Self-Portrait: A Performance Autoethnography of Un-faithing

(Volume 2: Liturgical Readings)

A project submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

MARC DANIEL NAIR

BA (Hons),

National University of Singapore

Postgraduate Diploma in Education (Secondary), National Institute of Education, Singapore

School of Media and Communication

College of Design and Social Context

RMIT University

SEPTEMBER 2021

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VOLUME 2: LITURGICAL READINGS

CONTENTS

Table of Figures ........................................................................................................................ 3

Note to the Examiners .............................................................................................................. 4

Senryū of Singapore ................................................................................................................ 7

Selected Photo-Haiku ............................................................................................................. 12

‘life is like’ ................................................................................................................... 13

‘counts the cost’ ......................................................................................................... 14

‘100% wood’ ............................................................................................................... 15

‘please return’ ............................................................................................................ 16

The Book of Marc ................................................................................................................... 17

Speaking Gargoyle .................................................................................................................. 28

O Holy Torrent ........................................................................................................................ 31

Jesus Rifles .............................................................................................................................. 34

Thoughts On Being Brown ...................................................................................................... 37

i. Exercise Rights ................................................................................................ 38

ii. Fences ............................................................................................................. 39

iii. The Changing Room ........................................................................................ 40

iv. Integration ...................................................................................................... 41

v. Civil Defence ................................................................................................... 42

vi. Between the Yellow Lines ............................................................................... 43

vii. Peanuts ........................................................................................................... 44

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viii. when everything is brown .............................................................................. 45

ix. snakewhore .................................................................................................... 47

Sketches from the mrbrown show .......................................................................................... 48

The Best Tuition That You Can Get ............................................................................. 49

The Robbery ............................................................................................................... 50

Burning Mickey Mouse ........................................................................................................... 53

Electric Jesus ........................................................................................................................... 59

History Makers ....................................................................................................................... 73

Of Buckaroos and Straight Arrows ......................................................................................... 92

The Tunnel ............................................................................................................................ 104

Speak ® Oohlala! ® The Unfilling ....................................................................................... 112

Online Projects ..................................................................................................................... 118

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TABLE OF FIGURES

1 Marc Nair. ‘life is like’. (2018). 13

2 Marc Nair. ‘counts the cost’. (2017). 14

3 Marc Nair. ‘100% wood’. (2017). 15

4 Marc Nair. ‘please return’. (2020). 16

5 Marc Nair. ‘iPraise’. (2021). 66

6 Marc Nair. The History Maker International logo (2021). 74

7 Marc Nair. ‘The Boys’. (2002). 82

8 Marc Nair. ‘Light Sticks’. (2002). 82

9 Marc Nair. ‘Onstage’. (2002). 83

10 Marc Nair. ‘Sermonising’. (2002). 83

11 Marc Nair. ‘Physical and Spiritual Workouts’. (2002). 84

12 Marc Nair. ‘Preach!’ (2002). 84

13 Marc Nair. ‘Mission Accomplished’. (2002) 85

14 FCF Colonials Territory Rendezvous History. (2021). https://bit.ly/2R7KN4M 97

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Note to the Examiners

Self-Portrait: A Performance Autoethnography of Un-faithing (Volume 2: Liturgical Readings)

is a folio of additional readings that accompany the entire dissertation. They consist of

poems and other text excerpts that have been referenced throughout Volume 1, providing a

fuller exemplar of texts that have been referenced in the dissertation and are, in their

totality, a gathering of readings that are important to the liturgy. These readings consist of

work that has been written both pre-PhD and during the PhD (Oct 2017–Oct 2021). The pre-

PhD works have been repurposed for this dissertation because they function as important

touchstones and waypoints of previous practice in different genres.

‘Senryū of Singapore’ (2007) is the earliest developed body of haiku that I have published,

and as social commentary it offers a glimpse of performing voice through a form other than

spoken word. This use of haiku as a form of early poetry practice is discussed in Volume 1 (p.

78).

Selected examples of photo-haiku (2017–2020), taken from my Instagram account

(@marcnair), track the relationship between haiku and photography in my practice. This

form of multidisciplinary work is discussed in Volume 1 (p. 167). These haiku reflect an

ongoing practice that began pre-PhD and carries on to the present.

‘The Book of Marc’ (2021) is a tongue-in-cheek take on the Book of Colossians from the

Bible. It functions as a non-religious parallel to a biblical text. Accordingly, I quote from it at

different points in Volume 1 as a way of providing an anti-theological grounding for the

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process of un-faithing.

‘Thoughts on Being Brown’ (2021) is unpublished. An excerpt is discussed in Volume 1 in

Being Brown (pp. 131–137).

Two scripts from the mrbrown show (2013, 2016) are reproduced here in full. These should

be read in tandem with their analysis in Volume 1 (pp. 186–190). These scripts offer further

context into my practice of writing and voicing socially-minded satire.

There are four excerpts from the memoir, ‘Burning Mickey Mouse’ (2021), each

corresponding to a breakout room. They function as a thematic parallel to the reflection and

analyses found in the breakout rooms, offering context through highlighted episodes from

Marc’s former life as a believer.

‘Burning Mickey Mouse’ (1.2) is part of Breakout Room 1 (pp. 67–103).

‘Electric Jesus’ (2.2) is part of Breakout Room 2 (pp. 104–139).

‘History Makers’ (3.2) is part of Breakout Room 3 (pp. 140–179).

‘Of Buckaroos and Straight Arrows’ (4.2) is part of Breakout Room 4 (pp. 180–218).

‘The Tunnel’ is an excerpt from the memoir, ‘Burning Mickey Mouse’ (2021). It is discussed

in Volume 1 in Tunnel Vision (pp. 161–164). The rest of the memoir excerpts relate

specifically to the breakout room topics while ‘The Tunnel’ is best read as a stand-alone

episode.

‘Speak ® Oohlala! ® The Unfilling’ (2020) is offered here as multiple text/scripts that form

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the basis for the short film, ‘The Unfilling’, found in Volume 1 in Special Item (pp. 223–227).

Included in Volume 2 are key projects that have been created as multimedia pieces. These

only exist online and are referenced in the dissertation. Links are provided at the end of this

volume.

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Senryū of Singapore

from The Yellow Line (2007)

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Senryū of Singapore

Please don’t try to speed; I will let you overtake Exits I must make

Extra costs to bear; Rush hour begins in minutes. Please stop waiting here.

Make us a people Riding in between stations; Through the darkness.

Nurturing children, Integrating devotion; Elegant fictions.

Over and above, Building strands of team spirit; Spraining hearts and lives.

Makers of hope Overcome by paperwork. Extra hours; same pay.

Value-added lives Working for the sake of love. Overtime, we mind.

Trapped in between lines; Next change: a moral refund Silencing the house.

Pride of our country, Strapped to the bonds of their words; Cut corners quicker.

Smokescreen: Check nozzles - Disaster drills everyday. Force fed on half pay.

Starkly efficient, A meritocratic design; Fire and forget.

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Boys are men are boys. March around for love of war ‘Til the week-end calls.

Indent the soldiers; Plan for proficiency. Pass; Try again next year.

O blessed release, Running over land and sea. Do not recall me.

Heartland heroes wait Day and night in winding queues; Bounded by in-laws.

Romancing the law Over flowers, rings and flats. Martial, marital.

Please keep your account Open at all times. Save now, Bury your interest.

Suffer the little Pleasures, Casual abusers; Animal limbo.

Swift moving fingers Mobilise instant purpose; Shouting in silence.

Selling our city - Tropes of scaly lions Pays Bills; traps history

Numerical child: Reach yourself Inside microchips; Calculate your smile.

Proud city, pleasing. A port in the lee of storms; Poorer lions float.

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Not myself alone; Meeting rivals in my soul. Paper cuts, are coups.

God of the voter; Realign the boundaries, Carve open our lives.

Good for society, Serving the common man. Taxing our smiles.

Custom savings plan. Place your heart deep in our hands, Fear only your death.

New routines each year: Drum rolls welcome the old guard Passing in the heat.

Interior states rule; Subject to democracy. Act, for the party.

Neighborly concern, Protecting our festive joy; Patrolling our minds.

Like it or not, he Knows all things, endures all things, Yet cannot be pleased.

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List of Acronyms:

PIE - Pan Island Expressway ERP - Electronic Road Pricing MRT - Mass Rapid Transit NIE - National Institute of Education OBS - Outward Bound School MOE - Ministry of Education VWO - Voluntary Welfare Organisations TNS - The Necessary Stage PSC - Public Service Commission SCDF - Singapore Civil Defence Force SAF - Singapore Armed Forces BMT - Basic Military Training IPPT - Individual Physical Proficiency Test ORD - Operationally Ready Date HDB - Housing Development Board ROM - Registry of Marriages POSB - Post-Office Savings Bank SPCA - Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals SMS - Short Messaging Service STPB - Singapore Tourist Promotion Board NRIC - National Registration Identity Card PAP – People’s Action Party NMP - Nominated Member of Parliament GRC - Group Representation Constituencies GST - Goods and Services Tax CPF - Central Provident Fund NDP - National Day Parade ISA - Internal Security Act NPP - Neighbourhood Police Post LKY - Lee Kuan Yew

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Selected Photo-Haiku

from @marcnair on Instagram

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Figure 1. ‘life is like’ published 25 August 2018 on Instagram

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Figure 2. ‘counts the cost’ published 11 July 2017 on Instagram

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Figure 3. ‘100% wood’ published 21 January 2017 on Instagram

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Figure 4. ‘please return’ published 27 February 2020 on Instagram

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The Book of Marc

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About

The Book of Marc is a satirical rendition of the Book of Colossians, which is Paul’s letter to

the church at Colossae. The original letter is split into two parts, one regarding doctrinal

issues and the other regarding conduct. In The Book of Marc, a doctrine of un-belief, a

history of self and the call to be un-faithed is woven throughout. The reason for selecting

Colossians as a base text was practical. It had four chapters, each of which mapped

(broadly) onto the themes and direction of the four breakout rooms. The blend between

everyday advice on how to practice one’s faith and Christian doctrine was also a useful

template upon which I could build an atheistic response. Replicating the syntactical

structure and style of how Colossians was written, The Book of Marc also functions as a

document that mirrors the dissertation, offering a re-embodiment of a book of the Bible in a

parody text. But while it might be parodic in form, the text also systematically lays out a

structure of thinking, advocating for an atheistic doctrine based on reason and science and

offering a secular perspective when it comes to things like relationships. Chapter One offers

a broad overview of ‘belief’ that is written in opposition to Christianity, centring meaning

and belief in the self while providing a personal anti-testimony (verses 24–29). Chapter Two

develops this deliberate attempt to “pull out the roots you have established in the faith” (v.

7) by dismantling the arguments for Christianity. Chapter Three looks beyond one’s former

faith towards science as the basis of reason, “in the controlled testament of experiment” (v.

1). The urge in the original text is to put on Christ, but this chapter urges us to put on love

against “the falsehood of all religions” (v. 14). And this is not to leave one in despair,

because succor can be drawn from nature and a sense of a liberated soul who is free to

enjoy the natural beauty of this world. The final chapter is in two parts. One is a series of

dictums that direct the reader in how they should live and the second part pays homage to

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the New Atheists; Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris,

who are most famous for their 2008 conversation on atheism, which was filmed and also

turned into a book (The Four Horsemen).

The Book of Marc ends with an acknowledgment that not having all the answers should not

lead us into vague missives of religion but onward towards a clear-sighted pursuit of logic

based on reason and science.

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Marc 1

Greeting

1 Marc, an ex-follower of Christ Jesus, now liberated from the faith. 2 To the humanists and brave souls who have left the faith of their fathers: Love and light from the universe.

Saving the Self

3 I always consider the early days of my faith when I think of all those 4 who still live

in darkness and hope that they come to the light where I am, 5 since I have witnessed those who have had the courage to un-faith themselves out of anger, bitterness or

with reason, because of the reality that there is no hope laid up in heaven. Of these things we have heard too often in the gospels, 6 forced down your throat to set you apart from the ways of this world, offering what you thought was consecration, just

as you learned from your fathers and your pastors. 7 But I come to you un-faithed,

stripped of the vanity of belief, 8 and make known to you my love for humanity

without divinity.

9 And so, in sharing with you stories and writings from my early life, I ask that you do

not cease to question, and that you may be filled with the knowledge of the truth in

all wisdom and understanding, 10 so as to walk in a manner worthy of being your own source of reason, fully pleasing to your purpose here: bearing fruit by the work of

your hands and your mind and increasing in the knowledge of science; 11 strengthened with what your eyes can see according to the laws of this universe, enduring with patience the slings of believers, 12 giving thanks to Gaia who has been

our benevolent provider to share the bountiful inheritance of earth for our brief time of residence. 13 We have been delivered from the domain of darkness and now dwell in the kingdom of light, where our belief rests in the known world. 14 That which we

see is what we believe.

The Preeminence of Self

15 We are the image of the visible world, the sons of the soil. 16 For by reason we understand our existence, the order of the universe, things that are invisible are

merely undiscovered – all things have their place in reason. 17 And we are the epitome of what we know, and in us the evolution of self goes on. 18 We are the

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head of our bodies, we are our own church. 19 Do not seek salvation in any other, do

not look for mystical answers in indolence or attribute what is undocumented to

some god. 20 In time, we will reconcile all things, whether on earth or out in the universe, bringing understanding by the work of our mind.

21 And you, who were once captured by the one called Christ, 22 believing in his

sacrifice, you have now sloughed off this strange belief in an immortal body, you

now present yourself as whole and untethered to any other, 23 if indeed you

continue in the work of un-faithing, being stable and true to keep yourself free from

all temptation, in the hope of being saved from the curse of sin and salvation, of

which I, Marc, was once a slave.

Marc’s Teaching of Un-faithing

24 Now I rejoice in my freedom for my sake, and in my body I recognise the true self, unbound from chains that seemed to cause more afflictions, 25 both in the mind and in the flesh of myself and in the larger body of believers, of which I was one,

according to the dictates of family and culture. 26 Being born into a family of believers, it was expected that I would follow unquestioningly, silencing into

obedience all thoughts. 27 But now, I have seen the foolishness of my former belief

and the richness that this world offers, the promise of logic, the abnegation of faith in a higher power. 28 I proclaim I, warning everyone and teaching everyone with

humility, that I may see others come to this doorway of new unfaithfulness. 29 For this I work, subduing the old man and allowing the self to speak in liberated tongues.

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Marc 2

1 For I want you to know how great a struggle it has been for me and for those

around me and for those with whom I have not spoken face to face, 2 not to be able

to speak with a full heart and an openness of mind, to hope you hold yourselves open to understanding the choice I have made, to unmaster myself from Christ, 3 in

whom I have seen to be but a story, one that’s well told and full of wisdom. 4 I say

this because others will come with contrary opinions. 5 For I may seem lacking in faith, deluded and prone to world possessions, yet I will rejoice if you could sit and

listen to my story.

Alive in Myself

6 Therefore, just as you once received Christ Jesus as Lord, allow him to walk out of

your life, 7 pull out the roots you have established in the faith, undo all you were taught, giving thanks to the wisdom of the body.

8 See to it that no one returns you to the church by wishful thinking and the fear of hell, according to the Bible, according to the opinions of long-dead men and not

according to common sense. 9 For the earth is much older than we know, 10 and we

have developed by our own devices the ability to govern, to invent, to rule. 11 We circumcise the flesh of this belief, allow the inner man to rise, allow the flesh to soar, 12 having been once buried with Christ under the waters of baptism, now we are

raised to a new un-faithing by the powerful knowledge that God is fiction, and we are by nothing other than our will. 13 And you, who were once trapped in the ways of

church and the servitude of belief, you are now truly alive, free of the notion of sin,

understanding that there is nothing to forgive, 14 there has been no trespass and you are as you have always been. So set your fear aside, nail it to that imaginary cross. 15 Disarm those who would pray for you with blind faith, let them not triumph over

you.

