September 9, 2010
(Kirk)
Thursday morning, the beginning of a national holiday that runs through Monday, in honor of Idul Fitri. The whole country is on the move – 3.5 million of Jakarta’s 9 million people leaving the city, along with the rest of the island, driving, boating, bussing, training, biking home. Since Monday, the roads in Salatiga have been even crazier, and the main road from Solo to Semarang (two large cities that Salatiga sits between) more dense with vehicles than ever – for about ½ a mile every morning on my way to campus I pedal furiously down that two-line road conveying at least four lanes of traffic. I’m treated like a motorcycle, as long as I ride fast enough, and like an obstacle, when I can’t, and always like a pleasant diversion for the passengers who lean out the windows and wave at me. Yesterday, as I was preparing to turn right (from the left where they drive here) I merged behind a pick-up truck with a canvas top, and in the back were at least a dozen people who started gesturing and laughing with (it doesn’t ever feel like “at” – but it might be) me before I swung into the quiet road that leads me home.
The newspaper leads with the stories of the five day mass migration. An editorial suggests that the government ban more than two people on a motorbike during these days, because the three or four to a bike that are a normal sight here inevitably lead to a marked increase in traffic fatalities. On trains, passengers are bribing officials to get placed into the cars designed for the elderly and disabled. The minister of transportation recommends that travelers be in top physical condition before making the trip, and warns that police are ordered to “shoot to kill” if situations on the road demand it. The stores are crowded with shoppers preparing for visits home and gift deliveries around the neighborhood – the most popular seems to be giant bottles of fruit-flavored sugar syrup – the kind added to espresso drinks- like the bottle of strawberry our neighbor brought us when we moved in. (She had 6 cases of syrup in the back of her car when she left for Semerang.)
At night, the fireworks have increased – constant but still muted, like the US on July 2, distant explosions and circles of light through the dense palms and banana forests around our house. It’s the beginning of something, that much is obvious, and to be sure great celebrating seems in order after a month of fasting – I’ll be glad, too, when Ramadan is over, if only for the selfish reason that when I’m thirsty in public, I’ll be able to drink without appearing callous to the fasting people all around me.
At the devotional before the staff meeting yesterday (on record now as the most boring meeting I have ever sat through – they have TWO HOUR weekly meetings which include long debates over things that I have no stake in, like student registration procedures, though they also feature delightful Indonesian pastries and tea, which I will just go buy next week instead of attending the meeting) my Australian friend read from Paul’s First Letter to the Philippians, about the impossibility of doing enough to earn grace through works, no matter how accomplished or how moral. (I’ve never really liked Paul, who strikes me as the rule-giver determined to suck the joy out of the new religion and turn it into the hidebound, punishing-God dogma Jesus in the Gospels mostly seems to counter[except the parts where Jesus goes on about hell].) After he finished reading, he gave a short colloquy on grace.
“I read this passage because it seems like an appropriate passage given the time of year. Here Paul talks about all his accomplishments, and how he could claim them as important, but they are not, they are as nothing, as like all other humans, he must rely on the sacrifice of our Lord for grace. C.S. Lewis, the famous English writer, once came into a room in Oxford where other scholars were debating what was unique about world religions. ‘Oh, Jack,’ they called to him when he came in – his friends called him Jack – ‘what’s unique about Christianity?’ ‘That’s easy,’ Lewis immediately replied, ‘it’s grace.’ During this time of the year,” my friend went on, “when others have been fasting to show their god how committed they are as a way of earning forgiveness, it is important to remember that our God gave us grace through the sacrifice of His Son upon the cross. We cannot earn grace through our works, through fasting or praying at the right times of the day. We are granted grace by the Lord through His incomprehensible love for us.” And then he prayed, and then the two hour Power Point about student registration procedures began.
It struck me as an odd note at the end of Ramadan, a sort of spiritual one-up-mans-ship that I guess is a hallmark of religion. Other religions are an affront to Religion at their law-giving core, at the least because the laws are different (barbeque pork anyone?) and at the most because they worship the wrong sort of person manifested in the wrong body. It’s a tension that I have mostly evaded in my adult life in the United States, but that I viscerally remember from my childhood concerns with converting other people to believe the right thing that I believe in. Here, it’s back in spades, part of the national discourse, the political power struggles around religion that are central to this nation’s history. My children are at a school where most of their peers are the children of missionaries, in Salatiga for a Mission Language School that will prepare them to head out to more remote parts of Indonesia – Sumatra, almost wholly Muslim island to the northwest of Java, seems the destination of choice. From morning until night the compelling cadences and ethereal sounds of mosques surround me – wherever I am – calling devotees to prayer. My students ask me what church I go to. The newspaper reports on mobs destroying a church in Jakarta, on Hindu devotees making a once every 35 year pilgrimage to a temple in Bali, on Christians protesting for equal rights in the main square of Jakarta (right nest to Sukarto’s last erection – see post 3).
Selamat Idul Fitri, everyone – on Thursday night here and around the world billions of people will celebrate the final breaking of the fast with all-night parades and fireworks (we’ve been warned that sleep is impossible on this night, which is a meaningful warning in a place where nighttime noises are the norm). They are done seeking forgiveness for the accumulated sins of the year, and they will gather as family and friends and eat and commune. We will join our maid and her family on Sunday for one part of her family’s three-day party, bearing syrup and snacks when we arrive to celebrate with them. And then on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, the cars and motorcycles and busses and trains and ferries will return tens of millions of people back to where they live, and I will drink my water in public during the day, and the arguments and righteousness on all sides will be present as we go about our “normal” lives, seeking whatever grace we can come by. on the move
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