----Some personal thoughts about the self, love, and God

I am not religious. Not yet. I am not a true atheist either, for I have had so many things in my life that fell into place as if arranged by an invisible hand – so many that I can’t hold steadfast to the materialist principles that have clearly gone into the very core of the Chinese genome.

I have no religious blood in me. It’s family tradition, I’d proudly say, rather than widely denounced Communist influence. My mother told me that the closest experience she had to religion was when a friend took her to a local Christian church and asked her to worship God because He could save me. Mother went so far as to buy a copy of the Bible and put it under her pillow. The “Book”, as Christians sometimes refer to it, later was lost and forgotten in the vicissitudes of her life. In hindsight, she simply didn’t have what it takes to understand the Holy Scripture. But nevertheless my CP situations had become better over the years. What really saved me, in my half-atheist opinion, were my parents’ meticulous care and our self-driven persistence through hard times. Not God or other Divine Beings, but our selves only.

I’ve been studying English for more than ten years now. As a self-motivated English learner, I have always been interested in what we call western culture, a key element of which is of course Christianity. I read some Bible stories and some beginning chapters of the Bible. I became acquainted with Adam and Eve and, oh how could I forget the evil snake that made women suffer. (Sometimes I liked to entertain a thought that maybe it was God’s trick to rid humans of their wisdom, or His throne might have been threatened!) I learned that the son of God, Jesus, sacrificed his life for the salvation of his people and then arose from the dead. But it was all like seeing things through frosted glass. I would not “talk” to God when I felt helpless. I was raised to believe in the adage “God help those who help themselves,” which constituted the axis of my values that I have today.

One day about eight years ago, I tripped over and badly hurt my right foot when I was taking my regular walk at a park. As luck would have it, I had a facial stroke the next day. The effect was both hilarious and painful. If you look up at me, you’ll see something like a cartoon drawing of a smiling Obama that was hung upside down. Look down and you’ll discover a purple Chinese steamed bun that was originally my foot. Overnight my whole world shattered. The foot pain and the eel blood splashed over half of my face as an ancient Chinese remedy for facial strokes were a little too much for a well-cared-for little princess to bear. With my typing foot injured, I had to stop translating, one of the two things over which I have total control in my life, the other being … sorry, I can’t remember. Nothing I could do; nothing I wanted to do. I even began to question my existence, the meaning of my life. Why do I have to live? Do I live to work and love my family? If one day I was permanently immobilized like this, would I still have value for the world that I lived in?

To kill time, I began to listen to the audio version of a book entitled the Purpose-Driven Life. Slowly, the truths that the author advocated sank in. They calmed me. The book said that God created you for a purpose and it’s your lifetime job to find and meet that purpose. In retrospect, I think I should ascribe my recovery to my parents’ care, traditional Chinese remedies, and Tim, my American friend who stimulated my cell-regenerating process by announcing that he would visit me in two months (“Oh my God, I can’t let him see me like this!”). But the ideas contained in that book led me to a deeper understanding of Christianity.

Since then I’ve been praying in an atheist fashion. I pray for my family, friends, and the people around the world who I know are suffering. Sometimes I thank God for the good or bad experiences that I’ve had. But I would not like to pray for myself. Maybe I just don’t want to give up what I believe is appropriate for personal enrichment, i.e., taking responsibilities for my own action and inaction and ascribing them to none other than my own self.

Recently, a chance meeting put me in the Mingde Church – physically, of course. There I met some devoted Christian followers. They made me realize some of the impacts Christianity had on people’s minds that I had never anticipated. For example, on hearing someone broke his arm, I’d probably think, “Well, you fell and broke your arm. There’s nothing you can do to change that. Just accept it and try to live with the injury. That’s life.“ A Christian would probably say, full of emotion, “It’s God’s message! He wanted you to take a break from whatever you are trying to do! It may be a blessing in disguise!” Another may say: “God put you through this painful experience as a way to let you pay off your sins! You need to obey Him if you want salvation! God gives you an opportunity to redeem yourself because He loves you! God loves us all!”

Love is the essence of Christianity. For devoted Christians, God’s love is a fount of water that irrigates the dry soils of their hearts. The idea of “greater love” gives them more humanity. Nearly all the members of the Mingde English Bible Study Group I visited looked much more passionate than most Chinese non-followers I’d met. One “sister” even spent an entire afternoon traveling across the city to hand me a Holy Bible MP3 player, for which I was truly grateful. But I also discovered something else that seems more unsettling than the potential loss of personal responsibility.

What makes me feel uneasy is a common thought among Chinese Christians: I love God and praise Him and open my heart to Him because He can bring me peace and happiness, give me a sense of belonging, change my bad habits, hoist me out of my misery, send me into Heaven, blah, blah, blah.

Having written this much I can’t help but stop here to recall what I saw on TV last night: A mother starved her nine year old daughter to death only because the girl refused to go to school for some reasons that the woman was incompetent to find out. The most memorable (and ironic) line the mother in her jail jacket ever said was: “I loved her. I really did. All I wanted was her going to school and having a good life so she could take care of me when I get old.” I let out a dry laugh when I heard this.

As is known by all human beings, whether from the East or the West, true love is something you give other people before you without any added condition. For mundane, selfish souls that most of us are, it’s a very hard thing to do. If God really exists and truly loves us for our own sake like a young child for his mother, can we love Him back the same way, purely for the sake of Him? Probably not. We are hardwired to selfishness to pass our genes on in a harsh, resources deprived environment, like most other species. If we can’t give our equally unselfish love to God, then why do we sing praise songs and silently think, “What’s in it for me?”

According to the Bible, Jesus sacrificed himself for the sake of his followers. It is an admirable act, indeed. Now imagine this: Jesus tells you to go to hell to save the world. Would you do it? I’m sure you would be scared away by this order of God and would never want to hear the word “God” again, unless your sacrifice results in some benefit you want for yourself, whether its material, political, spiritual, or ideological.

Maybe you would argue that faith, like life itself, is a journey. You’d probably also cast me off with casual remark “nothing is perfect.” But remember the tragedy of that little girl I talked about earlier. It may be just one extreme case of selfish parental love, but it does show a universal humanity glitch: I love you because I can get what I want from you. Our love to God might not be any different at all. For me, it would make me feel like I’m a hypocrite rather than a follower of some purely good being that is supposed be treated as such, like a child.

Love in selfish terms can easily lead to manipulation. “You say you love me, so you must do this or that for me,” your girlfriend is whining. “God loves you, so you must do this and that,” a priest may claim. How far are we from being that evil mother who killed her own child? Will we “kill” God (or each other) if we, despite our efforts, can’t get what we wanted for ourselves? History proves that this uncertainty exists on many facets of human civilization: personal, political, national.

I’m not speaking against any form of spirituality or religion and I never will. I’m fully aware that “faith”, like a million other things in this world, may be a curse or blessing depending on how it is thought of and acted upon. For me, I’m open to all possibilities in my life. Maybe one day I’ll get tired of being my own boss and devote my self entirely to a Divine Being, to love Him and all His children. But I’ll try to make sure that I do that with a belief that love should be given on the terms of the loved, not the loving. I love simply because I have love and can love. Nothing more than that. But again I’ll have to go back to where I started and consider the following question. Do I love God the way He loves me?