John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
I am aware that there are those sceptics out there who believe that I make up most of the unlikely things that appear as gospel in this column. I can only say to them, “Keep enjoying the ride,” and I take refuge in the old maxim that says “the only true stories are the good ones”. Figure that one out.
My latest experience, here at the end of the second millennium, has involved close counters with various incarnations of the Supreme Deity and Its representatives on Earth.
Here is the scenario: I was at Johannesburg International airport early on Monday morning trying to board a plane (is this guy an airport freak? I hear you ask). I was talking to my wife on the cellphone, reassuring her that I was finally on my way after a wobbly start, when I observed to her that a small Tibetan monk has just walked past, wrapped in traditional black monastic robes, with thick socks and sandals on his feet. In the swirl of desperate South African travellers running late for business meetings in the far-flung corners of the motherland, and Afrikaans housewives relocating to the coast for Christmas with children and nannies in tow, he was something of an anachronism.
As I hung up, I noticed that there were suddenly dozens of the same types swarming all around my ankles, heading through the electronic security devices alongside me. As I got closer to the departure gate that led to my aircraft, I realised that they would all be accompanying me on the same flight to Cape Town. One or two of them were talking earnestly and in an unmonkish fashion on cellphones, and they were accompanied by a couple of dark-suited minders, also hunched over their hand sets. The minders had slicked-back hair and dark glasses. There was a sense of controlled wealth and power about it all, the monks (male and female) serenely unaware of fellow passengers, howling infants and grim-faced airport workers staring rudely at their fancy dress. The plane they were about to board was a mere functional necessity appended to the spiritual plane they were already on.
It was only on arrival at Cape Town airport, when I saw the hospitality tables set up for them, that I understood that they were delegates to the Parliament of World Religions that is being held at this time in the Mother City. They were part of the kerfuffle that has received most publicity because of President Thabo Mbeki’s apparent refusal to have a one-on-one with the Dalai Lama, also a delegate to this function, for political reasons allegedly connected with our diplomatic and trade relations with the People’s Republic of China.
The Parliament of World Religions is a curious idea. After I had basically finished the temporal business that had brought me to Cape Town, nothing would do me but that I should go and hang out at the Cape Technikon, the centre of the gathering, perched amid the ruins of District Six on the slopes of Table Mountain, and try to get a handle on what it was all about.
The registration hall was teeming with delegates of every conceivable persuasion, dressed in the various uniforms that were associated with their particular forms of belief. Some looked angelic, and some looked positively sinister. There were Indian Indians in psychedelic dhottis, Red Indians with beads and feathers, and everything else you could imagine, plus a lot of things you wouldn’t have imagined in your wildest dreams.
I stopped to chat to an elderly Irish nun from the local branch of Nazareth House. Like everyone else, she had a permanent, beatific smile playing round her face. I found myself sucked into the karma and smiled back, asking her what she thought of this gathering. If it was possible for all religions to speak with one heart, if not one voice, at a gathering like this, why the need for separate religions at all?
“Well,” she replied, “our Catholic Church is of course the true church, because it was founded when Our Lord was born in a stable in Bethlehem. The other religions you find split away from it because of greed and vanity.”
I didn’t want to get into a fight with a smiling nun on a beautiful day like this, so I didn’t attempt to start to complicate her serene world view by pointing out that Jesus Christ was a Jewish boy, that Judaism as a religion was a lot older than the Catholic Church, that Hinduism and Buddhism and a basket of other “traditional” belief systems had also been around for quite a few centuries, if not millennia, before the birth of Christ, and therefore couldn’t be dismissed as mere splinter groups that would one day see the light of day and come back to the true path.
So I nodded at her with my locked-on grin and drifted in the direction of a bright-eyed Buddhist abbot from the Zen Centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. She and a male colleague from a sister institution in South Korea were beaming at each other in the middle of the hall.
What did she think about this latest edition taking place in Cape Town? She smiled up at me even more brightly, if a little vacantly, and said, since it had always happened in the US till now, it was a good thing that it was diversifying into Africa.
I didn’t want to start a fight with her, either, by pointing out that Cape Town can hardly be considered to be in South Africa, let alone Africa. But it did set me thinking even more about this event and where it is located. If the gig had been held in Jo’burg, or even Durban, the monks, abbots, swamis, maulannas and shamans of the world might have been able to unleash that phenomenal smile-energy into an environment truly in contact with the forces of good and evil. As it was, their dazed and harmless beams were simply being absorbed into the generally stoned beaming that goes on in Cape Town anyway -the stoned leading the stoned.
Anyway, I left the place feeling better than when I had entered it, just from the vibrations of so many well-meaning souls drifting around the same confined space. It gets to be quite contagious.
And now, if you’ll excuse me (as Jimi Hendrix used to say), I must be on my wa- a-a-a-a-ay .