By Mika Salaí
A revelation to my people out there. My wicked heart thanks all seven points of the compass for leading me to you. My saints will forever be the outsiders. Without you, the trivial unpleasantness would be unbearable!
In my youth, I attended a Catholic grammar school in a tiny village. The nuns no longer taught at the former convent school and a nun of God only appeared in the classroom when the shortage of teachers could not be covered up by any other substitute. A priest held weekly masses in the school’s own chapel, at which we shone with around monthly attendance. While there are certainly institutions that enforce their education with a tougher hand, I consider this casual participation in Catholicism, of all things, to be insidious. Even dangerous for your own soul. At some point you realise that heaven and hell are not so clearly separable. They are both antagonistic accomplices that reliably shake hands, as day and night continually do.
The sin of the sinner
When I am asked today what influence my environment at that time had on me, especially the compulsory religious education, I triumphantly become a prophet: Do you know the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 7, verses 36-50? I can’t help but take a smug tone of voice at such elitist blasphemy. This one of my stories begins almost boldly on a hot summer afternoon; I’m in a place that hasn’t even earned its own postcode with its size. But that’s okay, after all, there are already too many borders in this country. I can still taste the stale air in my throat and feel the sweat on the back of my neck. We sat in class and discussed the anointing of Jesus by the sinner. Who was she? What had she done that demanded her ostracism? The answer to this seemed so obvious to me, you could actually think I was born with it. But everyone around me was at a loss and spun wild theories. Murder, espionage or perhaps witchcraft after all? Perhaps her behaviour was only considered sinful if it was measured against old-fashioned values – after all, sex before marriage is more tolerated in many Catholic families today than it was back then. But the teacher ruled out all these options one by one. His quiet insistence that he would let absolutely everyone but me have their say may have been didactically clever at first. Then at some point it became absurd.
The wicked word
The teacher was confronted with the fact that the only pupil who had been able to solve his riddle was by no means too shy to use the word whore. And that in his hallowed halls! I imagined how this scandalous idea accompanied him home. If there had ever been a chance that I wouldn’t dare, maybe just for his sake… it was now lost. After provoking me for the last 90 minutes, he would have no mercy. And rightly so, I smiled to myself. My joy was thieving, but all too honest.
The frustration in the room grew steadily and on all sides. Proportionally to this, his four walls seemed ever narrower, the stuffy air ever more sweaty. Tease & denial is all fun & games until a very personal limit of tolerability is crossed. After that, the prospect of redemption begins to change colour. When the lesson finally came to an end, we had all given up hope in our own way.
The depraved novice
Why did he even bring up this story if he had no intention of talking about the political contexts that proclaimed the sinner’s social status as a sinner? As if linking it to Catholicism would enrage this class to the point of mutiny. I couldn’t imagine that he seriously feared an uprising. He must have realised that I had told the pure soul next to me what this puzzle was all about. Had my indiscretion annoyed him? Or was the deliberate nature of my wording one taboo too many in the classroom?
My depravity is not as contagious as some people fear. At least those who reject it with a sincere heart are not so easily corrupted. I have already tried. However, I can live well with such rejection because it is tacit. Their faithful obedience causes no suffering, instead they simply keep their distance. They don’t go on modern crusades where they postulate with fascist ideas in front of abortion clinics. Only the lost and those who don’t yet know can do that.
Enlightenment
The rest of my lesser companions were both too exhilarated and too exhausted from the heat out there to continue fantasising about the questionable abysses of these strangers. They were probably already thinking about the water ice they were about to enjoy in the shade of the trees.
I no longer believed I would find my kind in this godforsaken place. Their mercy and tolerance is not measured by the number of crosses in each of their rooms. No matter how I looked at it, we could not be together here. In my paradise, inspiration abounds, everyone gets a glass, or better still, a whole jug. We feast and sin together, toasting to the splendour of our lives.
In a fleeting moment, our spirits met above the heads of the others in the room. The sinful idea of my liberation germinated in me. I recognised an opportunity to empower myself and others. Longing cannot describe the intensity of my feelings at the time, but perhaps this is what enlightenment feels like?