The Church In Kabul

Faith slips – and laughs, and rallies –
Blushes, if any see –
Plucks at a twig of Evidence –
And asks a Vane, the way –
Much gesture from the Pulpit –
Strong Hallelujahs roll –
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul –

- Emily Dickinson

There is a church in Kabul, Afghanistan. It has been there for years, alone in a country filled with another religion. It’s as crazy as it sounds. On my last visit to Kabul I went, feeling ridiculous and wondering what on earth this church was doing there, and why I had come to it. Both the church and I seemed to be standing out like sore thumbs, with no business being where we were.

Stuffed with too many other people into a little Corolla, I drove there through the criss-crossing streets, past the rubble that makes up the city, the refuse heaps, the mosques, the crowds of turbaned and cloaked men, the scattering of children, the flocks of women like billowing storm troopers in their burqas. It was three in the afternoon on one of the last days of Eid, and people were out visiting house after house in their finest clothes, drinking tea, eating sweets at the end of Ramazan. Everyone stopped to look at us. Too many Haradji packed into a car like clowns makes good feast day entertainment.

We pulled up to a gate in a wall like every other wall that lines the streets in Kabul, except behind this one was a church. From outside, it didn’t look like much more than the type of large house a small country would take as an embassy in the capital. It looked quite normal, deceptively normal. Walking inside was like going down the rabbit hole and popping up inside any and every church in small town North America. It had everything right. Pews that were too hard to go to sleep in and creaked every time you shifted off one buttock to let the blood back into the other one, hymnbook holders that banged against your knees, and those little holes for the communion cups worn smooth by the bored fingers of generations of children. At the front was an out of tune upright piano, and a pulpit with a microphone that distorted as much as it amplified. Because we were closing in on Christmas, they even had a little nativity scene, plastic gold.

So it wasn’t just a church; it was a churchy church. Smack in the middle of war-torn, bombed-out, identity muddled, blood-feuding, drug dealing, Muslim Afghanistan. I wasn’t sure how to act. I tried to be nonchalant, but there was nothing nonchalant about this. I went and sat in a corner. I like to keep my back to the wall in places that make me nervous. Church back home tends to jar with the rest of the world and weird me out enough. Here it was like finding a place that had somehow missed the apocalypse and was carrying on as if nothing had happened while everyone turned to mutants outside. I was having trouble reconciling this place with the streets I’d just come through. I should say that I never know how to fit in at church – I’m not very convincing. I always feel like running. The trouble is figuring out what to run to. Outside was the rest of Afghanistan and I didn’t really fit in there either. I was twice a stranger, feeling a bit panicked, and there was no place like home.

People were standing around, looking like the nice folk that populate most churches, except they were wearing Afghan clothes. Imagine Ned Flanders in a shalwar kameez and you’ll have a good picture. There were mothers with headscarves and babies. There were older kids, too. They were having a lot more fun than I was. A room full of pews is a great place if you’re a kid. They were running, jumping, hiding, chasing, doing everything but sitting nicely, which I knew was what they were going to have to do any minute, if my own childhood experience of church is anything to go by. Around me the grown-ups chatted amiably to each other about the things people chat about before church in Afghanistan, which is similar to what people chat about in churches back home. Pleasant, innocuous things, punctuated by broad smiles and absent-minded and unheeded directives to the kids to stop jumping off the pews. I recognized some people, but I couldn’t think of anything pleasant and innocuous enough to join in with. Plus, I had a feeling that if I spoke to anyone my voice would come out too loud and sound like a guitar string about to snap. So I fiddled with the hymnbook. I’d given up on nonchalant and was trying to settle for an edgy sort of cool. I ended up looking like I had a nervous tick.

Finally a woman came up, tapped the mike, and said a cheery “Good ing!” to everyone. The grown ups put an end to the pew jumping, people settled down in a chorus of pew-squeaks, and things started.

We sang Christmas carols I’d never heard before. There was a “sharing time” and a girl got up and told a story about meeting a taxi driver who asked her about Jesus and she glowed about what a great time and blessing it was. Then the preacher got up, in his three-piece suit, chin quivering with palsy, and delivered a message about the birth of Jesus. I lost track of it and came close to sleeping except that the hard pew kept me awake. Finally there was Holy Communion, brought to us in those chrome trays with the tiny clinking glasses peculiar to Protestant congregations. We “partook” as they say, put our cups in the little holes in the pews, sang Joy to the World, and shuffled out to chat in the parking lot.

The whole thing seemed … irrelevant. Outside, Afghanistan tumbled along seemingly unaffected by this little church in the middle of it. I started wondering about religious groups the world over. What exactly are they doing here? If the cultural context of Kabul made this particular congregation seem out of its element, it actually wasn’t any more so than any set of believers is out of place in the world that can’t comprehend them. Churches, temples, shrines, poking up from the crust of a world that no longer believes in heaven are as strange and mysterious and mad as bearded prophets who hear the voice of God on mountain tops or in caves, as wonderful and ridiculous as angels singing to the goatherds, as foolish as commissioning a kingdom to dimwits, stragglers, and prostitutes. Religion is not normal, it’s crazy, it’s a joke. Or a mystery. A church in Kabul may make little sense in a place where the empty space of a mosque would seem more suited, but let’s not fool ourselves. A mosque in this country, in this torn up world, is just as out of place. Religion will always sit a little uneasily while it sits on earth. Mosque, church, synagogue, or hillside shrine, it is a reach in the darkness, a blind, hopeful groping for more than what we see, more than this life in ruins.

The rest of us force ourselves to just believe our eyes and accept the world as conclusion, leaving such incredible stretches of imagination to children and saints, telling ourselves we’ve grown out of all such dreaming, that we are hardened and wise. I have made myself like this. I have educated and socialized and rationalized the dreams out of my soul. I have, at times, joined the haughty elite that laughs at such silliness as this church in Kabul. But it never works. In the breath after that laugh there is a hollow space that nothing on earth will fill.

My mind still reels at the idea of a kingdom like heaven, and reels even more at the idea that a quaint little church like this one, carrying along in Kabul to God knows what effect, would be the harbinger of such a kingdom. It would be a joke, it would be a mystery, it would be unbelievable. But the secret of it is that this is the very thing I long for in spite of myself. I want the joke, the mystery, the impossible, because I want to laugh, I want to wonder, I want to believe. I sit there in my squeaky pew, and I want to believe in this place. I sit there and want it to be true, but this truth seems so far to reach. I do not feel at home here, not in these pews, not in this world. Home for me is in the Impossible, in the Joke and in the Mystery. That’s the best I can do for now.