Father in Jerusalem: My father the minister had doubts about his belief even until his death. Blind faith is not a respectable position for me. Photo: Scott Peter Smith
It wasn’t long after finishing high school that I knew I was going to have to make some changes. I was given the official freedom by my parents to decide how to spend my Sunday mornings. I swiftly stopped going to church.
I had some friends there then and today some of them still are. It wasn’t about the people, but rather my shifting and developing belief system. At that tender age, being cool was important. Christianity was not. Independence was important, conformity to a structure was not.
The minister of the church just north of central Joburg, I knew, had his own doubts about his convictions. More of a theologian, a thinker and philosopher, less of a minister.
That was my father.
My father, and mother, were far more accepting of my questions and different lifestyle, even while I was still living in their home. To be fair, I was the youngest of three. I had two older brothers who smoothed the gravel road before me. I was making my own decisions and in that process I realised that subscription to any religion comes down to a decision.
No one knows anything. There are thousands of religions around the world, thousands already forgotten, thousands more to come — none of them guarantee truth, although we must concede there are similar perceptions peppered through them all.
All people need to understand and accept that there are all kinds of things going on around them that they don’t know about. At some point you need to admit you don’t know everything. But in turn, not knowing something does not mean that what you choose to believe is true. Not knowing does not provide enough reason to believe whatever you want.
My mother died long ago. Coming on 18 years later this year. By my father’s own admission she was far more devout and unquestioning of her faith than he ever was.
On her deathbed I asked her if she had regrets, if she would have done anything different, and she was simply content. She was all faith. She would say so a number of times in my childhood but it was never good enough for me. I wasn’t looking for proof; I was looking for more reason. A better reason than to simply believe.
My lingering wonder of an afterlife was exposed as I asked my father shortly after she was gone, “Where is she now?” He didn’t have a direct answer, surprisingly at the time. I remember him attempting to construct something along the lines of, “Depends on what you believe.”
The other end point is the same. Atheism is not the conclusion of reason. It is a decision one makes without having any more facts than a theist. Any rational person must come to a point where they see the scale tip, the cookie crumble, where they need to be honest with themselves and see the point where they can no longer rely on empiricism, where they need to dissect that which they were raised to believe, and see what they are choosing to believe.
A theist who declares “this is what I am choosing to believe” is a respectable position to me. Blind faith is not. Default acceptance of assuming you were miraculously born into the one true religion is also not.
My father remarried some years after my mother died. I was supportive of it. So were, for the most part, my brothers. Their wives, far less so. My new stepmother was Swedish, a Christian for the most part but a fundamentalist, a Zionist who had driven herself to Jerusalem in the 1960s and has never left.
She has the most beautiful home on the hill outside the old city and Jaffa gate. She has assimilated herself into the Jewish community and mostly has been accepted.
For a fundamentalist, debate, not even debate but conversation, is impossible. We clashed often. Not about religion or about the mishmash she had created for herself to believe, but rather because she could not see beyond it. Any world view and its actions were valid to her because God was on their side.
She often said that because I did not subscribe to her particular religion — whatever that was — that it meant I was an atheist. Often, for laymen, the argument for atheism is a rejection of a Christian idea of a god. This isn’t surprising; much of most religions can be relegated to the dustbin of history. I’d argue it is inevitable for all religions to change and shift and expand. The lingering pagan influences on Christianity are consistently swept away. And for reasons that can be only spiritual, the flat earthers persist. But here we are.
I took photographs of my father just after he died, not quite two years ago. Never intending to publish them, never intending to show them to other family members. The light of the setting sun fanned into the room. I had turned off the humming oxygen machine and a calmness was on my father’s face after a long illness.
I was alone with him and taking photographs is how I document my life, my experiences; a timeline of my life. This was significant to me. These pictures were significant to me. I also know he would not have liked me taking those images.
About two weeks later I was out with a friend, we started drinking, hard Covid lockdown had been lifted and some bars were open and, frankly, I needed to get out.
There was a bar, more like a shebeen, in a basement, under a Pep store in downtown Joburg, a short walk from my apartment. The weather was already cool, it was late May, and as we stood at the top of the stairs; the hot stuffy air wafted upwards to us. We looked at each other and asked ourselves if we were really doing it. We nodded.
Within moments I was being deliberately bumped into and rubbed, my assets located. As we ordered quarts through the security bars I felt a tap on my pocket where my phone was. Moments later it was gone. I knew who it was but in an environment like that trying to get it back would be impossible, and dangerous. I let it go. But then I remembered the photographs. Unique. Impossible to repeat. Gone. And I remembered how my father would not have wanted me to have them.
I contracted Covid. It forced me to stop working for two weeks. It forced me to sit and let the emotions of the last months well up. With no photographs. No digital memories.
My father wasn’t a prescriptive individual, he would never deem it necessary to impose an idea on what you should do or feel. At his own end, he wondered what a Christian actually was. This wasn’t a rejection but rather he let the questions that were always there come forward. After most of his life dedicated to a particular religion, even he wasn’t sure what to believe.
But that Covid over those days knocked me down, forced me to process. I felt bad physically and emotionally. I was questioning all aspects of my life — relationships, location, work.
Coincidence? Of course. But the rarity of these events, intensity of experience, timing and an open question of taking a photograph of my recently deceased father left me wondering if he didn’t have a hand to play. It doesn’t give me reason to assume spiritual interference but it gives me enough room to accept the possibility.
Be wise enough, I tell myself, to see a thread through it all, a commonality that can neither be denied nor verified. I’ve learned to be a little more humble and be open to the possibility of it.