When I was small, I thought God spoke Afrikaans and the Afrikaners were the chosen people. This simple truth was evident in the fact that The Bible was written in Afrikaans and the Bible is the word of God so you can’t argue about that. We were the people, the preferred ‘Volk’, finish and klaar. The word ‘Israelite,’ as used in the Bible to describe the preferred group, was a mere matter of history, myth and semantics. I understood the word to be an amorphous concept that had no physical time, place or shape. The Israelites were the good guys, that was the most important thing. They were the winners, the anointed, the ones with hope and a powerful god on their side.
The Jews who lived next door to us were as far removed from the Hebrews in the Bible as the Greeks with the Fish & Chips shop on the corner were from Socrates or the guys who built the Acropolis. They were diluted forms of once great originals and we had risen in a pure form to become the current elected representatives. God had come up with a new and improved version. If you needed more proof just look at what happened at the Battle of Blood River, not to mention the fact that we took the country from the nasty Romans, I mean British, during the Boer War and when we became a Republic in 1961.
Dominee
I can’t recall a Dominee or a leader in the Voortrekkers specifically telling me these things that overtly, but that is how I oriented myself in the world. To be clear, we were explicitly told to not imagine God in a specific form as that would be a sin. God was a blur. That is what made it such a powerful concept. He is everywhere but you can’t see him. Just believe that he is there. He is a fog, an intellection, a vagueness – but he can crush you or lift you, so you want him on your side. When overwhelmed by confounding notions, we take mental shortcuts. Axiomatic thinking provides solace: God is good, God is in us, and God is on our side*. (*Terms and conditions apply; read the Bible for a full list of exclusions and more details.) The more confusing a construct, the more clear it becomes if you just accept it. It’s a great trick if you can do it.
Jesus was an easier concept to give a shape to, as he was presented to us as a beautiful young man in a white robe and flowing locks. We saw this with our own eyes in the illustrations in the Kinderbybel. While historians cautioned that historical Jesus much more closely resembled a young Yasser Arafat, we scoffed because the pictures in the Children’s Bible were very well done and had a lot of detail.
There was a lively debate about whether Jesus was still returning, never left or was already back, walking amongst us. I recall sitting on those cold, hard wooden church benches and slowly looking around as far as I could to see if I could spot him. I tried to appear unsuspicious but I probably looked like that head-rotating child in The Exorcist. Even in my young mind, it would have been a stretch if Jesus appeared in an NG Kerk in Germiston, but you never know. If he was walking the earth, he would be an alpha male. An apex persona. That would make him Afrikaans surely? He might wear one of the more expensive Safari suits. A rugby player, maybe. What if Jesus was already playing for the Springboks? If he was, I hoped he wasn’t gorgeous Gerald Bosch, the famous Springbok flyhalf. I was in love with Gerald Bosch, and that would make it a terrific moral dilemma; one is not allowed to be in love with Jesus. Moreover, I was also confused about my feelings about Gerald Bosch, to be honest. I was torn between wanting to be secretly coveted by him and wanting to be him. I used to take my brothers’ rugby ball, kick it and tackle my own shadow in the backyard till my knees were grazed and bloody.
Dare
You would not dare talk about such things, of course, it would be blasphemy. Can you imagine the Exorcist child asking the Sunday School teacher to consider that Jesus might be manifesting as a small, rugby-playing fiend chasing itself around the mulberry tree? Perplexing thoughts become spectral projections in a metaphysical mist. This fog is what gives religion, culture and ideology its power because you don’t know you are in it.
I wonder if today’s fiery dinner-table polemic about the current Israel/Palestine flashpoint is, in essence, any different than the rationalisations I weaved as a child. I am asking because friends and colleagues are evangelical on this issue in a way they were not during the Russia/Ukraine conflict when the latter is arguably more significant. More annoyingly, they feel entitled to pressure me to ‘pick a side’, which I won’t. People who a few months ago could not string together three coherent sentences about this long-standing and complex struggle now strut around with the sense of purpose of the one who has personally been given the task to blow the bugle that will bring the walls down.
Plato said our reality is a dim shadow of our essence. Jung explained that the subconscious and archetypes rule our logic and behaviour. Abstractions are often more real to us than reality. We don’t orient ourselves in the world empirically. Psychologists, neuroscientists and artificial intelligence engineers are realising that facts are the servants of narrative. No matter the evidence, we tend to propel it into a form that tells us where we fit into the story.
Influential
If it is true that people who grew up with the Bible as an influential scripture are now merely projecting themselves onto the framework of the greatest book ever written, it would be the most natural and human thing to do. It’s goodies vs baddies, cowboys vs crooks and nobody is ever the baddie or the Orc or god forbid, a poor Philistine. We all replay the hero’s journey in our own lives and watch it over and over again on the silver screen and other peoples’ wars.
Life is hard and complicated. Pray that you don’t end up a Hittite or Canaanite in someone else’s story, because people, at some level feeling like incarnations of the Israelites, will try to take your land and subjugate and humiliate you because their god promised it to them and they have a divine right to do it.
Amen.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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