Let No One Disqualify You

16 Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of heaven and hell, or

with regard to Easter or Christmas or praying at mealtimes. 17 These were the

shadow of things you knew, but substance goes far beyond the ritual and the rite. 18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on kneeling and opening your heart, going on in

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detail about your sins, condemning you for your sensual mind, 19 and ignoring that

complexity is not a marker of design, for if all this requires a creator, who then

created God? Would He not require an even more complex creator, and so on, for infinity?

20 If in Christ you were trapped by the prison of sin, then now, you must live free of these restrictions: 21 “To ask for forgiveness, To believe you are forgiven, To accept

the blood that cleanses your sin” 22 (referring to the supposed crucifixion and

resurrection of Christ) – according to the fallible thoughts of men over long centuries. 23 These have the appearance of promoting an institutionalised form of

mass belief, subjecting body, mind and capital to the church, but they have no value

in determining the veracity of heaven, hell or the weight of a soul.

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Marc 3

1 If now you have been freed of Christ, seek the things that are rooted in science, where truth is, in the controlled testament of experiment. 2 Set your mind on things

that are on this earth, not above or below. 3 For you have this one life, and your

mind is now yours, free of the claw of a higher power. 4 When reason which is your wisdom perseveres, then you will write your own story.

Put on Your True Self

5 Put to death therefore all that is holy in you: the resurrection, the trinity, heaven

and hell, the sentiment of sin, which is tomfoolery. 6 On account of these a certain blindness has covered the eyes of believers. 7 In these you too once walked, when

you were living in belief. 8 But now you must put them all away: the cross,

communion, worship, tongue-speaking, prophecies, eternity and visions from your mind. 9 Do not fall back into doubt, seeing as you have put off the old self with its

practices 10 and have gained your liberty, having your chains of belief unlocked from

a prison, not of your own making, but through a falsely imagined creator. 11 Here there is no Anglican or Protestant, no Methodist or Evangelical, Roman Catholic or

Presbyterian, here there is the un-faithed, where reason rises in place of prayer. 12 Put on then, as liberated ones, sceptics and agnostics, a willingness to learn, a heart for those still in darkness, benevolence and patience, 13 bearing with one

another and, if one slips back into church, speak in an even tone, not prone to anger; even as you have seen the light, so you must help others to do so. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together, against the falsehood of all

religions. 15 And let songs of nature rise in your hearts, which reveals wondrous things. And be grateful. 16 For each passing season deepens the kindness of this earth, the loamy soil where your freedom now bears fruit, stretches upwards to

meet bountiful sky, be thankful you are no longer bound by the blood compact with a saviour. 17 For wherever you go, in both city and country, desert and boardroom,

you are now free to see the beauty in the heart of the human, uncreated, and for

this we give thanks.

Stand Up

18 Women, stand up for what you believe in, as is what should be. 19 Men, do not

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stand in their way and understand you have had your day. 20 Young people, do not

obey your parents blindly, for this only leads to pain. 21 Parents, do not impose your

beliefs upon your children, lest they become indoctrinated. 22 Helpers and maids, insist on your rights, hold on to the passport of your independence, not giving in to

abusers out of obligation, but remind yourself that you are a person, too. 23 Whatever you do, work honestly, for yourself and then for your fellow men, 24 knowing that you will get what is due to your labour. You are serving no other god. 25 Yet the wrongdoer may get richer, and the evil man may prosper, for the world

does not run on good or evil, but on chance and the laws of physics.

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Marc 4

1 Bosses, treat your workers justly and fairly, knowing that you too will be called to

reckoning one day.

Further Instructions

2 Continue steadfastly in critical thought, being watchful yet open-minded, willing to learn from all. 3 At the same time, remember your friends, that you may find an

opportune time to speak words that thin the fog over their eyes and un-prison them

from their present state of belief – 4 this is not a command, but a promise coded in reason. 5 Walk in wisdom towards the edge of the world, marking each day with purpose. 6 Let your speech be seasoned with truth that comes from the mud on your boots and the sun on your back, that you may know how to answer these difficult days.

Final Acknowledgments 7 Hitchens has been the forerunner for many of these words. He is a beloved thinker

and faithful contrarian of believers. 8 I quote him now for this very purpose to encourage you, ‘That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed

without evidence’, 9 and with him Dawkins, that paragon of scepticism, who exposes all who claim miracles in the name of pseudo-science. They speak from years of study and well-trod arguments. 10 Dennett, another of the masters, greets you, with

a mind towards evolutionary biology and free will, and 11 Harris, who is a bastion for the existence of morality and spirituality outside of religion. 12 These are the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the new atheists, leaders of a different force for good,

and they have greatly comforted me. 13 For we are bombarded with questions daily, whether there really is something beyond the gaze of telescopes and the scrutiny of

microscopes, 14 whether we are vainglorious and stubborn in not naming the

numinous as divine and eternal, but calling it energy, blasphemed word, 15 that has become the rallying cry for these new ages. Yet some continue to live in metaphors

and cross-eyed symbols. 16 To this I urge that this letter be read on every street-

corner and pulpit, in the hope that some would understand that not knowing

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everything is not failure, but what drives us forward. 17 There is much we do not

know. There is much to be done.

18 I, Marc, write this letter with a ball-point pen. Remember that it is refillable. Save

the earth.

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Speaking Gargoyle

from The Poet of Unlove (2015, Red Wheelbarrow Books)

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Do you know how to speak gargoyle? It is the secret language of kids who couldn’t fit in,

kids like me who would rather climb the faraway tree than climb the stairs to class. It was

reading the grapes of wrath under the table and not listening to lessons on English

comprehension because somehow, in America’s Depression, I understood more about the

world, than this language of numbers, exams and report cards.

English lessons involved writing stories where I was given the beginning; and had to erase

wild thoughts of opening lines involving girls with dark eyes and lilting voices. Because in

this age of discovery, pubic hair was a public affair, girls dampened my dreams, and I often

had to force down a random erection on the way to answering a question on the

blackboard.

I hated answer keys, because they never opened any doors I wanted to walk through,

instead I had to follow pre-fabricated paragraph structures and witty proverbs to end the

story: so ‘A bird in hand is worth two in the bush,’ because that’s what Ah Seng’s father

always told him.

I always wanted to write something closer to the Tiger Beer coffeeshop haze of Ah Seng’s

father, home after another angry day at work, where younger men understood computers

the way he understood beer, “Wah lau eh, boy why you everyday play spider, you think

spider can help you get degree ah, wait you become road sweeper. Go and study before I

hammer you.” But writing Singlish was a sin, just like mentally undressing a girl or stealing

from your mother’s market purse. So I learnt to speak gargoyle.

I was fifteen when I found God in a hotel conference room in Genting Highlands, Malaysia.

We were praying in strange blubbery tongues, laying sweaty hands of faith on each other,

the deeper life of the spirit sparking off isolated giggles, collective guffaws, then finally

hysterics, as if the greatest joke in the world had been told, and the punchline kept on

rolling for eternity.

Maybe it was the expectation of waiting for God, since he did say he would come back soon,

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and this was the holy laughter before his second coming. Or maybe it was the cool air of the

highlands numbing our senses, or maybe because my first crush was at church camp with

me. I sat behind her on the five hour bus ride from Singapore and gazed at her hair, long

and mysterious, smelling faintly of ripened strawberries. I had to keep my jacket on my lap.

I wrote love letters to her that I never posted,

the stamps of my self were left untasted,

her address a prayer I never finished.

I kept telling myself she would never like me, I was a gargoyle, grotesque against her

morning song; I gargled while she glowed, But God was never complicit in all this; I never

asked him for her hand, only for the strength to stop this laughter that sounded like

gargoyle to the world outside.

Sometime in my twenties gargoyle language became hip again.

Churches made pastors into rock stars, playing chord progressions that induced perfectly

synchronized devotion in the chorus. Scripture was pulled out of the dusty lands that

prophets lived in, spun into promised Kingdoms for believers who pledged their lives on

interest-free sermons. But not once did I hear anything about gargoyles, of defrocked

philosopher kings hanging in the gutters of cathedrals, speaking sermons in stone, collecting

storms, an orthodoxy of what cannot be understood; just penitents praying in the shape of

questions; unloved, confessing doubt in the old hymns, speaking gargoyle.

Someone once told me the toughest tongue twister is

red gargoyle, yellow gargoyle

red gargoyle, yellow gargoyle

red gargoyle, yellow gargoyle

After a while it becomes the sound of rain, rushing from stone throats into darkness.

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O Holy Torrent

from The Poet of Unlove (2015, Red Wheelbarrow Books)

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Please turn with me to the Kopimist hymnal, page 404. And now, let us sing. O holy torrent full of light and love Send us your blessed broadband from above O holy torrent from thee is born the seed To freely share with everyone in need Fellow believers of the church of kopimism, All those who hold that copying information Is a sacred virtue of file sharing; welcome. I bring you a message today on the need to share. Kopimism is not just a religion, it is a relationship, the need to bond between the bits and bytes of our lives. Ours is a community that exists in fragments, we often see in part but should the bandwidth open in our favour, we would be whole. Yet there are those who call us pirates, they accuse us of stealing, they sue our generals and format our servers! Lord Dotcom of Castle Megaupload has fallen, but all the more will we pray to Saint Napster, patron saint of kopimisers everywhere According to Qwerty, our most sacred manual, we have been released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in a new way and not in the old way of the written code, for all we want to do is to liberate movies, music and programs from the curse of the law and redeem them, by the grace of our holy torrent. All hail, torrent And beware, my faithful seeders, of those who do not give as they have been given. They are selfish leeches, hiding behind anonymous firewalls, keeping the bounteous blessings of cyberspace on their own miserable hard-drive souls. Such sordid sinners have no place in the church of the torrent. All information is holy; a communion of uploads and downloads For when we share, it is like prayer, carried on the wings of angels to those who hold the ports open, do you not agree, beloved seeders? Torrents are our way of life, so let no internet service provider tell you otherwise. Let no recording company impose upon our rights! Did God himself charge when he made the music of the heavens, painted pictures of mountains, framed in full HD the movies of our lives? No! They can take our bandwidth, strangle us with bills for cable, send us warning letters filled with fear and fable but they can never stop the torrent. As long as a network binds us as long as one fibre connects us

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we will never go offline. Now repeat after me the Seeder’s Prayer: Ctrl-C copy me To a place I can be Safe at rest Ctrl-V Where the seed, lives through me And everyone say, “Torrent”.

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Jesus Rifles

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Congregation, Attenshun!

Are you filled with the fire of God? I said, are you burning to trample all the enemies of the living God? Somebody shout Hallelujah! Like our brother soldiers overcoming the terrorism of Satan, we are called to fight the good fight of faith with any means necessary. Open your instruction manuals with me. For our pre-believing friends that’s your B-I-B-L-E. In 2 Corinthians 4:6 it says, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.” And what is this glory of God that shines into such dense, unbelieving darkness? Is it a flashlight? Is it a spotlight? It is... the Demon Hunter 777! Hallelujah! With a fire rate of 5 verses per second, the Demon Hunter now takes cartridges that hold up to 50 verses. You can choose a single shot mode or blast off a chapter at a time. Featuring state of heaven prayertronics, your Demon Hunter will be personally anointed for battle with my holy handkerchief, which once cured three old ladies of a headache in one Sunday. But some of you need instructions to use the Demon Hunter and if you can’t get hold of my special edition DVD box set on spiritual warfare, packaged with a miniature suit of armour, then listen carefully to my 3-step plan of action to living a demon-free lifestyle. Step one, start each day by praying in tongues for half an hour, and you will get clear direction on which demon to blow away first. Step two, look out for common places where you might find demons, in the embroidery of your living room curtains there might be dragon demons hiding, in the t-shirt your neighbour wears that says ‘Jesus is my Homeboy’. Sometimes demons even take the shape of clouds. Step three, the Demon Hunter removes the need for you to lay hands on the infected soul, simply point, and shoot. To help you, we’re including at no extra charge, the Holy Spirit Infra-red Scope, upgraded with anointed illumination and printed with quick-speak Bible verses. And if the demon gets too close to possessing you, simply attach the praise bayonet and stab a prophetic song into it. We here at Holy Warrior Ministries proudly nickname this little baby a Jesus Rifle, cuz just like Jesus, we condemn those demons with high-calibre faithfulness. Holy demon hunters, you can pick up your very own Jesus Rifle after the service for only $999, and if you use your discount code, WARRIOR, that’s with a double r, I’ll include an exclusive study guide and daily devotional. Now let us stand to sing the closing hymn: O when the saints, O when the saints

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O when the saints go marching in Lord I want to blow up demons O when the saints go marching in

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Thoughts On Being Brown

38

i. Exercise Rights

Helix Bridge, Marina Bay Sands

The runners are white, male and going bald,

their marathon singlets a lunch hour pass.

Through the casino where croupiers call,

sprinting softly on corporate carpet grass.

As distances close with muscle-bound minds,

they cross the bridge, jogging their good genomes,

while underneath construction workers find

an hour’s sleep, a sunburst sigh of home.

For theirs is the garden, theirs is the toil,

not an office of air-conditions.

And theirs is the portion of rice and oil,

sometimes a bottle of inhibition.

Some hearts are dominant, some silent,

some remonstrate, and some are violent.

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ii. Fences

In a Ministry of Home Affairs budget speech in 2016, MP Denise Phua suggested that communal areas in Little India such as playgrounds and void decks be fenced off so that the old and the young get to use the spaces meant for them, as residents must be protected from “the disamenities that can arise from large gatherings”. While she acknowledged the contributions of foreign workers, she added: “Congregations of such high density are walking time-bombs and public disorder incidents waiting to happen.” She subsequently apologised and said she gets along well with the foreign cleaners in her constituency. This poem is for her. Perhaps you have not seen the bhatura,

how it rises like a blimp, this Indian

miracle filling space with leavened bread.

Perhaps you feel the need to chain-link it

with a ring of chole helmets, pressure

cooked to curry favour; a firing point

to deflate this aggravation, a rise of

plebeian bombs, importunate pooris.

On your night vision screens, communes

of carrom men slam across back alley

boards, floating on powder, striking at the queen,

finding pockets where the netting’s been worn

away, so that no one catches them when

they fall into fenced fields, a sense of home.

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iii. The Changing Room

Delta Sports Complex, 2016.

An old man and I are both waiting to use the single shower cubicle. Dripping with

perspiration, I take off my shirt to cool down. The man looks at me curiously. He is Chinese,

in his 60s, and probably a retiree. Because only poets and retirees are free on weekday

mornings to use the gym.

“Excuse me ah,” he asks, “are you from the UK? You look very hairy.”

“No, I’m from Ang Mo Kio.”

He looks surprised for a moment, then presses on.

“Your parents? Are they Singaporean?”

“Yes.”

“Were they born in Singapore?”

“Yes.”

“How about your grandparents?”

I look at him. “What about your parents?”

He looks hurt. He starts blustering. “No, no. I don’t mean to insult you,” he says. “It’s just

that, you don’t, you don’t look Singaporean.”

“What does a Singaporean look like? Like you?” I ask him.

And he starts back-peddling so hard he nearly falls into the sink.

“No, no, I mean, it’s just that you don’t look, like, ok, ok, I’m sorry to insult you.”

“I’m not insulted, I’m just trying to have a conversation.” He tries to shake my hand in

apology and then scurries out of the bathroom.

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iv. Integration

My parents have been trying to sell their 5-room HDB flat in Ang Mo Kio for the last ten

years. On and off, we take pictures, engage an agent and watch as a string of non-Chinese

people come to see our house. They know we’re unable to sell to Chinese because of the

Ethnic Integration Policy, instituted in 1989 to limit the total percentage of a block or

neighbourhood that may be occupied by a certain ethnicity.

According to a 2012 study, Chinese-constrained HDB resale units were 5 to 8% more

expensive than Malay or Indian-constrained units, which were 3 to 4% cheaper than the

average resale price. So that’s why we always get lowballed. It’s not about people being

cheapskates, it’s just our statistical fate.

