TGIF

Last Friday I attended mass at a church, one of the two times in every year that my mother would force me to go to church because she feels it is too important for my mortal soul to miss. Last Friday was, of course, Good Friday, the other annual event being Christmas.

I use the word ‘force’ but hardly any physical enforcement is involved. Firstly, I like my mom and even though I do not subscribe to her religious views, I realise that it means a lot to her that I attend the mass anyways. Another reason is that she kinda holds me hostage because I live under her roof and collect an allowance on which I survive on.

Not that it stops me from complaining about it.

You see, if there can be said to be one defining feature about mass it has to be its excruciating dullness. I would not be surprised to learn that the phrase “If you’ve seen ‘em once, you’ve seen ‘em all” was a reaction to a church mass. Even if it appeared in the Bible, I’d feel more amused than surprised.

The church very likely realises this as well, this is why all churches inevitably have uncomfortably hard, angular pews for seating which are designed in such a way that there is no inconspicuous way to fall asleep on them.
It might also go some way into explaining why some churches have taken to getting their youths to play horrible pop songs that have their lyrics tweaked to provide some tenuous link to Christianity.

Have you ever seen a person asleep in a Green Day concert? Thought not.

If there is one bright spot in the exercise in ennui, it would have to be the Gospel readings. For people unfamiliar to the proceedings of mass, the Gospel readings are when a member of the congregation would read aloud to all present a selected passage from the Bible. Three short passages are usually read after which the presiding priest will deliver a sermon or a speech commenting on the passages read.

The sermon, I can lose, because it is very hit and miss, depending on the priest, it can be a humourous explanation of the passages with a couple of heartwarming personal anecdotes thrown in and capped off with an Aesop moral or an entirely humourless, powerpoint style summary of the Bible passages that would put the wooden pews to work.

In fact, those were one of my favourite moments when I used to attend church more regularly as a child, just behind eating luncheon meat with nasi lemak rice in the church cafeteria.

I loved hearing the stories, even though they were disjointed and I probably didn’t understand half of the words or even before I understood the inconsistencies, hypocrisies and the allusions to the more salacious parts of the Bible, which is how I derive most of the entertainment from the stories now.
I think I was enraptured by the sense of majesty and importance in the language used.

As I grew older and more knowledgeable, I learnt about the influence of the language of the Bible on the way people speak and write. I am told it ranks among Shakespeare and Keats as the three main influences on the English language. As someone who aspires to be a writer and having not read much of Shakespeare and not at all of Keats, (Blasphemous, I know although I hope to change that in the future) I am thankful at least to have an early exposure to the Bible. How much that has seeped into my consciousness, I cannot say.

That pompous, dogmatic language of the Bible is certainly very useful for sounding important. Anybody no matter how goofy looking could muster up a least some small sense of authority if one injects words like ‘thou’ into his speech.


Gandalf is pretty cool, but you’ve got to admit that is a pretty goofy looking hat.


It does have its flaws though. These would be the two main faults, tiresome explanation and needless repetition.

For example in all of the readings of the mass I attended last Friday, whenever something happened that was referenced to in earlier parts of the Bible, it would invariably proceed to hammer home the fact that this was prophesized however many books ago. This is not only a jarring interruption to the exposition, it is also an insult to the intelligence and attentiveness of the readers, not to mention really annoying. This is not unlike a garrulous, smart-arse commentator one occasionally encounters in cinemas that is unable to keep the fact that he has figured out the identity of the murderer in the movie to himself, only in this case the commentator is a character in the movie so you can’t reach behind you and express how your knuckles feel about his running commentary.

Another common annoyance is the Bible’s propensity to repeat itself, the New Testament would be one-fourth its length if it could make up its mind about whose account it wanted to use. It is not as if the occurrences when some detail is not corroborated by the other books would have detracted from the central message of the book. This almost seems like a lazy attempt to pad out the story or what some industries call ‘filler’. The requisite melancholic ballad in between the hit songs in a pop album.
The book is also not above rephrasing sentences or having the same things happening multiple times.
Is Peter’s denying the acquaintance of Jesus three times more evocative if it happened three times instead of just once?
Does the Macarena get any better after the first 30 seconds?


No. no it doesn’t

Regardless, the Bible is and will remain an influential book. Not even a book collaboratively written by J.K Rowling, Dan Brown, Mitch Albom and Stephenie meyer about a teen wizard who uses magic to decipher clues to an international conspiracy in works of art while having inspiring conversations with his late lecturer, in addition to maintaining a relationship with an unageing sparkling vampire, would conceivably help to create a religion which would eventually count a quarter of the world’s population as its followers.

Then again, its followers have not resorted to proselytizing through emotional blackmail, annoyance or violence… yet.