Peering across the divide - a few little notes on faith

I’ve wanted to write about faith since I moved in Indonesia. But finding words to talk about faith is difficult and feels fraudulent, like saying I love you just because someone else says it and you want it to be true.

It’s necessary to think about faith in order to understand this country; without religion, life here is confronting and confounding. Faith is everywhere, operating in tandem with every life experience, informing so much of everything that happens. Every day, no matter where you are, you can hear the sound of a nation of believers as they are called to pray. The faith of this country wakes you up in the morning with devoted humming that creeps through the crevices of your apartment.

Five things I have learnt about faith, from the faithful and the faithless:

1. Faith needs nothing earthly. Mosques are great empty spaces with shiny marble surfaces, where the faithful join together to bounce their prayers off the walls and hear them back again. Here, the faithful don’t require anything to help them believe. Their belief is bottomless and nebulous in its expansiveness; but hard-surfaced in its strength.

2. Faith is about being grateful and expressing hope and asking for help and saying you’re sorry. These are the things that people have trouble doing every day of their lives.

3. Faith finds meaning in the things that happen to you and gives reasons for the moments that bring joy or distress and provides comfort when the world is loud and unhearing. These are the things that people want from the moment they’re born.

4. Faith requires trust in the intangible, belief in the unfathomable and loyalty to something that is everywhere and nowhere. These are the struggles of life and have nothing and everything to do with a God or Gods. These things are hard for everyone, every moment, every day, no matter where they live or who they love or what they believe.

5. Sometimes it’s sad not to believe, but you can’t just choose to have faith. Sometimes it’s just too difficult to believe in things that you can’t hold in your fists or prove with facts.

I recently edited a report for the Indonesian Commission on Violence Against Women, about horrific human rights abuses against women in May 1998, when riots raged across Jakarta and other cities of Indonesia. Amid the chaos, mass rapes and other appallingly violent acts were carried out, predominantly against Chinese Indonesian women.

Editing the report was excruciating not just because of its content but also because it was so poorly translated – words had been changed from Indonesian into muddled English that tripped over itself often nonsensically. Every so often while editing the report I came across an indecipherable paragraph of translated English, and would have to refer back to the original text in Indonesian. Using dictionaries and online translation tools I constructed paragraphs – bundling words together like hellish building blocks to form awful sentences. Finally emerging with meaningful sentences like: the research indicated that mass rapes were conducted almost simultaneously, in a manner that was organised and widespread across a number of different riot locations. Going over and over the translation and hoping that I somehow got it wrong.

Almost at the end of the editing, I was finally presented with a gift. So Indonesian this is: to receive a small piece of clarity and beauty at the end of a dismal journey.

The final appendix of the report: the prayers. It was a strange thing, after wading through the report’s jumble of lost meanings, to find that suddenly everything makes sense in verses of prayer. Reading the lines of the prayers was like discovering the code for understanding the report – there it was tucked away at the back, only to be found by those who persevere to the end. This elusiveness of meaning is so typical of Indonesia.

It’s a simple truth: you will never understand anything about this pocket of the world until you listen to its people pray. In this land where everyone believes in something, it makes no sense to attempt to comprehend it without grasping the way its people believe.

In prayer, the translated phrases about May 1998 are achingly poetic.

The prayers speak of immaculate flesh with blood gushing all over; of sacred wombs, torn and tattered; of lives, dying and exhausted; of brutal, foul grips of anonymous villains. The prayers speak of tears that wither; they appeal for help to show truth as truth, and to give strength to Indonesia’s leaders who must scale their way righteously. The prayers ask that the souls of their loved ones may rest in Your Most Consoling Gardens.

And then, making the most sense of all:

We could not sigh our pains to anyone but You
... this misery is beyond our possibility

Indonesia is a collection of thousands of islands with lots of dark corners where unspeakable things are often left unspoken, where issues that might cause offence or distress are rarely confronted, where - only if absolutely necessary - hushed tones are employed to tenderly dab at awful things. In this world, there are countless souls who could not sigh their pains to anyone.

And from another world, the faithless are left to peer across the divide, struggling to deal with the miseries that are beyond our possibility.