I wonder when I take the elevator if we are tolerated, if certain floors are marked

somewhere on a blueprint with yellow and brown and black markers. I wonder if invisible

ink is used for mixed-race families. I wonder if they keep track of our electric meter, take

note if we occupy a parking space, if we frequent the community club with their weiqi and

tai chi and muah chee sessions in Mandarin. I wonder when I ask for my elevator floor

through a sea of Chinese chatter. I wonder when the girl at the coffee shop looks straight

through me and speaks in Mandarin, insisting that I understand, that there is a quota to

occupy space in this country, but my order for coffee is never entirely black; it is a shade of

brown, but with so little sugar it is almost bitter.

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v. Civil Defence

Recently, I spotted a poster at an MRT station for the Singapore Global Paramedics and

Firefighters Challenge, to be held at Expo. Organised by the SCDF, the poster featured a

range of occupations associated with, I imagine, civil defence. There was one race

conspicuously absent from the poster. Maybe we should call this the NCDF, the No Chinese

Defence Force. So, what would the NCDF do at this challenge?

Thank you all for coming from fire and police stations all over Singapore for the Singapore

Global Paramedics and Firefighters Challenge. Contestants will be competing at stations

such as:

Brownian motion: In a room of constantly moving brown people, teams have thirty seconds

to spot the potential terrorist.

Curry Favour: Someone is cooking a pot of curry and the smell is making the majority race

uncomfortable. A police report is made. Role-play a way to defuse the scenario.

Overtime: Teams have to play a game of Jemput-Jeopardy to defeat the king of Singapore

trivia, Smarty Tan, to prove they don’t just relax one corner.

Extricate: Contestants have to work together to devise a solution to save an Indian man who

is stuck in a giant vat of prata dough.

Tak boleh tahan: Teams will have to hold out as long as they can while a drunk Chinese man

tells explicit racist jokes.

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vi. Between the Yellow Lines

Former PAP MP Mr Choo Wee Khiang, in a speech in Parliament in 1992, said, “One evening, I drove to Little India and it was pitch dark but not because there was no light, but because there were too many Indians around.”

And maybe that’s why you ban the drums on Thaipusam, because dark hands banging on

stretched skins remind you of some kind of outrage, breaking between your yellow lines,

but its ok for your lions to prance through shopping malls and hawker centres and its ok for

burnt offerings to be swept up by brown men who see it as duty and not the aftermath of

offerings to deity. And its ok to keep telling us to be open-minded, that meritocracy means

everyone gets a chance when the odds are stacked against us, and there’s a Speak Good

Mandarin campaign, but nothing for other tongues. And maybe that’s why when I was

posted to the Seletar East ammunition depot in the army there were no Malays around,

because they would steal crates of bullets and smuggle them up north, they would

radicalise the bunkers and lay siege to the stores, they would occupy Woodlands and block

the Causeway with Ramli burger stands and demand a separate state. They would never

surrender, and so locking them out is their necessary fate.

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vii. Peanuts

The Chinese director of the Singapore Sports Institute dressed up as a Sikh kachang putih (sugar-coated peanuts) seller for a staff event, which included a sharing of the origins of the Festival of Lights, learning about mindfulness and tasting treats of traditional Deepavali goodies.

In the first place, Sikhs don’t celebrate Deepavali. It just happens to fall around the same

time as Bandi Chhorh Divas.* But I think you have bigger problems than that if you think it’s

ok to wrap a towel around your head and paste a beard on your hairless chin and give out

white-coated peanuts. Or should you be given a sporting chance?

Will you also wake at 5am, will you also sell peanuts for 14 hours a day? Will you really

make peanuts on your peanuts? Will you carry the five sacred items every Sikh must wear?

Will you remember that brown is the taste of earth, of ground where you will return, of long

days under the sun, of being unseen on Sundays?

I am three-quarters Indian and still don’t feel comfortable enough to do the head wobble,

that universal gesture of thanks, an acknowledgment of kindness, of someone’s presence;

an implicit, mindful recognition that you are here as I am, two selves with different dreams;

lifting our eyes to the same stars, equal.

*Bandi Chhorh Divas, which means ‘Prisoner Release Day’, celebrates the release of Guru Hargobind Sahib, the

sixth Guru, from Gwalior Prison in India along with 52 princes in 1619.

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viii. when everything is brown

Preetipls, a YouTube influencer from Singapore, called out Chinese people for an embedded sense of racism and privilege in a viral video made in response to an epaysg.com advertisement that featured a Chinese actor and DJ, Dennis Chew, portraying a character from each race, which Singaporeans termed ‘brownface’.

circle the jobs that require non-Chinese speakers only

they never look disappointed when you walk into the interview room

strangers won’t stop to comment on your skin colour

a cashier won’t speak in Mandarin without looking up because she assumes you understand

wounds are slowly sewn shut by the joy of not fighting for a seat in this city

doors are never closed because there is Muhammad in your name

no dirty looks are fired at mixed-race couples

they never assume you are not from here

selective immigration keeps a brown majority humming along, well-stocked

you won’t have a problem renting a flat because of the colour of your name

generals who serve in the army and the civil service won’t serve us notice of crossing the

wrong racial lines

and no one chants

brown face, brown face

this is not your place for fun

brown face, brown face

this is not your race to run

when everything is brown

no one slaps other voices that sting like evening mosquitos from stagnant water

and old, dividing ideas about race are not allowed to breed.

when everything is brown

we fumigate because all government agencies want to lower yellow fever

and do the mozzie wipeout

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when everything is brown

the anthem will never be mangled, and semangat, spirit,

won’t come out as semayat, a dead body, empty of song.

when everything is brown

King Muthusamy keeps his place at the table

when everything is brown

brown artists won’t be erased by the censor for connecting

who they are with how they feel and what they have to say

listen

when everything is brown

nobody is fucking it up

nobody is fucking

us up

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ix. snakewhore

NPE Art Residency removed the work of artist Jonathan Lim two days after his show, On Common Ground & Public Forms, opened with Priyageetha Dia. One of Dia’s friends apparently giggled while Lim’s guest speaker was speaking. The reaction offended Lim, who called the woman a “snakewhore” on Instagram and threatened to “obliterate” her and Priyageetha, referring to them as a minority “cult”. Both women are of Indian descent. (Adapted from: Coconuts Singapore)

Now the walls of the gallery are empty, but there’s still blood on the fixtures. Blood that

calls and sings in your dreams, that sets fire to your veins.

We are sorry to hear you were born with a sword in your hand, anointing you lord over us.

So you trained in the art of slicing off unevenly balanced heads who speak in colours you

cannot even name.

You swung that sword with your eyes closed.

The blood will not wash off your hands. You tremble as you dash to cover a moon growing

full. The windows won’t stay locked, so you open the doors and scream your name in

absolution.

All of the snakes are slithering into your ears tonight. They sing in the only tongue you

recognise: the privilege-speak of slithering syllables.

They are a cult of swaying goddesses, dark-skinned; moonlight drips off sylvan bodies. They

come closer, wrap themselves around you, as you become your canvas, a mute reflection.

The bite, when it comes, is almost gentle. Colour leaches from your eyes as the snakes

disappear into night; night that loves them for the whores they are and will never be.

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Sketches from the mrbrown show

written by Lee Kin Mun and Marc Nair

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The Best Tuition You Can Get Online link: http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2013/09/the-mrbrown-show-the-best-tuition-you-can-get.html Boss: Is your child doing badly at school? Is your child lazy or stupid? Not scoring A1s? Then our tuition centre is not for you! Here at Elite Globalist Tuition Centre, we believe in only cultivating the best. Here at Blk 103, Seng Kang Vale, #09–133, in my bomb shelter cum storeroom, we make A-star students into A-superstar students. Auntie: My boy boy was only scoring 98 out of 100 for all his subjects and even after I cane him daily, it didn’t improve! But after sent him to Elite, he now scores 99 out of 100! Plus he stop twerking! Thanks Elite! Boss: Not everyone qualifies to join Elite Globalist Tuition Centre. Your child needs to sit for our 6-hour tuition entrance exam because we want to tailor our program to your child’s abilities. Students taking our entrance exam will be streamed in three categories: Elite, Extreme Elite and Go Home Please Don’t Come Back. Uncle: My girl girl was just an average gifted student in her GEP class until she became an Extreme Elite. She is now top gifted student using advanced Elite techniques, like spreading rumours so that her classmates will spot the wrong exam questions. Thank you, Elite! Boss: We are not only about the academics at Elite Globalist Tuition Centre. We also have values! Values like Do Unto Others What They Didn’t Think of Doing to You, A Friend in Need is Dead Weight and Where There is a Will, There is an Inheritance. We believe that you can lead a horse to essence of chicken, but you cannot make him smart. So make the smart move and send your already smart child to our tuition centre, and we will make him a Reader, a Leader and a Breeder. Eliminate doubt, eliminate fear, eliminate the competition. Join ELITE!

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The Robbery Online link: http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2016/07/the-mrbrown-show-the-robbery.html Teller: Hello. Standard Unchartered Bank phone banking service, can I help you? Robber: Er yes. This is a robbery. Teller: I’m sorry, did I hear you say, “This is a robbery?” Robber: Yes, this is a phone bank robbery, I have a weapon, give me $30,000, don’t call the police. Teller: Of course, sir. I wouldn’t want to get hurt by your weapon. Robber: Ya! Don’t mess around. This weapon can really hurt you. You better cooperate. Teller: May I know with whom I am speaking to? Robber: Of course not! How can I tell you my name? You stupid or what? Wait police will know who I am! I came prepared for this phone bank robbery, ok? I am even wearing a ski mask! Teller: You sound very professional, sir. I cannot tell what you look like at all, over the phone. Robber: Ok! Now give me my money! Teller: How would you like me to give you the money, sir? Robber: Er, transfer to me can already! Teller: Do you have an existing account with us, sir? Robber: Don’t have! You make an account for me! Faster! I got weapon! Teller: Of course, sir. Would you like a current account or a savings account? Robber: Which one is better? Teller: The current account comes with a chequebook. The savings account pays interest. Robber: Savings account then, I don’t mind making some interest. I don’t need chequebook. Teller: Of course, sir. Please tell me your full name. Robber: Oi, I already said I cannot tell you my name.

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Teller: No problem. I will activate the Account Name Service recorder, and you can tell the machine your name. I won’t hear it. Robber: Good idea! Machine: Please say your name after the beep. Robber: Cockroach Lim. Machine: Name recorded. Thank you. Teller: Thank you, sir. I will need a minimum sum to open the account. Robber: How much? Teller: For your special Phone Bank Robbery account, you will need $30,000 to open it. But you can always withdraw it later. Robber: I don’t have so much money leh. If I have, I won’t need to rob you, right? Teller: Oh don’t worry. We are happy to provide a credit line to you to open the account. There, I have placed $30,000 into your new Savings account from your credit line. Robber: Wah, good. Your service not bad. I am glad I chose your bank to rob. Teller: Thank you, sir. Just a few more things we need to do. You will need to enter a Phone Banking password. Please enter it now. (Typing sound) Teller: Sorry sir, the system is rejecting your password. The password must be at least eight characters including one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one numeric digit, one special character and the blood of a virgin chicken. Robber: Wah lau eh. So troublesome. (Typing sound) Teller: Thank you, sir. Your Phone Bank Robbery account is almost open. We need you to provide a Security Question and Answer to ensure no one else steals from your account. Robber: What kind of Question? Aiyah. I don’t know lah. You give me one. Teller: How about, “What is the name of your first girlfriend?” Robber: Can can. Er, my first girlfriend name is Tan Siew Mai.

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Teller: We are almost done. Just to let you know, we are having a promotion right now. If you sign up for a credit card linked to your account, you will get a free Hello Kitty toothbrush set. Robber: Oh! I like Hello Kitty. OK, sign me up for the credit card too. Teller: We also have a travel insurance promotion right now. If you buy our travel insurance, we will upgrade your free gift to a Hello Kitty toothbrush set WITH Hello Kitty trolley bag. Robber: Wow, that sounds good. I will need travel insurance because I plan to escape with my $30,000 to Bangkok. Put me down for that too. Teller: I will need you to pay for the Travel Insurance first, sir. So can you transfer $500 to us? Robber: Er, how to pay you? Teller: You can just walk into any branch of our bank, and tell the counter you have opened the Phone Bank Robbery account and give the teller $500. We will give you your Hello Kitty gifts and paperwork at the same time. Robber: That sounds easy enough. I will go the Holland Village branch. Teller: Just so we don’t cause any undue panic to other customers at the bank, may I suggest you write your request on a piece of paper and hand it to the teller. Is there anything else I can help you with, sir? Robber: Er, nothing else. Teller: Then thank you for banking with Standard Unchartered Bank, sir, and have a nice day.

53

Burning Mickey Mouse

Memoir excerpt from Breakout Room 1

54

Growing up as an Evangelical Christian in Singapore, my family frequently attended home

church meetings where the ‘power’ of God was freely manifested. This power was accessed

and unlocked as the result of being empowered by the Holy Spirit to tear down spiritual

‘strongholds’ in the name of Jesus. This involved practices such as praying in tongues, laying

hands on people for healing, delivering people of demons and receiving and offering words

of prophecy through the gift of discernment.

There seemed to be a correlation between the force of a preacher’s personality and his or

her espousal of doctrine. The most charismatic of preachers were often the most militant.

We were taught, for example, that the devil and his minion demons roamed the earth,

looking for places, people and possessions to occupy and to terrify. The Bible was thrown at

us to confirm this: “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around

like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). This way of thinking paved the

way for prophetic servants of God who worked as itinerant preachers and demon-casters,

trawling the fringe and preying on small churches who allowed them to rage and rant from

the pulpit. It seemed, too, that small churches also carried a far higher percentage of

believers who always required deliverance. Perhaps it was because they knew that they

could consistently get the attention of the pastor or the visiting preacher as opposed to

larger congregations, where they would just be another face in the crowd. But it genuinely

puzzled me; do people really have that many demons in them? And how did said demons

keep coming back? What terrible things were people doing during the week? What was

their daily routine of faith? Did they sin to such an extent that they needed to go up to the

altar to be prayed for and delivered of demons every single Sunday (often accompanied by

dramatic flailing, retching and occasionally speaking in strange voices)?

When I was eight, I was attending Trinity Christian Centre, which was considered a large

Pentecostal church; my immediate family had links to hosting home-based meetings by

various itinerant preachers who claimed to carry gifts of deliverance, being particularly

sensitive to the presence of demons.

Apparently, demons reside everywhere. The following list of children’s toys is drawn from a

much longer list of places/objects of potential demonic activity on a website called Dreams

55

of Dunamis. This wouldn’t have been too different from the list kept by my parents, or to

which people in our community subscribed:

Toys: He-Man, She-Ra, Smurfs, Care Bears, the Joker character from Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, dolls – especially Cabbage Patch dolls, troll dolls, some Barbie dolls, Brat dolls, toy voodoo dolls, and puppets – Big Bird from the Sesame Street program (other characters from that show would be good to avoid as well), Teletubbies, gremlins, Rainbow Brite, sprites, elves, punk rock dolls, Gobots.

It felt that living in fear was the way to go; that, though we were in this world, we were not

to be of this world and not to love the things of this world (1 John 2:15). But instead of

focusing on God, we ended up being consumed with combating these evil objects and

forces. I suppose it offered a vigilante aspect to faith. It was an active way to engage with

the largely passive nature of belief in Singapore, where persecution was minimal and it

wasn’t the done thing to try to convert Muslims because that would upset the delicate

balance of racial and religious harmony in Singapore.

After one such Sunday sermon, my parents expressed interest in having an African preacher

called Henry Peters (who was based in Malaysia) come to our house because they were

having doubts about the soft toys that I possessed. In particular, a large pink bear called

Beary Bear and a Mickey Mouse doll with brown wooden shoes that would clack on the

floor as I moved him along. I was eight years old, and these were my favourite things in the

whole world.

The preacher came and sniffed around, as if the presence of the devil had seeped into the

fabric of our curtains and had taken root in the shoe cupboard. He immediately spied my

soft toys and, despite my protests, they were taken and imprisoned, together with a

delicately carved, expensive sculpture of a robin, and a mirror that was filigreed with an owl.

The preacher immediately classified and condemned them as ‘graven images’.

He quoted: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that

is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth”

(English Standard Version Bible, 2001, Exodus 20:4).

