Our friend Ibu Viva, who runs a coffee plantation/tourist resort south of Salatiga, the chain-smoking-low-cut-dress-wearing-bacon-eating Muslim woman that we have become very fond of, clearly saw it as her opportunity, when we told her were Unitarian Universalists in the United States, to ask the question that had been burning in her mind for a long time:
“What’s the difference between an atheist and a heathen?”
In Indonesia, where your identity card includes one of the five sanctioned religions (Catholic and Protestant are separate; Jews need not apply), it’s all about the religious identity. Of course one can imagine that on an archipelago with thousands of islands and hundreds of languages, five religions doesn’t quite cut it, but that’s what they’ve got to work with.
In Flores, our tour guide Johannes around the city of Bajawa came from what the tourist brochures for Flores call a “traditional village,” and he took us around several “traditional villages” that we trekked into through amazing jungles (cinnamon trees – it’s the bark). He told us about baptism ceremonies. Flores is primarily Catholic, because the Portuguese colonized it in the 16th century (cinnamon trees – it’s the bark), so all the children are baptized with a Catholic baptismal ceremony, and given a Catholic name. But the first baptism ceremony is the traditional one, and it’s the one where the baby picks its own name.
It goes something like this: the mother or father picks up the baby and carries it around and repeats names that come from the family history, working backwards from the parent to the grandparent and so on. At some point, the baby sneezes or farts or poops or waves her arms a little frantically and there it is, the name of the baby. He told us of situations where the parents got too impatient and just named the baby because the baby refused to choose a name. This was a mistake, because the baby cried and cried until they went through the process again and chose the right name.
It’s like that here; Johannes was certainly, and deeply Catholic, but he and all his children, before they ever stepped into the church, were named this way, and the villages he took us to, all Catholic too, had pits where they buried animals in certain arrangements and aligned buildings in certain directions with religious meanings that would not pass muster in the Vatican. Islam here, in general, is something people from the Middle East offer consider not real Islam, a silly claim about the largest Islamic country in the world. And there are syncretic blends all over the place, sacred caves and holy rocks and magical mountains that exist in perfect comfort with the religious affiliations on the official identity cards.
Here, in ways that I have not experienced since childhood, we breathe religion. We say a prayer before every staff meeting at my Christian University, with a call to prayer from several mosques sounding in the background. People ask where you are from, and what religion you are (and how much your house costs, and whether you use family planning – boundaries are a little different here). You must have a religion, and it’s not exactly illegal to marry someone from a different religious background, but it’s not easy either, and requires the approval of people from several different religious and secular offices.
And of course there is our kids’ school, holding the banner aloft. Today we got a survey from them asking us to rate the spiritual qualities of the school, on scales of 1-5 (i.e.” Please indicate the overall spiritual atmosphere of the Elementary school”). The potential for snarkiness is high on this survey, especially for an atheistic heathen (or is that redundant?) but I’ll pass on the survey I think. 1 is “poor/unhealthy” and 5 is “excellent/healthy” – “stifling,” unfortunately, likely is a 5.
When I did neighborhood guard duty last week, one of the guards started grilling me about American sexual habits. Did everybody just have sex all the time? Could married people have sex with whomever they wanted to after they were married? Were young people allowed to have sex before they were married? (It’s not illegal here, so I’m not sure the genesis of that question.) Then he went on to alcohol. Do I drink beer? Do I drink vodka? Does everybody in the United States drink vodka all the time? My answers disappointed him, but they were titillating enough for one of the other guards to cluck a little about non-Muslim ways of being in the world.
Soon enough I will return to my free-sex, vodka-swilling heathen oasis, but in the meantime, I send another dispatch from the believingest place on earth…
We'll have a bottle or two waiting for you at YWP.
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