When I was summoned to the school chapel, my first instinct was to repent. “It has to be an exorcism,” I thought to myself. Yes, my mischief was often stealthy and teachers were in the habit of asking me to help them identify culprits for crimes I had committed. Still, I had been taught to know that omnipresence was one of many attributes of God. And now God had reported me to his messengers, members of the chapel committee; those self-important, self-righteous snobs (or so I thought) who walked with a permanent frown on their faces, judging us sinners. I prepared myself for the session that always comprised of a fit, deafening screams, unintelligible utterances and strange voices, all from one person. It’s the kind of stuff that caused nightmares, caused me to break out into religious hymns to scare the devil away, and sometimes kept me up late on dark nights pleading the blood of God’s begotten son, all the while quivering under the covers. The more I thought about the exorcisms at my school, the more I wondered if some of the students didn’t put their acting skills to use in these sessions. The chapel committee, particularly the intercessors, were an insistent bunch. They could shout for hours and make circles around the person that needed redeeming if that’s what it took to drive the devil out. The devil, it seemed, couldn’t be driven out without leaving its previous occupant exhausted from screaming and rolling on the floor. Therefore, it’s not implausible that sometimes students played the devil in order to quicken the process. All of this was running through my mind when I suddenly heard the last bits of a sentence being directed towards me: “and God wants you to be part of it.”“Part of what?”“Part of the chapel committee.”“Me?” “Yes, you.” I wanted to ask, “Which God?” but I thought it wise not to. Nonetheless, in a few days, and for fear of offending the God that a history of rewarding disobedience with fire, hailstorms and whales, I joined the chapel committee. The first thing I gave up was the right to look nice. Maybe yes at 14, there wasn’t much of me to show anyway but I didn’t appreciate having to trade my well-fitting jeans for oversized skirts. This enthusiasm about the decision to be shabby had been triggered by a message that had been passed on from God to one of the committee members; he wasn’t happy. God wasn’t happy with the way they dressed. It made sense that God would want us to be modestly dressed. And I would have overlooked this matter had it not been for the fact that since that day, I found myself in a constant state of panic. God was never happy. If I had feelings for a boy, then I was putting a human being above God. If I fell asleep while reading and therefore forgot to pray, I was idolising books. God wasn’t happy with the way I ate or laughed or talked or sang. I sometimes wondered if I was breathing in the way he approved. I finally realised why chapel committee members had no use for unimportant things such as laughing and smiling. How could we, yes ‘we’ (because I was now one of them) be happy if our God was never happy? Never mind that most of the directives were just imaginary.