56

My younger brother, who was four at that time, was incensed because the preacher’s son,

Martin, who was the same age as him, pointed out that he felt a demonic presence in one of

my brother’s toys. It was a plane that had a little green rocket that could be launched.

Martin accused it of looking like a snake. So, that was promptly set aside as well to be dealt

with later.

Another verse was quoted that day by the preacher to justify his actions: “Many of them

also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men:

and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver” (King James

Bible, 1769/2017, Acts 19:19). The home—for a particular breed of Christians who maintain

a homeostatic relationship with the arcane symbolism of the Old Testament—has been

likened to the inner courtyard of the temple of God, so it needs to be kept clean and free

from idols and other cursed things. According to them, Christians unknowingly bring things

back from the fallen world. Often, on their travels, they may trespass or pick up tainted

souvenirs, even if it is something as innocuous as a stone or seashell. Because one never

knows what foul spirits dwell within a conch. These cursed objects function as portals

through which demons may enter and attack the household. People may fall ill, nightmares

could happen, or a string of minor accidents may befall the members of the house.

I was screaming as they took my soft toys away. They closed my bedroom door, but I could

still hear their murmured prayers. Apparently (my mother told me this later), they bound up

the demons that dwelled in Mickey Mouse and Beary Bear in the name of Jesus, tore them

up (they had a hard time with Mickey’s wooden shoes) and proceeded to burn them over

the stove. A terrible smell ensued and the fire turned green. This was more likely due to the

fact that there were chemical compounds present in the stuffing and not explicit evidence

of Satan. But this provided solid proof for the adults that there was a festering evil hidden

within the toys. I cried myself to sleep that night, comforted only by my decidedly

impersonal bolster. A very large part of my childhood died that night.

Acts of spiritual warfare such as this ill-starred ‘binding and loosing’ of spirits create a sense

of power that abnegates logic and prizes personal ‘encounter’ as a function of truth and

validity. However, this moves the focus away from God and onto a false imagination of

57

action. Pastors such as Henry Peters trucked on fear, embodying the invisible realm of the

enemy within tangible, innocent objects. And for them, a greater purpose is revealed: they

are lower-case saviours, holding within their hands a smidgen of the power of God, wielding

it like a Jedi’s lightsaber. Except this battle isn’t against the Sith Lord, and the lightsaber is

from Toys“R”Us, $19.90 on special. But my parents, and so many other Christians, bought

into this value-store version of militant Christianity.

This episode with Mickey Mouse stayed with me for a number of reasons. It was very

disturbing, as a child, to be told that a stuffed toy contained an evil spirit. It made me

wonder how pervasive the spread of demonic activity was in this world. It was also very

violent, because the toys were taken from me against my will and subjected to a terrible

end. The smell of burning plastic and synthetic material, and the justification of that as

proof of demonic inhabitation, became something embodied and unforgettable as well. But

why did I not lose my faith? I suppose I still believed in Ephesians 6:1, which emphatically

said, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” It was a difficult verse to

argue against. Ultimately, I was still a child and I was expected to fall in line with what the

family believed.

*

The itinerant minister came in a variety of guises; some were of the straight-up fire and

brimstone variety like Henry Peters, plunging everyone into a constant fear of hellfire and

damnation. Others were peaceful beatnik singing prophets like Gary Gregor. There’s a

YouTube video of Gregor still floating around. Charismatics never die, they just transmogrify

like dated tech objects in 1980s movies. Gary Gregor came to my aunt’s house sometime in

my early teens. He claimed to be able to prophesy through song. He was a psalmist,

someone who sang the Psalms with his own tuneless tunes. They weren’t pop-friendly

tunes, they were designed to lull us into a sense of surrender and trust, that here was a man

who knew both the Scripture and the discerning heart of God. He then proceeded to deliver

a prophecy for every one of the many family members who were present. I remember my

aunt changing the cassette tape a few times. I think a copy was made for my family’s

prophecies. The tape is long gone, along with whatever revelation Gary Gregor offered, but

58

his memory remains. I suppose my aunt gave him a ‘love offering’ (Christian parlance for an

honorarium) afterwards. I suppose it must be pretty tiring to fabricate two dozen

prophecies out of nothing. Funnily enough, it reminds me of poetry-on-demand gigs that I

occasionally do, although those are usually at festivals and are sponsored and fuelled by a

completely different kind of spirit. There’s a template to prophecy, and the old lies are often

the best lies.

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Electric Jesus

Memoir excerpt from Breakout Room 2

60

I used to serve in the children’s choir at Trinity Christian Centre. This was in the years just

before my voice broke. I had a lovely tenor, clear and able to hit the high notes with ease. A

couple of times a year, we would get up on stage in the main auditorium and sing for the

adult service. The songs were carefully chosen by our choirmaster, a tough, no-nonsense

woman we called Pastor B, and we would dutifully practice our parts after having

auditioned for various roles. It felt wonderful to be onstage, praising God. I took great pride

in looking out over the congregation in the darkness of the pews and knowing that I wielded

a particular kind of power. It was an awareness of attention. While I never sang solo,

nevertheless, that feeling of being collectively able to affect people was something that I

recognised even then.

I have a particularly clear memory of one of the songs we sang. Performed by the

Continental Singers, it was called ‘Carry The Light’. Pastor B adapted it by adding lines from

a much beloved children’s song at the start.

Jesus loves the little children All the children of the world Red and yellow Black and white They are precious in His sight Jesus loves the little children Of the world

I was pretty sure I sang ‘Red and yellow’, but when I search for the lyrics now, I find

numerous versions that have ‘red, brown, yellow’ in them. I suppose that the church has

taken the past twenty years to become more inclusive.

Perhaps a more inclusive version should list physical characteristics

(https://brucegerencser.net/2020/12/jesus-loves-the-little-children-all-the-children-of-the-

world/):

Fat and skinny, short and tall,

Jesus loves them one and all.

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Here is the first verse of Carry The Light:

In this world of darkness, we are given light Hope for all the dying How will they know, how will they know That Jesus loves them, and He died to save them Carry the Light, carry the Light Go and tell the children, they are precious in His sight Carry the Light, carry the Light Go and preach the gospel, ‘til there is no more night In the name of Jesus Christ Carry the Light

There’s something quite powerful (or funny) about a bunch of children exhorting adults to

‘carry the light’. To ‘preach the Gospel ’til there is no more night’ assumes that the world is

shadowed by the dark night of the soul, and it is the light of Christ that will break this

eternal darkness. Analysed more closely, the line preceding it makes no sense. Who are we

reaching? The children? Telling someone they are precious in God’s eyes is not the same as

asking someone to believe in Christ. How does one carry the light? Is it placed in a holder?

Does it need oil? Does it need to be lit again and again? My understanding is that the light

isn’t literal. It is, rather, the light of the Gospel, which should reflect as a glow on one’s

countenance.

Unfortunately, I have come to understand that Christians don’t so much carry the light as

speak the light, in reflex-action utterances of Christian jargon that mask the failures of daily

life beneath a floating mask of holier-than-thou language. One of the best phrases must

surely be, ‘I’ll pray for you’ which is often uttered as a cookie-cutter response to a need or a

situation in someone’s life. There can be nothing more reassuring and vacuous at the same

time. It is an instant signifier of the speaker’s devotion; that they would keep the person or

situation in mind while asking the other person to trust them. It is a clever cliché of the

practice of faith, of carrying the light.

When my voice broke, I was booted out of the choir. The onset of puberty marked the end

of my time onstage. There was no succession program, no offer to transition into the youth

ministry’s worship team. I felt bereft and unwanted. Desperate, I tried being a communion

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server, because someone I confided in told me that true service was in the unseen. It’s easy

to serve God onstage, he said, but the real work is done behind the scenes. So, once a

month, I helped to pass platters of bread and grape juice along the aisles during the youth

service. I was carrying trays, which, I supposed, was a kind of exercise in light-bearing,

though it certainly did not illuminate anything for me.

Those were the years when I first began to discover that there was a difference between the

songs we sang in church and CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) at home. I remember,

when CDs first came out, being entranced by a country and western album of Christian

songs. It was one of the first albums that my father purchased to play on his brand new

Denon CD player. This was, to me, the best song on the album:

Gospel Cannonball Verse With one foot in the bottle And the other in the grave I never knew quite what to think When they told me, Jesus saves But I was slowly sinking I couldn’t find the strength to swim When a cannon blast Blew away my past And I wound up next to Him Chorus Cannonball, cannonball I never was so happy As when I heard my Jesus call Cannonball, cannonball His love hit my heart Like a big ol’ cannonball I enjoyed the rags-to-riches redemption story and the physical imagery of Jesus being an

explosive cannonball that could obliterate the past and save you from your sins. I was too

young to understand the implications of simultaneously standing in a bottle and a grave, but

the genre of the music seemed to fit the easy message of the song. The lilt of the singer’s

voice pulled me into a sense that being saved was as simple as allowing the cannonball of

God’s love to explode my heart.

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I was 15, an age where many of my friends started to become aware that faith was a

personal choice. Some stopped following their parents to church and left altogether, others

became more involved in church. Because I couldn’t get into the worship team, I felt on the

margins and eventually left Trinity Christian Centre to join Tabernacle of Fire with my family.

There, I started to play the keyboard in church and picked up the guitar, drums and bass. I

taught myself the guitar after receiving the psalmist’s anointing so that I could write songs.

And the drums and bass were simply out of necessity. As a small church, we often had to

double- or triple-up when it came to serving.

As music became more and more integral to my experience of faith, the mid-to-late 1990s

was also a time when Christian artists were crossing over into mainstream radio, getting

airplay on secular stations and holding concerts that attracted Christians and non-Christians

alike. It was a growing market. In the late 1960s, Christian music earned less than US$10m

on the music market. In 2007, that figure rose to three-quarters of a billion dollars.

CCM had three categories: Christian artists who sang recognisably ‘Christian’ songs with

music that wasn’t what would be played or accepted in church services, Christian artists

who sang vague love songs that could be about Jesus and God, but could also be about

human relationships, and artists who didn’t want to label themselves as Christian. Their

songs were generally positive and their image wasn’t often controversial or riddled with

scandal, but they did not identify as Christian. This last category was often guesswork. But it

meant that it was a more acceptable option for conservative parents who didn’t want their

children listening to Bon Jovi or Metallica. So Christian rock bands like Petra sprung up to

neuter the negative stereotypes of certain genres.

If you name any genre of music, there’s going to be a Christian band that trucks in it. Ska,

punk and even death metal. Perhaps there’s something to be said about the interpretation

of the verse in Mark 16:15, “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every

creature” (by any means necessary, it would seem). But often, I found it hard to see what

was so Christian about the lyrics from these bands. At best, the songs would not be full of

vulgarities, traffic in negativity or be obsessed about depression, death or the devil. And I

was always taught that by your works is your faith expressed. So what were these bands

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expressing? A kind of compromise? Or were they trying to draw unbelievers away from

darker forms of music and towards something that would not condemn them straightaway

to damnation?

My musical taste was not as eclectic. I did like Christian pop-rock, though, and frequently

visited Trumpet Praise in Plaza Singapura. It was a tiny Christian record shop that I hit up

whenever I had saved enough money to buy new music. In those days, it was pretty much

impossible to get Christian music elsewhere. Music streaming was unheard of, save for low-

quality radio streams online. Trumpet Praise was where I found obscure ska bands like Five

Iron Frenzy, discovered the songwriting prowess of Rich Mullins and became a firm fan of

Jars of Clay. Their first album brought on a soft revolution in the world of CCM. Jars of Clay

wrote songs that teetered between worship and CCM. A simple way to make a distinction

between the two is that worship songs are sung to God while CCM is about God. But

somehow, Jars of Clay, led by Dan Haseltine’s earnest collegiate voice, hybridised the form.

They reached out to a generation that was tired of Maranatha choruses and Don Moen’s

boomer arrangements. They did not always buy into the Vineyard series of live albums,

‘Winds of Worship’, which was tied into the third wave of Neo-Charismatism, spearheaded

by the 1994 Toronto Blessing, an event which drew parallels (and critique) with the 1906

Azusa Street Revival. That was the world which Jars of Clay found themselves fording in

1995 with their eponymous debut. The opening strings and acoustic guitar of their first

single, ‘Liquid’, quickly dropped into a driving beat backed by monastic chants. Then

Haseltine sings,

Arms nailed down, are you telling me something? Eyes turned out, are you looking for someone?

The music shifts into a major key and the chorus rings out:

This is the one thing, the one thing that I know The rest of the song continues to move between questions of doubt expressed in the verses

and the declamatory chorus, with its assertion of knowledge, presumably of faith. I was

hooked.

And then radio stations, including the one I listened to in Singapore, picked up ‘Love Song

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for a Saviour’, another single from Jars of Clay’s album. It quickly became the song that

everyone wanted to learn to play on the guitar (‘Liquid’ was far too difficult).

In open fields of wildflowers, she breathes the air and flies away

From the first line, the story of a girl and her relationship with her Saviour drew us in

through the frame of a testimony. The one-liner chorus was both her cry and the cry of

everyone singing along,

I want to fall in love with you, I want to fall in love with you

This relationship wasn’t just fictional, it echoed a Woodstock Christianity, a belief that was

diametrically opposite from the militant spiritual warrior schlock that Renewalist preachers

were pushing from the pulpit. This was a gentle faith that dealt with the idea of

sanctification as a process of becoming, rather than the expectation of being continuously

on fire (like an eternal Olympic flame) for God.

The pre-chorus of ‘Love Song for a Saviour’ goes like this: He’s more than the laughter Or the stars in the heaven As close as a heartbeat Or song on her lips Someday she’ll trust Him And learn how to see Him Someday He’ll call her And she will come running Fall in His arms The tears will fall down And she’ll pray There was an innocence in the song, a purity of relationship that paralleled a romantic

heterosexual pursuit but also slipped sidelong into the spiritual. It was not for alpha male

Christians, who were likely to listen to something more heavy hitting by POD (Payable on

Death) or Stryper.

That same year, another song with an even more overt Christian message got airplay on

Christian and alternative radio stations. While Jars of Clay may have opted for a folk-rock

sensibility with beta-Christian lyrics, DC Talk went all out with the lead single and title of

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their fourth album. ‘Jesus Freak’ was a hard-hitting rock song that became the anthem for a

generation who declared themselves ‘sold-out’ for the cause of Christ. It was a little too rock

for me, and my parents objected to the use of the word freak. It was a good couple of years

before I was able to buy the album, before my mother was able to get around the idea that

rock music was noisy music.

‘Jesus Freak’ is essentially a declaration of faith in the midst of persecution. The second

verse contains a rapped segment about John the Baptist:

There was a man from the desert with naps in his head The sand that he walked was also his bed The words that he spoke made the people assume There wasn’t too much left in the upper room With skins on his back and hair on his face They thought he was strange by the locusts he ate You see the Pharisees tripped when they heard him speak Until the king took the head of this Jesus freak The whole song argues for a freakdom premised on being strange in the eyes of the world

but absolute for the cause of Christ. Musically, there are echoes of bands like Nirvana in the

guitar chording and the drumming and it was also a marked departure from the band’s

previous hip-hop-heavy record. Bands like these, along with Third Day, Skillet, Audio

Adrenaline and Newsboys formed a steady diet of CCM to accompany what I was singing in

church.

Figure 5. ‘iPraise’. I was so taken by Christian music that I even engraved iPraise on my iPod. Inevitably, the harder edges of CCM began to make their way into the church. The first

concert I ever attended was Sonicflood, when I was 17 and in junior college.

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Sonicflood was a Christian worship band that had begun to ‘rockify’ church songs, turning

their concert into a strange ecstasy of admiration for the band and worship towards God.

When people raised their hands and pumped their fists, were they raising them as an

expression of awe towards the music or as a response to the subject of the songs? I could

never tell the difference. I went with a friend, E, whom I kind of liked, but didn’t quite know

what to make of. She was hip, intelligent but not very ‘Christian’ in the way she behaved.

She swore, did not believe in ‘organised religion’, i.e. church, yet still claimed to believe in

God. Back then, going to church for me was a fundamental expression of faith. Being part of

and contributing to the church was every Christian’s duty, or so I believed.

