Paradise and the bear market of the Inferno. God's mercy and love, we are told, is limitless - why, then, shouldn't he save those not of the faith too? I think it's just a matter of degrees. Everyone gets saved, but in a different way, and perhaps with a different reward. But the difference is ultimately cosmetic, because everyone gets saved. And that is the important thing.

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Hmm...I had not expected that track to run for so long. And I suppose this is kind of like inviting flamers to open fire. But what the heck - it's not as if divergent views are intolerable. Views only become condemnable when they start to hurt real people.

Anyway - so, Ash Tuesday. Going home with a smudge of ash on my forehead was a liberating experience, not only because of what happened in church, but also because no one else seemed to notice, or if they did, they had the grace not to do a double-take. Tolerance in a society is always precious, I think, and the ability to tolerate a wide spectrum of differences without tearing society apart is a rare gift indeed. Of course, I won't venture to say that wearing ash on your forehead is something radically deviant. If this were considered radically different, then we should start to worry about the narrowness of our society. But for me, it was something different. Something that set me apart, for that short hour or so, from the people around me, people who I have tried, out of the force of habit, to blend in with everyday. The ash was a moment of desocialisation, of differentiation that was frightening in its obviousness, and pleasurable because no one seemed to mind in the slightest.

Sometimes, it's just nice to stick out a bit.