E and I, together with a couple of other friends, started a little zine called Beauty for Ashes

that contained drawings, reflections and poems. It was very pretty and also expensive to

produce because we made it to give away to friends. We tried stocking it in shops and

handing it out to our respective church friends. People politely took a copy but I think we

were predating hipster Christianity by about ten years, at least, in Singapore.

A year later, Jars of Clay came to Singapore, their first and only ever visit here. Fresh off the

release of their sophomore album, ‘Much Afraid’, they performed at the World Trade

Centre Harbour Pavilion, a venue that has long since been obliterated in the service of a

megamall. Listening to Haseltine and gang perform live was one of the highlights of my

teenage years. I felt the lyrics of the album title track resonate deep within me, at a level

that no Sunday prophecy in Tabernacle of Fire could ever match.

All of these things I’ve held up in vain No reason nor rhyme Just the scars that remain Of all of these things I’m so much afraid Scared out of my mind By the demons I’ve made Sweet Jesus, you never ever let me go –from ‘Much Afraid’, Jars of Clay The simple rhymes and plaintive melody spoke to me of a faith that was riddled and

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wracked by doubt, of not knowing everything and accepting that frailty and failure were

part of the Christian experience. But this understanding was compartmentalised, it formed

only one part of my relationship (or so I called it then) with God. The larger part was back in

church, subject to a God of signs and wonders. Preachers harnessed the plough of the Holy

Spirit to their sermonising tractors and laid furrows deep onto the foreheads of the

congregation. It reminded me of how a church elder in Tabernacle of Fire once led the

worship service in the absence of the regular worship leaders. He didn’t know how to end

the song, so he kept turning to the band to tell them to play it again. We must have played

that song at least 25 times. Repetition does not, contrary to Renewalist belief, increase the

presence of God. It does hasten the onset of ennui, or in local parlance, being sian. But

doubt was anathema to the strain of my belief. Doubt was weakness and weakness is just

one step away from sin.

And while many of the CCM songs were beyond my ability to sing and play, I used to

practise the guitar with many of the songs that were sung in church. These had been written

for accessibility and were often translated into other languages. I always felt there was a

particular purity in singing to God, a singular focus of devotion that left me feeling ‘holy’ or,

to be more secular, high. On a more neurophysiological note, singing releases endorphins

and generates oxytocin. Endorphins are associated with feelings of pleasure while oxytocin

enhances feelings of trust and bonding. This also explains the particular joy that comes from

congregational singing in church.

Singing was also my way of dealing with loss. One morning in 2003, I remember my mother

coming to my room and waking me up while it was still dark. Sunil had passed.

I reached for my guitar and played the first song that came to mind, Matt Redman’s ‘Blessed

Be Your Name.’

Verse 2 Blessed be Your name When the sun’s shining down on me When the world’s all as it should be Blessed be Your name

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Blessed be Your name On the road marked with suffering Though there’s pain in the offering Blessed be Your name Pre-chorus Every blessing You pour out, I’ll Turn back to praise When the darkness closes in, Lord Still I will say Chorus Blessed be the name of the Lord Blessed be Your name Blessed be the name of the Lord Blessed be Your glorious name My voice cracked as I sang the second verse and I could barely squeak out the words to the

chorus. It was, literally, too painful for words. Sunil was my cousin. He was 18 when he

passed, my brother’s age at that time. His parents were missionaries and had spent years on

a gospel ship that travelled from port to port, selling books and evangelising.

Sunil had leukaemia and epilepsy, but he was ever cheerful. He was also an incredibly

talented painter. After he passed, his school in England (where the family was based) named

a building set aside for the arts after him. While he was being treated in Singapore, I

remember him getting progressively weaker and weaker but he never once complained. It

was difficult to fathom that he was dying, even more difficult to accept the fact that my

aunt’s family did not believe in divine healing and miracles. They believed that this was

God’s will and that it was not about the length of one’s life, but how well it was lived. Back

then, I struggled with that and I struggled to sing ‘Blessed be Your Name’. It was not fair. But

more than that, it was a binary of belief that seemed both impossible and yet essential to

bear.

In church, the music I listened to was locked within a set of music and lyrics that rarely

moved beyond saccharine, predictable melodies and cliched words. Outside, I enjoyed

Christian bands that moved the needle on how I understood Christian life, with all its

attendant doubts. Eventually, more rock elements were introduced into the church. When I

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was in HMI, Planetshakers was huge. They were Hillsong’s lead challenger in stadium-style

Australian praise and worship music. The band was led by guitarist Henry Seeley, who more

or less ripped the riff from Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On The Water’, for his song, ‘Come To

Praise’. The erudite chorus of ‘Come To Praise’ went:

I don’t know what you’ve come to do I’ve come to praise Him, praise Him, praise Him It’s just plain to see that when I’m praising Him I can’t contain it, I can’t hold it in Of course we went wild for music like this. And I would be remiss not to include ‘Jump

Around’, also from Planetshakers, with this sterling chorus:

Everybody jump around In the house of God Hey, hey jump around What was probably more sacrilegious than the inane lyrics was the fact that the riff was

almost a note for note replica of Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Guerrilla Radio’. Nobody

called them on it. I am not sure why. Maybe people who listened to Planetshakers didn’t

usually listen to Rage Against The Machine.

In fact, I had grown frustrated with the kind of songs I had to write to ‘fit’ into church and

which would be considered ‘anointed’ enough to be sung on Sunday. So, together with a

few friends, I started a Christian rock band called Splintered Theory. We wanted to write

songs that pushed a more Christian message within the shell of a rock song. I wrote the

lyrics and rapped when necessary. We played one gig in front of a large shopping centre. It

kind of fizzled after that because our lead singer wasn’t really working out and we couldn’t

(or at least I couldn’t) find someone who fit the ‘sound’ of what I was looking for—a kind of

Zach De La Rocha meets Chester Bennington. This was one of the songs that I wrote for the

gig:

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In a Time of War Verse 1 Do you know where to go in a time of war Sign on gear up prepare to die for a higher cause Do you know what it means to fight with everything you’ve got March on dig in hold the line in the screaming night Chorus This is a time of war; this is a time for battle Activate the warriors, fight for Your king This is where you die, where He comes alive Detonate the old man, crucified to Christ Verse 2 Do you know that missiles stand ready in a time of war There is no way to know where or when or how or why Do you know what it means to put your faith into a cause Believe you have been saved when bullets are flying Bridge Soldier, are you ready to die? (repeat) I, I am ready to die This was what I wrote in an email to a friend whom I asked to help design a logo for Splintered Theory:

In summary, we want to reach out to the world with Christ-focused lyrics and music. Our music will not compromise on the message but we want to use music as a vehicle to bring the message of the cross. We also want to challenge Christians with our songs, that identifying with Christ is to die to self and come alive to Him, and it’s not all sunshine and flowers. Our message may seem hard to some, but we hope that it will stir something in the hearts of everyone who hears it.

This was in 2007, the year I left History Maker International. It was a time when I was flexing

my creative feet but could not unbind myself from the radicalised doctrine of Renewalism.1

1 Renewalist Christianity places special emphasis on God’s ongoing, day-to-day intervention in human affairs through the person of the Holy Spirit. Renewalists believe that the power of the Holy Spirit is manifested through such supernatural phenomena as speaking in tongues, miraculous healings and prophetic utterances and revelations. Renewalist Christianity is one of the largest and fastest-growing movements in global Christianity, with its major strands accounting for at least a quarter of all Christians worldwide, or more than 500 million people, according to the World Christian Database. (Pew Research Center, 2007, ‘The Renewalist Movement and Hispanic Christianity’ https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2007/04/25/iv-the-renewalist-movement-and-hispanic-christianity/).

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Looking back, it is painful how unaware I was of the futility of such extreme thinking. But

trying to plug Jesus in and turn him electric was my way of giving an edge to my faith.

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History Makers

Memoir excerpt from Breakout Room 3

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When 9/11 happened, I was a fulltime conscript in the Singapore Army. I watched the twin

towers collapse on my guardroom television screen, a tiny 14-inch CRT set, and knew

instinctively that the world was not going to be the same. For one, the powers that be

ramped up security in my camp. From doing guard duty three times a month, I ended up

spending ten nights each month prowling the vast reaches of my camp, either on foot or on

a bicycle. It meant that I wasn’t able to serve in church as often as I wanted to. Often, I

would ask to be on Saturday guard duty, just so that I could book out on Sunday to spend

the rest of that day in church. It was a major sacrifice, because Sunday was usually an ‘easy’

day to be on guard duty. But I was in thrall to a higher call. Major changes were also afoot in

my family’s life. It was during that time we merged with RW’s church and not long after, RW

claimed to have a vision from God to reach the youth of Asia. He had prayed about it and

God had given him a new name and a vision for our church. We were to be called History

Maker International. And we were Radical For Jesus.

Figure 6. The History Maker International logo

At first, I thought it was a joke. Surely not History Maker? I mean, that was the title of a song

we used to sing by a British band called Delirious. They had a Coldplay-ish sort of vibe and

were at the ‘cutting edge’ of worship music, or at least what passed for edgy in Charismatic

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circles. Their music was a staple amongst the songs we selected for the mission field, along

with those by Hillsong, an Evangelical megachurch from Australia who had a massive impact

worldwide on the songs that were sung in modern worship services in churches. Hillsong

theology was light and their melodies were earworms, making it perfect for a broad range of

doctrinal beliefs. This was coupled by preaching on mission-laden terms such as the 10/40

Window, which we were all encouraged to pray for. Like a bomber drawing a target into his

sights, the 10/40 Window, coined by missionary strategist Luis Bush, referred to regions

located between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator. This area was supposed to have

great poverty, a low quality of life and seethed with the ‘unreached’. Improbably, South

Korea, Japan and Israel are in the 10/40 Window. Sri Lanka isn’t. But it was Sri Lanka that

RW set his sights on for the maiden voyage of the History Maker circus.

All over the world, churches preach a variant of this truism: “Missions is the heartbeat of

God”. They use this to justify sending mission teams to far-flung countries, supporting

missionary families from the church who go out to the mission field to plant churches, start

schools or embark on social justice endeavours. But more often than not, missions is seen as

a way to convert the heathen; those who are in darkness and have yet to hear or experience

the light of the Gospel. According to the US Centre for the Study of Global Christianity, there

were 450,000 Christian missionaries working abroad in 2019.2

Similar to the West sending missionaries in droves to Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries, so

too has Singapore taken on the mantle (or assumed their own neo-colonial mandate) to

2 ‘Status of Global Christianity, 2019, in the Context of 1900–2050’ https://bit.ly/3DpZrHL

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send missionaries out from the first-world sanctuary of Singapore to our third-world

neighbours. When Billy Graham, the late American evangelist, visited Singapore in 1978 to

hold a gospel rally, he was greeted with a lion dance put on by the Singapore Tourist

Promotion Board. Over the five nights that he held meetings at the old National Stadium, an

estimated 337,000 people came to listen to him. Mind you, the population of Singapore

then was only about 2.3 million people. At one of those nights, Graham prophesied that

Singapore would become the ‘Antioch of Asia’, referring to an ancient city in modern-day

Turkey that was a base for the apostles in the early days of the church. Over 40 years later,

that phrase is still being bandied about. It was even made into a book3 and continues to

justify Singapore’s role in evangelising the region.

When non-Christians think about missionaries, they have people like William Carey, David

Livingstone or Hudson Taylor in mind, larger than life white men who dedicated their lives

to the service of God in far-flung places. They went to China or India, set about learning the

language, teaching and embarking on other educational or service endeavours. They would

be there for years and years. Their children would often fall ill or die from unknown tropical

diseases. They would suffer enormous hardship and would rarely journey back to the West.

These men (and occasionally women) were embedded within their mission field. Their work

was ethnographic as a matter of course, because they had to engage with the locals if they

wanted to start a church and preach the Gospel. Arguably, mission work was a side-line to

imperialism. The evangelisation of empire, whether it was the English, the French or the

Spanish, has been well documented elsewhere but the point here is that missionaries saw

their work as a calling, a life-work. And to some extent, it would seem to be the only way to

3 Syn, W. M. (2017). On Being The Antioch of Asia. Armour Publishing.

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have a lasting impact or legacy on the place, regardless of whether you’re helping or hurting

the locals. In contrast, History Maker Sri Lanka was going to be a wham, bam, thank you

Jesus few days. We would go in, hit them hard, fill ‘em up with God and then fly back home.

I remembered three things in particular from that trip. First: the preparation. We were all

told to pray in tongues for an hour every day to build ourselves up spiritually. I found myself

praying in tongues as I walked around my army camp on guard duty at night, surprising the

monitor lizards and earning me extremely odd looks from the rest of my mates on duty.

Second: Chili. Sri Lankan food is hot. VERY HOT. When we first landed in Colombo, we went

to a food court for a meal. I picked out rice and a few dishes. And every single dish had a

different kind of chili in it. And all of them were incredibly spicy. I raced to get a bottle of

Pepsi. They came in reusable glass bottles with long, thin necks, which required the thinnest

straw ever. That did not quench my thirst. Perhaps this was a portent of the fire of God that

would fall in the days to come, someone joked. Third: War. Sri Lanka had been embroiled in

a decades-long civil war since 1948. The simple reason was ethnic conflict between

Sinhalese and Tamils, but the shadow of colonialism was also a key factor in the war. The

British, when they ruled Sri Lanka, brought in over a million Tamils to work in plantations as

labourers. They were situated mostly in the north of Sri Lanka, in Jaffna. The British practice

of ‘divide and rule’ caused the Sinhalese to enact harsh laws against the Tamils when the

former were given the reins of the country after the British left in 1948. Sinhalese became

the official language and Tamils were driven out of the civil service and denied citizenship.

This led to wars in the 1980s and the 1990s between the Sinhalese military and the Tamil

Tigers.

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A July 2001 Tamil Tiger suicide attack on the Bandaranaike International Airport in Colombo

destroyed eight military jets and four airliners. We were supposed to fly into that airport in

April 2002. Naturally, this caused some trepidation amongst our parents, but after the

attack, a ceasefire was negotiated until October 2003, when the Tigers declared full control

over the north and east regions of the country, which led to the government declaring a

state of emergency.

The ceasefire allowed us a window to enter Sri Lanka and RW seized upon that opportunity

to craft it as a divine moment, a God-given mandate to reach the beleaguered youth of Sri

Lanka and stir up revival in the nation. By the way, don’t you love the word mandate? I

always thought that RW wanted to have a literal man date with God, that there was

something a bit too weird and pally with how he always seemed to be in the same locker

room with the Holy Spirit. The word mandate comes from two words in Latin, manus (hand)

and dare (to give). Used in the Christian context, it is God who gives his command into our

hands. And it was God who commissioned RW, like a true Christian soldier, to lead the rest

of us into battle.

When we were driving out of the airport, I was shocked to see a hardcore sandbag bunker

with a couple of machine guns poking out of it. This was something straight out of Vietnam.

It was only then that I realised that RW had brought us into a country that was still very

much at war. But he had bigger spiritual fish to fry. A war wasn’t going to stop him. He

needed to execute his three-day revival plan.

The first day always brought the pain. Everybody left the revival service convinced that they

were the world’s biggest sinner, that they were far from the goodness of God, that they had

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fallen, hard, and were hopeless individuals. The altar call was premised on asking for

forgiveness. Some people would go up to be prayed for or to be healed. Or to be stripped of

whatever it was that was keeping God from moving in their lives. The service usually ended

on a rather sombre note.

The second night was when RW started to fill the congregation with some hope. This night

was usually when there would be a ‘move of the Spirit’, and we would be urged, pre-service,

to pray even harder for God to manifest himself in our midst. It didn’t matter that the Bible

said that Jesus would always be with us. Nope, we had to have him be with us in a very

specific way. And in order to do so, RW said we had to overcome our own weaknesses as a

worship team. What were they? Well, I noticed that the Sri Lankan band was a lot better

than ours. A LOT. I wondered why we had even come here! They outplayed and out sang us.

They were better rehearsed, hit their notes on the beat and their musical arrangements got

a lot closer to the CD rendition then we ever did. I felt like we were imposters. But my friend

Eugene reassured me that it wasn’t about how good we were, but about the attitude that

we brought. Our amateur efforts to be a band was not as important as having a heart for

God and the lost (in that order). Because what people saw was not our talent (not like we

had much to begin with) but that we had showed up, we had made the effort to come here

and more importantly, that we were on fire. Looking back, that seemed like a pretty good

excuse to explain why we didn’t practice enough.

What usually happened on the second night? There would be copious praying, more

personal healing and breakthroughs and a glimpse of the power of the Holy Spirit. There

could be sporadic outbursts of holy laughter or a prophecy or two. RW would shift gears and

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urge the congregation onto the ecstatic, the possibility of life with the power of God in your

veins. And I think he truly believed it.

When Tanya Luhrmann conducted fieldwork amongst members of the Vineyard Church in

the USA, she documented the personal relationships that people developed with God

through the practice of prayer. In particular, she looked at the ways in which people claimed

to discern God’s will, hear God’s voice and experience or see spiritual beings. In a now-

famous paper published in 1965, Rodney Stark described a taxonomy of religious

experiences, many of which fall square into what Evangelicals describe as an ‘encounter’

with God. These range from the confirmatory (feelings of reverence associated with a

‘knowing’ that one’s beliefs are true), the responsive (an awareness of something divine),

the ecstatic (including various bodily responses) and revelational (this includes visions,

prophecies and even audible voices).

I remember praying for a young lady in Myanmar who was shaking as she stood in line,

hands raised and speaking in tongues. She was primed to receive the Holy Spirit. The

moment I laid my hand on her forehead and prayed (the way RW did), saying “In the name

of Jesus, be filled!” she flung herself to the floor in a reverse push-up position and then

proceeded to contort her body in a series of strange shapes, all the while ululating. It was

like nothing I had ever seen before. Most people just sank down in a kind of swoon and then

started laughing or crying or were quiet. She had been possessed, I assumed, by the Holy

Spirit. I counted it as a win and moved on to the next person.

The last night, though, was always the clincher. This was the night when a decision had to

be made. And it was always an absolute one. Are you ready to go all the way? Are you

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ready… to die for Jesus? I would finger the keyboard, drawing out an emotive medley from

various worship songs. We would segue into singing occasionally, but the music was mostly

instrumental, a base upon which the sermon could achieve a crescendo or pause in reverent

contemplation. At the very end, after everybody had agreed that they would die for Jesus

and had ‘laid down their life’ at the altar, then there would be the rejoicing. The mad

singing, the jumping about. The joy of being empowered to be a history maker.

As revival meetings go, the one in Sri Lanka was pretty much out of the textbook. And it was

the structure, more or less, of our short-term mission trips. What did they accomplish? In

reality, very little. We didn’t try to understand our Sri Lankan brethren at all. We didn’t

make an attempt to learn their language, consider their cultural practices or find out what

songs they sang and try to learn them. We taught them our songs, imposed our version of

God on them, believing that they needed to be made radical for Jesus. Sound familiar?

It’s funny, because we in Singapore weren’t living through a civil war. We didn’t experience

deprivation, bombing, economic peril and medical shortages. Yet we believed we actually

had something to offer them. And best of all, we weren’t preaching to people who hadn’t

heard about Jesus. We were singing (rather badly) to the choir.

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Here are some photographs from that 2002 mission trip to Sri Lanka:

Figure 7. ‘The Boys’. Not sure why we were all in black here. Perhaps we thought we were rockers. What strikes me is how serious my gaze is. Its intensity is rivalled only by that of Richard William, on my left. Perhaps I was trying to channel my best impression of being a hip, young missionary for Christ.

Figure 8. ‘Light Sticks’. Using light sticks in a darkened room during worship was an easy way to get a mood going and feel the ‘joy of the Lord’. The intention to replicate a secular concert was deliberate and added to a sense of physical excitement which was often used as proof of some kind of presence of God.

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Figure 9. ‘Onstage’. The full worship team on stage. I was one of two keyboardists in church and was the designated keyboard player on this trip. Being a musician in the band was always supposed to be a ‘higher’ calling than other ministries and so we were held to more rigid standards.

Figure 10. ‘Sermonising’. Humour was always a core part of RW’s sermons. Telling funny stories (and he was good at them) was a great way of swinging the needle from one end of the emotive spectrum and made the emotive gut punch of sin and failure and utter helplessness before God all the more impactful.

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Figure 11. ‘Physical and Spiritual Workouts’. It wasn’t all just spiritual workouts. What’s a revival camp without physical exercises? Games for the almost 300 attendees often took the form of a tele-match. It gave the impression that Christianity was a well-rounded pursuit for the teenage soul.

Figure 12. ‘Preach!’ RW was very dependent on his interpreter in countries that were not English speaking. A good interpreter would reflect the energy and passion of the preacher, even jumping and moving around and reading the crowd correctly. Evangelical preaching is often a performance, and the interpreter is very much a co-performer in the process.

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Figure 13. ‘Mission Accomplished’. At the airport in Colombo, waiting to return to Singapore after the mission trip. Looking at this photograph, all I can see is the arrogance that comes out of having done exactly what God purportedly ordained us to do.

*

The following is an actual report that RW asked me to write after a 2004 mission trip to

Yangon, Myanmar. Dug up from email and presented verbatim, I have annotated it with my

own reflections in the right column.

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History Maker Myanmar: 2004 Mission Report by Marc Nair The trip to Myanmar was undertaken in the month of July 2004. It was the second mission trip to Yangon for History Maker International but the first trip for me. I had been regaled by wonderful testimonies from that first trip about how the church and the youth had been transformed from conservative, passive Christians to vibrant, jumping believers, set on fire and released by the power of the Spirit. And in the intervening year, we had regular updates on the breakthroughs they had been having, and how they were waiting with great anticipation and excitement for our team to return. In the spiritual realm, there was an expectation for us to take them to a ‘higher’ level, and naturally we also had to be geared up. The dramas and the dances had to be brand new, the worship had to break through into the spirit realm and most of all the Word had to be one that would be relevant, fresh and God-inspired. My personal purpose in going to Myanmar was simply to be a vessel that God would use. In spite of my weaknesses and failings, I knew that God was greater and He would show His power and leave me in awe of Him. God moves greatest on the mission field, where we are uprooted from all of our creature comforts and focused on answering His call. And what I hoped to experience in Myanmar would be something that I could bring back to Singapore and share with my friends; that God is not found just in church on Sunday morning, but is the Sovereign God over every area of our lives. The Mission & Vision Radical for Jesus. This was uppermost in our minds as we touched down in the military stronghold that was Myanmar. I think a question that bugs us on every trip is “What are we doing here?” The praise and worship team is miles better than ours, we don’t speak a word of Burmese, and our stomachs are so vulnerable to the local food. But I think that’s

Myanmar was another country in the throes of unrest. In 2004, the military junta were firmly in power and churches were more or less underground. But all this was fuel for going there to fire up the Christians. This was a church under persecution. What on earth could we offer to them? I was usually in charge of writing short ‘object-lesson’ sketches around a Christian theme for the mission trips. ‘A vessel that God would use.’ Check the blatant and frequent use of Christianese jargon in this report. I was so steeped in this kind of language that I was oblivious to its cliched implications.

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precisely God’s way of showing us that in our weakness He is stronger. And it shows us too that History Maker is not an international youth camp, but a movement with the potential to explode into a revolution. The apostle Paul urged the early church to preach Christ and only Christ crucified, and History Maker is all about the History Maker, Jesus, and how we are part of His plan to lead the world back to Him. And whether it’s Sri Lanka, Korea, India, Indonesia, Myanmar or anywhere else, we have always found like-minded partners who are willing to be radical for Jesus. The Trip The trip was 6 days and five nights long, Monday to Saturday, and the conference was from Wednesday to Friday. On Monday and Tuesday, we set up musical equipment, got to meet some of the team and visited some of the church members in their villages. The villages were a real eye-opener for me. We learned, for example, that because of power cuts villages would have electricity for one week and none the week after. Life was at its simplest, with wells dug in the front yard and narrow staircases leading to cramped rooms with the occasional luxury of television the only link to the modern world. Faith works itself out in Myanmar very differently. Communication is a burden because it is prohibitively expensive. Mass e-mail is still years away, and landlines and mobile phones cost a fortune. The church then becomes the focal point for believers, a place in which music and dance combine with the Word to literally lift them out of the quagmire of their lives. Because this is a nation under oppression, Buddhist temples dot the landscape, and just next to our hotel was Shwedagon Pagoda, a massive structure that towered over everything else but couldn’t stop the purposes of God being fulfilled in Yangon. The atmosphere was outwardly calm but underneath we could feel stirrings of change as the Spirit of God cut a swathe of truth and

Just like Sri Lanka, this was how we rationalised our inferiority and obvious inadequacy in continuing to head to places where being persecuted has made believers there far more devout and ‘hungrier’ than we could ever be, or ever wanted to be. It’s funny, this word ‘Radical’. To be radicalised took on a decidedly darker meaning post 9/11, and yet RW decided to go ahead with it, arguing that our form of extremist belief was the polar opposite from the Jihadists. We visited a church member’s house, drank tea while sitting on his floor and practised a disgusting mix of sympathy/slum tourism. We didn’t volunteer to help them with anything. I think I would have had a bit more respect for the church if we could have paired our ‘revival meetings’ with some English lessons or even toilet building in a village. Essentially, leaving behind something other than a glimpse of how privileged our lives were.

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righteousness in the gatherings. The meetings themselves were quite typical of History Maker meetings, building up to a point where people were blown away by a move of God. And that happened on Friday morning. God showed up and shook the crowd. Teaching I had two teaching slots in Myanmar, both on the first day. The first I shared with Elvin Leong on relationships. Mine was about the merits of staying single while Elvin’s was on how to handle being in one. I think I didn’t do a good enough job because I didn’t prepare enough, and ended up having too little to talk about. I spoke too fast, probably out of nervousness, and I failed to include illustrations, which left Elvin the heroic task of filling out the remaining time, which he did very well. After lunch, I was slated to share with Stanley on evangelism. My area was on organising evangelistic events such as a sport meet, a talent-time contest, a treasure hunt and so on. I thought this would help to move their concept of church out from the shelter of the localised building into an externalised community, albeit in a non-threatening way. And I stressed too on finding a way to incorporate an evangelistic message into the program. As a whole, I thought the range of teachings and workshops were varied and on the whole well presented, but I honestly wonder how much the Burmese youth got out of it. How much of what we said do they already know? More importantly, how much did they understand? Are we merely finding new ways to traverse old ground or do we keep on sharing in the same areas because the need remains? What would be interesting to see on future trips would be to find a way to get the youth more involved; like for example a song-writing workshop that has a short teaching and then to break up into smaller groups, each with a member of the mission team. This would allow for greater interaction and better utilise the mission team.

How did I know it was God? Simply because I couldn’t conceive that it could be a figment of my imagination, something devised by the embedded dialectic of good versus evil that governed my thinking. In addition to imposing our inferior musicianship on the Burmese, we also succeeded in giving them utterly pointless life lessons from affluent Singapore. Staying single for Jesus is rather less important than staying alive on the streets of Yangon. This was, in hindsight, an incredibly self-centred topic and clearly irrelevant for a persecuted church. What the hell was RW thinking when he assigned me this topic? I remember trying to push for something like this, but was overruled, because let’s face it, how many people are interested in the craft of writing songs?

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Drama I also helped out in the four dramas that we presented in Myanmar, contributing ideas and doing the soundtracks. They dealt with different aspects of Christian living; ‘Chariots’ was about staying committed to the race that we have all been called to run and not to be distracted by things of this world such as clubbing, pornography and ungodly relationships. ‘Love of my life’ was about a game-show in which contestants were asked to choose between different ‘idols’ and the purpose was to present Jesus not as an idol, but as someone more, as a Saviour. ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ was a simple mime about choosing the right kind of girl. There was a lot of humour in that one, with Ben dressing up as a homosexual and pretending to go after me. The last drama was based on Carman’s song, ‘Sunday’s On The Way’, and was quite a powerful mime on how Jesus was crucified but rose again on the third day, defeating the devil and freeing everyone held captive under the power of sin. My honest feelings about the dramas were that they did help in lightening the mood and also present in a new way truths about Christ while remaining relevant to contemporary culture; but for the most part because of the absence of dialogue we ended up presenting and rehashing stereotypes, which are sometimes good because they cue peoples’ expectations and lend a measure of familiarity. However, the problem is more in finding new ways to present these old stereotypes, and this is where I guess we really have to depend on the Spirit of God to show us what will work. Praise & Worship I was supposed to lead worship on Thursday morning but Pastor Richard swapped me to Friday morning instead. But Thursday night I was beginning to burn up inside, had a runny nose and a sore throat; all the classic symptoms of an approaching fever. Sure enough, Friday morning I woke up and couldn’t swallow at all! A fever raged full tilt inside me and my nose couldn’t stop running. I remembered thinking there was no way I

More Puritanical dramas that come down hard and heavy on the obvious sins and venerate the ‘set apart’ life. Reading this now, I’m appalled, yet back then, homosexuality was seen as yet another sin, like adultery, and homosexuals were roundly and regularly condemned from the pulpit. Again, zero intention to research local stories or folk tales. Nope, this is where I had to go to the library. But then again, RW had a very Western approach to religion, so the themes and topics were not about making space for local practices, but about obliterating everything with a Holy Ghost cannon. I didn’t know it then, but I had come down with major food poisoning after eating bad biryani.

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could lead worship later on. I didn’t even want to go down for the morning prayer, but dragged myself down anyway, if only to tell Eugene or someone else to take over. But when I did tell him, he completely stunned me by saying, “You can do it! You just have to get up to the stage and open your mouth and God will take over.” And deep inside I knew God had led me to this place to show me that in my weakness He would prove Himself strong. Somehow, somewhere, I found the strength to sing, to even jump around, and that Friday morning was when God moved. After Pastor Kelly’s inspired message, the session went on as God ministered to the youth. And I can honestly say that it had nothing to do with me, because it was God who sustained me and empowered me. I know this for sure because at night I had to stand by the side, I couldn’t sing or even jump because I was so close to throwing up. It was an experience I would not like to repeat in the natural (I was knocked out by fever for a week after the trip), but in the spiritual it was nothing short of an experience of the awesome power of God. What I learnt I was very blessed by the Burmese youth and their determination in the face of their struggle to survive. To be a Christian in Burma is always to be a minority group, to be ostracized from the ebb and flow of society and to make a stand as a Christian, to go and live a Christ-like life is something that is infinitely more difficult in a country like Burma. I learnt that many times we Singaporeans have taken our own freedom of worship for granted, to the point where we don’t see it as a privilege, but rather a constitutional right, and because we don’t treasure our freedom our lives don’t reflect the consuming power of God that can change the world. When I see the sacrifices that the Christians in Burma make, I ask myself if I make any such comparable sacrifices, and why not? The answer is probably that here we are distracted by the whispers of consumerism, the never-ending quest to acquire and upgrade, disregarding Jesus’ words to “seek first the kingdom of God and all these

This was a great example of the old trope of walking by faith and not by sight. ‘Less of me, more of You’ was a favourite saying in HMI for many years. It was a combination of foolishness, stupidity and faith. Or maybe faith was the sum of foolishness and stupidity. But when you believe something hard enough, you tend to find reasons and signs to justify your belief. Actually, I had to go to the doctor to get an injection to break the fever. It was that serious. But, rather than see that I had put my life at risk, I chose to look at it as God working through my weakness. If this wasn’t the height of spiritual blindness, I don’t know what was. This paragraph is the only paragraph in the report that makes sense… up to a point.

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things will be added to you.” We don’t see His Kingdom come in Singapore because we don’t seek for His Kingdom. Those who seek shall find, but if we choose to lay up treasures in the world, we will find only earthly pleasures and not eternal treasures. What I would like to see next year More of God. Less of me. More of His power. Less of my strength. A move of God like what happened in the book of Acts, where the Spirit of God fell freely in complete disregard for any man. To have worship move into the Holy of Holies, and not just the sound and fury of the outer court. To know God as He knows me, to understand Him better and so reveal His glory in my life in such a way that I will die to self. To have His Spirit reign in me so I can reveal Jesus to them. To see spiritual strongholds fall down in Yangon as the church of God becomes a fighting force taking back the enemy’s spoil. To change the mode of the church from passive-defensive into active-aggressive. Because there’s a war on, and we’re in it.

“We don’t see His Kingdom come in Singapore because we don’t seek for His Kingdom.” Such moralising, such high-horsery! So much judgment from me. But I was really only parroting whatever came from the pulpit, and the message was that God doesn’t move because we haven’t moved to where God is. And how can we do that? BE MORE HOLY. This is a very bad reading of the book of Acts. I am ashamed. This Holy of Holies nonsense refers to the Tabernacle, a totally Jewish construct and irrelevant to New Testament theology. But Evangelicals pick and choose their emotive phrases to fit their doctrines. Yup, this was the sort of pseudo-militant, ableist-anarchic Christian jargon that riddled my thinking despite being an English Literature major in a secular university. Obviously, I was good at keeping the church and state separate in my life.

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Of Buckaroos and Straight Arrows

Memoir excerpt from Breakout Room 4

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When I was around five or six years old, my mother enrolled me in a programme at church

called the Royal Rangers. On my very first day, this was what I had to memorise:

The Royal Rangers Pledge

With God’s help, I will do my best to serve God,

my church, and my fellow man. To live by the ranger code.

To make the Golden Rule my daily rule.

The Royal Rangers is a Christian version of the Scouts, a clean-living, positive spin on being

in touch with nature through a program that blends outdoor activities with spiritual growth

through Bible study and spiritual lessons. The official definition goes like this:

The Royal Rangers program is an activity-based, small group church ministry for

mentoring future men, grades K-12, with a mission to evangelize, equip, and

empower the next generation of Christ-like men and lifelong servant leaders.

This is from the Royal Rangers Quick Start Guide, a handy, one-stop guide for churches in

the Assemblies of God fold (a major Pentecostal denomination) to start up a Royal Ranger

Outpost of their own. The companion program designed for girls was called “Missionettes”.

They had uniforms as well, but were strictly separated from the Royal Rangers, so we never

knew what they did. I always assumed they did gender-equivalent activities; so, if we were

tying knots, they might be sewing on buttons; if we were cooking over fires outdoors, they

might be making a meal in someone’s kitchen.

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I started in the Straight Arrows, dressing up like a Native American Indian before moving on

to the Buckaroos, wearing a cowboy hat, lariat and scarf every Saturday afternoon. Then

came the Pioneers, the Trail Blazers, and if I had stayed on, the Trail Rangers. Activities

included learning how to tie different knots, how to build a fire and general Scout-ish things

designed for boys “to grow in Christ-like manhood”.

What does manhood mean? Well, according to the quick-start guide, “manhood is an

adventure—an adventure where boys do what God asks them to do”. As convenient proof

of this commandment, a passage in the Bible is used to justify the statement. This is the

story of how Jesus told Peter to get out of the boat and come to Him across the water

(Matthew 14:25–29). Like Peter, the quick-start manual implies boys need to have faith to

obey. When Jesus asks us to do something—to help the needy, obey our parents or sing in

the choir, it’s an invitation to adventure. But this conveniently ignores the context of the

passage. The disciples were in a boat that night, tossed about by a storm. At around 3 am,

the darkest part of night, they see what looks like a ghost coming at them, walking on the

water. They figure out it is Jesus, and he tells them to take courage and not be afraid. And

then Peter, the loudmouth, the one who shoots before he sights, apparently finds the

bravado to say, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to You on the water” (v. 28). And

Jesus, knowing full well what would happen, shouts, “Come!” I won’t expound on the rest,

but the point here is that Jesus never asked anyone to step out of the boat. He didn’t ask

Peter to show how brave he was to do something that was logically impossible. So, who was

it that was asking us boys to spend our school holidays camping out in a jungle?

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Another verse we absolutely had to memorise was the Golden Rule. “In every thing, do to

others what you would have them do to you” (Matthew 7:12). I practised the Golden Rule

once to my great detriment. A naughty friend of mine used ‘fuck’ one Saturday afternoon

during a Royal Ranger meeting. I was eight. He was scolded by our outpost commander and

counselled. And the reason given was that that word was inappropriate because it didn’t

speak kindly of someone else, so we should not use that word unless we wanted someone

to use it on us. Fair enough. But I still didn’t know what it meant. I went home and asked my

Mum, “What does fuck mean?” Swifter than a speeding bullet train, my mother handed me

a tight slap. “How dare you!” she yelled. “Where did you pick up such filthy language?”

“From my friend at Royal Rangers,” I replied innocently. “Never say that to anyone, ever

again. You hear?” “Yes Mum, but why?” “Do you want another slap? No, right! Then don’t

use such language in this house or with your friends. He can say it all he wants, but he’s not

my son…” And so the lecture went on.

I remember going to a Royal Ranger camp when I was ten years old and being scared as

heck because there was a teenager who had been tied to a tree overnight. I discovered that

this was an initiation rite into being a Trail Ranger, the highest echelon of being a Royal

Ranger. Such rites were typical (in my time) for boys aged 16–18 and there was a lot of

macho bravado as well as a lot of mystery about the whole process, which really seemed to

rip off the Cherokee Indian rite of passage. But when you emerged at the end of the night,

you were on top of the pecking order. Royal Rangers was fun when I was younger, but as I

grew older, I wondered why we needed to have this pseudo-Scout movement in a country

where all boys have to go through two years of mandatory National Service in the Singapore

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Armed Forces. And even before that, some boys choose to sign up for the National Police

Cadet Corps (NPCC) and National Cadet Corps (NCC) as afterschool activities throughout

their teenage years. Their free time is spent marching, cleaning a rifle and ironing their

uniforms. It’s a vicious curtailing of so many other possible pursuits in an already grade-

obsessed country.

If I could reprise that chapter of my life, I would offer a prayer that goes like this:

Prayer of a Buckaroo

Dear God,

May I be polite and not insist I am right,

May I open doors for ladies and coo at babies.

May I hug my parents and take out patents,

May I never bury my given talents.

May I keep my hat from flying away,

May my boots be spit-shined every day.

May my mouth sing the grace of the Gospel,

May I be able to spell Pentecostal.

May I walk this road and always question,

For if zero fucks are given, how will I get to heaven?

How will I lasso a good Missionette, how will I ride

The horse of compassion to the promised land?

What’s my spirit name, how will I last the night

Tied to a tree; speaking in tongues, trying not to pee?

How will I be a disciple, if the knots I tie

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Come undone and I’m a royal mess of a ranger

The last one who’s picked, like I am a stranger

And in the dark, when I kneel my heart to pray,

Lord, I will burn this uniform someday.

Another troubling aspect of the Royal Rangers that I never understood and still don’t was

their focus on using the language of the Wild West, of white men conquering lands and

stamping out Native Indian tribes. In America, the first district-wide Pow Wows (designed

for fellowship, training and evangelism), were held in 1964, with five districts conducting

Pow Wows. In ‘A Short History of Royal Rangers’, one district reported that “143 boys were

filled with the Holy Spirit during one council fire”. Interestingly, this phrase, ‘filled with the

Holy Spirit’ comes out of nowhere in a very factual chronology of the history of the

movement. I can only assume that this could have been seen as an Upper Room experience

(referencing Acts 1, when the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples when they gathered in the

Upper Room after Jesus had ascended to heaven).

Figure 14. From Northeast Region Royal Rangers FCF Colonials Territory Rendezvous History

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The above screenshot, detailing a Royal Rangers meeting, details the use of Native American

terms; from reservation to the use of Native American ‘nicknames’. These two examples are

blasé reminders of the cultural appropriation that the Royal Rangers have been engaging in

for decades, except that, because it is in the name of the Lord, this somehow legitimises it.

But when you’re a kid, you’re oblivious to the misrepresentation and erasure that comes

when men take on pseudo–Native American names and conflate being an outdoorsman

with outsized colonising tendencies in the name of God. This is also completely irrelevant in

Singapore, which is almost all urban and has no hinterland or substantial forest to speak of,

much less wigwams and hollering tribesmen.

We tried our best to make this whole Wild West thing work, though. When I was thirteen

years old, we went on a three-day hike from the centre of the island (starting at the

Singapore Island Country Club), working our way across reservoirs and nature reserves until

we emerged much further north at Choa Chu Kang. The end point was a McDonalds. I don’t

remember the exact route, except that we camped (illegally) beside a reservoir, warmed up

tins of canned food and cooked instant noodles over a campfire. What we did then would

be impossible to do today. Singapore in the 1990s was a lot less regulated and developed

than it is now. I suppose that was the closest we could come to being an urban ranger,

although, just like a Native American, I frequently felt like I was an outsider because of my

race. During Royal Ranger meetings, there were frequent conversations in Mandarin, not

intentionally, but simply out of habit. These casual acts of exclusion were, perhaps, most

telling of the lack of acceptance, grace and ‘Christian’ values. Or simply that culture is a

stronger force than faith could ever be.

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There was rarely any attempt to reconcile our immediate environment with what we were

learning in the Royal Rangers. We lived in a tropical climate, in a city-state with very strict

bylaws regarding camping and starting fires in the open. We had no prairie or mountain

ranges. We were not white men who had come to displace and destroy the lands and

lifestyle of Native Americans. Our forefathers, who chafed under the hand of colonisers,

came here to work as coolies and labourers, rarely rising up beyond the middle class.

The Royal Rangers never quite entered into the mainstream life of the church, even though

Pentecostalism was yet another excessive American export from the turn of the twentieth

century. I did not attend service in my Rangers uniform, nor did we have special

presentations for the congregation. However, it was an Assemblies of God (a Pentecostal

community of churches) initiative, so we would occasionally gather and meet other

‘outposts’.

While the Royal Rangers could be seen as an antiquated, but still functioning arm of the

missionary-from-the-West-come-to-save-the-heathen model (Trinity Christian Centre was

started by missionaries), glocalisation, the simultaneous occurrence of both universalising

and particularising tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems, has

been another way in which global movements have become accepted in the local church. In

the academic sphere, this can be seen in Chen Kuan-Hsing’s Asia as Method, which calls for

a shift in the centre of power from the West to Asia, and inter-Asia referencing, to

understand differences and seek commonalities in shared experiences within Asia. Chen’s

approach is to treat the West “as one cultural resource” among others, which I believe is

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akin to how Asian Pentecostal Evangelicals have grown their own congregations and

established their ethno-centric approaches to doctrine.4 Chen proposes that we avoid

carrying on with the fear of the West as a continued totalising discourse but to see it as “bits

and fragments that intervene in local social formations in a systematic, but never totalizing,

way”.5 The West would then stop being a monolithic entity we are always opposed to, but

one ‘resource’ amongst many others.

Thinking along those lines, what if Royal Rangers were localised? What if it derived its

source material not from the American West but from local history? Perhaps I would then

be in the Orang Laut. The Malay phrase, Orang Laut, literally means sea nomads or sea

gypsies. The Orang Kallang, Orang Seletar, Orang Selat and Orang Gelam were the original

Orang Laut who lived in Singapore. As the Orang Laut, we would engage in various activities

centred around the sea and stay in a kelong, a stilt fishing house set out in the sea—the

equivalent of an American wilderness. And just like the Royal Rangers, we would draw

spiritual lessons from the experience, because we are Christians, after all.

But nobody had the imagination to speak for us and to us; for the depth and breadth of our

multi-layered history and culture that stretched far before the British arrived. Of our many

trading partners, of our centuries of stories. None of that has ever been referenced or

narrativised in any of the thousands of sermons I’ve heard in my life.

4 Chong, T. (2016). ‘Pentecostal megachurches in Southeast Asia’. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Newsletter, no. 75. https://www.iias.asia/sites/default/files/nwl_article/2019-05/IIAS_NL75_1617.pdf. Last accessed 29th July 2021. 5 Chen, K-H. (2010). Asia as Method. Duke University Press.

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So here’s a diary entry of what life could be if I were a member of the Orang Laut

programme:

June 10 1994 (13 years old)

Last weekend was my first overnight trip to the kelong, an offshore fishing platform

made of wood where people live and work. This was an initiation that was

compulsory for us to become Orang Laut (Nelayan First Class). We left the church in

a minivan, wearing our sarongs and singlets, carrying fishing nets that we had woven

individually over the course of a month at OL (Orang Laut) meetings in church.

I didn’t know what to expect out on the kelong, so I packed lots of mosquito

repellent, a cap and lots of water because I heard it gets very hot and you could

easily get dehydrated. Oh, and a hand line, because we might have a chance to do

the optional Mastery Badge task and catch a fish!

Older OLs told us this part of our journey was known as ‘The Calling’, because we

learned that in Matthew 4:18–22, Jesus, when walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw

some fishermen and called them to follow Him. Why did he call fishermen, I

wondered? Why not teachers, or scholars or kings? Surely they had more power or

brains? But we were taught that fishermen face danger and risk daily. A storm may

come, the fish may not bite, and then they have to use skill and wisdom to survive. If

everything is laid out on the table, where’s the challenge? When we reach people for

Christ, they aren’t always easily found. And neither do they come to us. But we have

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to go to them, to the sea, using the net of the Gospel to bring them safe and sound

to the shores of heaven.

On our first night, there was the Rite of Passage, and everyone but Samuel took part,

because he had only joined two months ago, and still hadn’t passed his memory

verse test. We were each given a candle that was lit by our commander and sat in a

circle on the open deck of the kelong. We were told to meditate and listen for a

while. What I heard the most was silence. There was no music, no traffic, no blare

from televisions. We sat and stared at our own flickering candle flame, a fire that

was meant to symbolise our personal desire to follow after the light of the world,

Jesus. After some time, our commander read the story of Jesus calling the disciples

to us again, and then asked us if we wanted to follow Jesus, to become a fisher of

men. One by one we said yes and blew out our candles. We slipped out of our

sarongs and singlets, and, wearing only our trunks and a headlamp, we dove one by

one into the water to find a shiny coin. The water was dark, deep and very cold but

we had to persevere to find this ‘pearl of great price’. This task was inspired by the

parable that Jesus told in Matthew 13:45–46. One of my friends, Aaron, couldn’t find

it even after three tries, and he really wanted to dive again, but the commanders

wouldn’t let him because he was exhausted. He fell asleep crying, because he

wouldn’t receive his First-Class badge like the rest of us.

The next day, we left the kelong behind and took a field trip to visit the Hang Tuah

Memorial Museum in Melaka, where we would spend our second night. Hang Tuah

was an Orang Laut who lived in the 15th century. He was a great warrior; humble,

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cunning and resourceful when fighting against the armies of Siam or duelling

Javanese pirates off the coast of Melaka. In fact, we regard him as our ‘spiritual

father’ despite the fact that he was a Muslim. We believe that he carried the seeds

of greatness that transcended faith and serves as an example of servant leadership.

So, we eagerly read the stories of his exploits that were displayed on the walls of the

museum.

One of the most important objects in the museum was a replica of Taming Sari, Hang

Tuah’s keris. A keris is a double-edged dagger. According to historical documents, his

dagger was forged from 20 types of iron. As long as Hang Tuah wielded Taming Sari,

he was invincible and undefeated in battle. The highest badge that we could receive

as Orang Laut was a Warrior badge that featured a replica of Taming Sari. The only

person we knew who had one was our Outpost Commander, and he only put it on

during very special occasions. In order to receive it, you had to kill a wild boar

singlehandedly, something that was illegal in Singapore.

But of course, the laws of the church and the Orang Laut are based on eternal,

higher commands than the temporary laws of our land. But we never talked about

these holy laws to non-Orang Lauts. They were a secret, something we shared

through stories of our heroes, in the same way that Jesus revealed the kingdom of

heaven in parables only to his disciples.

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The Tunnel

Excerpted from Burning Mickey Mouse: A Memoir, unpublished

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Is it true today that when people pray We’ll see dead men rise, and the blind set free Yes, it’s true and I believe it I’m living for you

from History Maker, by Delirious

Sometime in December 2005, when we were gearing up for Christmas, we received a

disturbing text message that quickly made the rounds in church. A had passed away.

A was a young man, freshly graduated from university and ready to start work as a dentist.

He’d fallen in the shower, collapsed from a brain aneurysm that had been triggered by a

rare condition that he had had all his life. He was only a few years older than I was. All of us

gathered in church, distraught, unsure what to do. We only knew that we had been urgently

summoned there by RW.

In church, we looked around, stricken by grief, thinking of A’s younger brother. Both

brothers were drummers in the worship team and they were two of the nicest guys I knew.

Down to earth, always willing to help and incredibly ‘Christian’. RW paced up and down the

stage, seething. He was furious that A had been taken in this way. “It wasn’t his time to go,”

RW pontificated. The devil had somehow slipped in and pulled him away before his work on

earth had been completed. RW wanted to stage an intervention, to go to the hospital and

pray for him to be raised up. But it wasn’t possible, the body had to go to the morgue

before being embalmed and sent to the funeral parlour. Besides, we could scarcely believe

our ears. He wanted to do… what?

Raising the dead to life has long been seen as the feather in the cap for the Campground

Revivalist, that particular brand of evangelical preacher who isn’t content to call down fire in

their own church, but sees it as their calling to bring it to the world, much like an

undiscerning plague of locusts. And the generals of the faith, those who, like Jesus, raised

men from the dead, were people like John G Lake, Oral Roberts and Smith Wigglesworth.

RW had graduated from Oral Roberts’ university, so he was very well schooled in the

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theatrics of this practice. None of the aforementioned preachers had a verified claim upon

investigation, yet the rumour persists, becomes truth and then passes into belief when

repeated over and over again. Jesus supposedly raised three people from the dead: a

synagogue official’s daughter after she died of a fever; a young man who was being carried

towards the cemetery; and, most famously, Lazarus, brother of his good friends Mary and

Martha. Lazarus had already been dead for three days before Jesus arrived and told him to

come forth from the tomb.

Not to be outdone, Smith Wigglesworth, who died in 1947, claimed to have raised 14

people from the dead! 14! That’s an entire soccer team. Plus three substitutes. They could

have formed Resurrection United.

Catholics and Anglo-Catholic denominations celebrate All Souls Day, a day of remembrance

for those who have passed away but are still in purgatory for their sins, requiring the prayers

of those still on earth to get them out of jail and into heaven. This immediately follows the

feast day of All Saints Day, which celebrates the faithful who have made it into heaven. And

the Chinese observe the Qingming Festival, a day set aside to sweep their ancestors’ tombs

and pay their respects with the deceased’s favourite food. Paper money is also burned to

ensure the dead are not lacking anything in the afterlife. Both of these practices have at heart

an acceptance that death is the next stage of the soul, and that it is strictly one-way only.

But RW didn’t believe in those practices. Rather, he was schooled in faith healing and the

laying on of hands to be a conduit for the Holy Spirit to move in mysterious ways.

And he could not accept that A’s time had come. No. He asked the church if they were

comfortable to try to raise A from the dead at the wake. He did not make it mandatory.

Some people excused themselves. My parents and my younger brother weren’t onboard

with the idea. But I was. Why? I was fired up with the possibility of seeing a miracle. Besides,

RW reasoned, there was nothing to lose, was there?

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In 2019, Twitter was abuzz with #resurrectionchallenge, a hashtag that started trending in

Africa after Alph Lukau, a South African pastor, released a video portraying how he had

raised a man from the dead. It was quickly exposed as a fraud, a poorly done one at that.

And instead of raising the faith of others, it raised laughs, with people making their own

parody resurrection videos. It is admittedly a lot harder to make claims such as these in the

social media age. But beyond that is the worrying persistence of this doctrine, not just in

Africa as a legacy of the excesses of John G. Lake, but back in America as well.

In December 2019, two-year-old Olive Heiligenthal stopped breathing suddenly and passed

away. Her mother, Kathy, a worship leader at non-denominational Bethel Church in

Redding, California, which has come under criticism for a variety of excessive spiritual

practices, rallied the church to pray her back to life. There are videos online of her leading

the congregation in singing, over and over, for Olive to return. She wrote on Instagram, “Her

time here is not done, and it is our time to believe boldly, and with confidence wield what

King Jesus paid for.” Olive did not come back to life.

Most Pentecostals disbelieve that the miracle of resurrection is something that existed only

within the Scriptures and is no longer applicable today. This apparent paradox comes up

against the belief that God is in absolute control of every situation. If he chooses to take

away life, we have to accept that it is His will. To question that is to challenge him and that

was what RW was doing. But back then, those of us who said yes to his madcap request

were caught up in the idea that this was how we would put our faith to the test. It would

make for an amazing testimony on our future mission trips.

Death in the world is not something to be denied, it is the valley after the mountain’s peak,

the eternal shore after the long boat ride. But Christian theology defeats death, which is

seen as the consequence of sin and therefore something negative. So many Christian songs

sing of being triumphant, of overcoming and receiving eternal life. But this desire to

resurrect the fallible body when the eternal soul has moved on seems to be at odds with the

promise of the far better deal of eternal life.

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A distinction should also be made about the kind of resurrection that Jesus himself

experienced versus the garden-variety type of resurrections that he performed. The Greek

word anastasis, “full restanding”, is used to describe Jesus’ resurrection; from fully dead to

fully alive. The other three resurrections that Jesus supposedly performed are described

with the word egersis, which carries the sense of waking up, implying that the three people

were asleep and had been awakened. But they were not given eternal life, they were not

delivered from death, unlike Jesus. Eventually, Christians will all achieve anastasis.

According to Luke 20:35, “those who are accounted worthy to attain that Age, and the

resurrection (Anastasis) from the dead, … cannot die any more, being children of the

resurrection”. Like Jesus, they will be given a new body, one that has been declared

immortal, free of the sting of death and the hold of the grave.

In 2017, a poll commissioned by the BBC showed that a quarter of people who called

themselves Christians in Great Britain did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Given that

this is the central tenet of Christian doctrinal belief, this is somewhat puzzling.

Bart Ehrman, author of Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife talks about the arrogance

he felt when he received Jesus into his heart and became a born-again Christian as a fifteen-

year-old boy. He was convinced that he was going to heaven and equally sure that the

billions of others in the world were going to hell. He felt that it was his mission, therefore, to

convert them. Ehrman’s experience echoes my own formative years almost to a tee, except

that, unlike him, I didn’t go to the seminary. In his book, he observes that the belief that our

soul goes to either heaven or hell when we die is not found anywhere in the Old Testament

and was not what Jesus preached. Ideas about the afterlife have changed over centuries but

importantly, Ehrman makes the case that there was a time when “No one on the planet

believed that there would be a judgment day at the end of time”. And later on, others

believed that it did exist and so it eventually became orthodoxy, an infallible truth.

The idea that God is a merciful and just god just doesn’t square with the idea that someone

who is a sinner will be punished by him for ETERNITY. There’s no end point to the suffering?

It just goes on… and on? In early Christian writing, the idea of hell as an imagined place of

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punishment first arose not so much as an actual physical place but as a way to push people

to believe in heaven. Because eternity is a long time. Hell, it’s beyond time!

What did RW believe? I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps that A was in limbo, in purgatory,

though not because he still had some sins on his account. Nope, that wouldn’t fly. Because

we would then be praying for him to open the door to enter heaven, not the door to come

back to earth.

A small group of us showed up on the second night of the wake at the funeral parlour along

Lavender Road. This was a multi-storey building that held a number of funeral halls. The

funeral parlour is an efficient means of holding a wake, unlike the traditional practice of

holding a funeral wake under HDB blocks, in the void deck. Open to the elements and

strangers, relatives would often have to pull a night duty shift to keep the dead person

company and prevent something untoward from happening. At the funeral parlour, one

could simply leave and the staff would lock the room behind you.

When we arrived around 11pm, we occupied chairs that had been laid out earlier for a

church service. A’s younger brother had brought his parents home. He would return later to

join us. His parents, who didn’t attend our church, came from a more traditional Methodist

church and didn’t really approve of what we were doing. I am pretty sure that RW didn’t tell

them what exactly we were going to do. The emotional upheaval and hope that was being

drummed up by those of us who were there was palpable. The few remaining friends and

relatives who were sat at other tables gave us odd stares, because we were quietly praying

in tongues under our breath. We must have looked serious and a little bit insane. Or maybe

just seriously insane. Eventually, everyone else left, and it was just the History Maker

faithful, ready to make history. A’s younger brother came back and we began.

RW first asked us to gather around the coffin and stretch forth our hands to beseech God to

bring A back to us. Some people actually physically laid their hands on different parts of the

body. We prayed for him to return fully healed and whole. We sang, we cried out in English

and in tongues, we chastised the devil, we sank to our knees, we prayed until we were

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hoarse. And then, when nothing seemed to be happening, we went quiet to try to hear

what God was telling us.

And this was when, I swear, I had a kind of vision. Today, I’m convinced it was just my

imagination telling my Charismatic mind to give it up, but back then, I was sure that God had

given it to me. I saw A, hale and hearty, walking down a tunnel towards a door. This door led

back to earth, to us. If he opened it and passed through, he would wake up and be among

the living again. I was sure of this. He put his hand on the door handle, then paused. He

looked back. At the other end of the tunnel was a blaze of light, too bright to make out

anything beyond. And again, I was convinced that this was the glory of heaven. A had been

drawn from that place of glory through the Liminal. He had come because we had called him

through our prayers. And here he stopped. With what I described to the others later as a

wistful smile, he shook his head slightly, turned and walked back down the tunnel, back into

the light. I didn’t need to hear him speak to know that he didn’t want to return to his failed

body when he had already transcended to eternity, or whatever version of heaven I had

thought I had seen.

RW called a stop to our attempt after a couple of hours. When he asked if anybody had

received a word (from God) or some kind of vision, I shared what I had seen. And that pretty

much concluded our resurrection escapade.

I wrote a lyric about this episode a few months after:

Raising Lazarus Verse 1 far from the apostles just a bedtime story forgotten about the greater things You promised Pre-Chorus You healed the blind and the lame drove out demons, woke the dead

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Chorus Where is my hope, where is my trust Where is my faith, where is my God Raising Lazarus, raise a man from dust Raising Lazarus, raise the faith in us Verse 2 Cross becomes convenience, Blood saves all of our sins Past the natural man The world’s waiting for change You healed the blind and the lame drove out demons, woke the dead Bridge Stand, believe Trust, His plan Rise, come forth, Live, again

At that time, I firmly believed that it was better to have tried and to have failed than to have

not tried at all. After all, what did we have to lose? The bridge of my song reinforces that

simplistic trust that embodied my belief. More than trust, it was a blind faith in the belief

that everything from the Bible could be transposed into life today. This rather nihilistic view

of an ‘all-or-nothing’ faith falls square into the Word of Faith Evangelical movement, of

which RW was a big fan. Essentially, the blessing of God empowers Christians to achieve

what the Bible promises. And this, taken to its illogical extreme, includes the ability to raise

the dead to life. But it wouldn’t be fair to lay the blame entirely on RW. All of us were guilty

of a lapse in logic. All of us ignored the grieving family and put our own exalted sense of

faith before the reality of the tragedy. A had broken up with his long-time girlfriend not long

before he passed, but instead of wondering how she was doing, we wondered how and why

she broke up with him. We turned against her, perhaps blaming her (though no one ever

voiced it) for A’s death. I am deeply ashamed of what I did that night and it is something

that I have carried around with me ever since. I only left the church two years later, but a

seed of doubt, a wavering of faith, had been sown by the failure to bring A back to life.

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Speak ® Oohlala! ® The Unfilling

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Speak

(after Vernon Falls)

don’t think says the American preacher

his hands stretched out, an open Bible

close your eyes, picture truth, unlearn

your mouth, let syllables spark to flame,

you are river ululating, trip-talking

like a child, wordless; understand

a single syllable is sufficient to

unlock the patient ear of God

believe there are rows of decoders

spitting out long-form confessions,

arrayed neatly on tablets, pleas

that no one but God can read

don’t stop says the American preacher,

believe worlds enjoin when you speak,

believe in this vocabulary of angels

with wings and things of glory

believe as you fall under the power

of devotion, untranslatable tremolos,

trembling mysteries of faith;

let the Holy Ghost haunt your tongue

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‘Oohlala!’ excerpt from Burning Mickey Mouse: A Memoir

Vernon Falls urged me to open my mouth and let the river of the Spirit flow. He told me to

start with a single syllable, and just repeat it, over and over. In time, he said, God will add

more words to your vocabulary. But you have to practise. And then you’ll be able to pray

entire prayers in tongues. My eyes screwed shut, I concentrated and reached for the first

syllable that popped into my head. ‘La.’ It seemed safe. It was musical, but not as silly as

saying ‘dododododododo’ over and over. Just to give it a bit of a twist, I launched into it

with an ‘ooh’ in front, adding a bit of punch and allowing the option of drawing out the

‘ooh’ into something more emotive. Oh là là! How French!

Oohlalalala

I stopped. It sounded… stupid. Childish. Meaningless.

Keep going, Vernon Falls urged. Keep going. You have to break through, keep saying that

one word God has given to you. Deep inside, I did wonder if God did give me that word or if

I had simply made it up. Nevertheless, I kept on.

Oooooolalalalalallalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalimalumalamalalalalalalalalalalalalalimalum

alalalalalulalallulalalalalalaaaaaaaaaaaoooooolllllaaaaaaaaaulalalallalalalilailulalilalulalilul

ulululululelelelelelelelleleeleleleleoooooulalalalalalallallaaallalalulalalalulalallalallalalaliliaaa

alullooolala

Satisfied, Vernon Falls proceeded to slay me in the spirit before moving on to the next

willing supplicant.

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The Unfilling

Scene: A young person, (V), comes to an unPreacher, (P), in order to be unfilled by the Spirit.

P: Child, why are you here?

V: I have come that you may remove the spirit within me.

P: Do you understand what you are asking?

V: Yes.

P: By the orbiting planets! Blessed is that which comes out of you and returns to the void.

How long, child, have you carried this within you?

V: For over twenty years.

P: And do you know what is in you?

V: A strange language, an unnatural vocabulary.

P: Speak, move, that I may understand.

V moves while uttering ‘U laa la la la lal shi ki ku ke ri an da, la lalalal, lu ma la ma li ma la la

la’

P: Who gave you this language?

V: I was told to open my mouth by a man named Vernon Falls, who laid his hands on me and

asked me to speak the first syllable that came to mind. It was la.

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P: Were you singing a song?

V: No.

P: Were you uttering a heavenly language?

V: Maybe.

P: How did you know it was heavenly?

V: This was taught to me as doctrine.

P: Did you believe it?

V: Yes, for many years.

P: So when this man, Falls, prayed for you, did this ‘la’ come from something inside of you,

or did something come inside you and give you this thought?

V: I… don’t know.

P: Could it be there is nothing inside you other than yourself?

V: Maybe. But I still doubt. Because I feel the safety net of belief is important. What if there

really is a heaven, and a hell? Better that I have my seatbelt fastened to some form of belief.

P: But who is right? Which religion should you believe? And if you choose one, which

denomination is right? For example, in the Bible, Revelation 7:4 says that only 144,000

people enter heaven.

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V: That doesn’t sound good.

P: Why should we assume that salvation is in one of the ancient belief systems? What if you

can be rewarded with eternal life for thinking critically?

She stops dancing.

V: I would like that. Will you unfill me?

P: Certainly. Repeat after me, the words of Madylyn Murray O’Hair:

“An Atheist loves himself and his fellow man instead of a god.

An Atheist knows that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said.”

Now, go in peace.

V: Thank you.

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Online Projects

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1. Far From The Plastic World

An autoethnographic journal created as part of the La Wayaka Residency (2019). This is

referenced in Volume 1 in A Different Kind of Exposure (pp. 170–177).

http://www.marcnair.com/publications/far-from-the-plastic-world/

2. The Unfilling (video)

An analysis and explanation of the video can be found on pages 223–227 of Volume 1.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i7jzow21v6u39vq/The%20Unfilling.m4v?dl=0