One of the things we have to get is a desk for me. Have been checking different places for it, like Office Depot, and smaller furniture stores around downtown, and some bigger ones online. The quest hasn't been easy, as it never is when you are looking for a particular type of furniture, as the desk we are looking for must fit in a small place, so it can't be more than 50 cm (20 inches) deep, not 90 cm (35 inches) wide. Most desks available are computer desks, or ugly compressed cardboard desks with an unsightly little door for a tiny little... box-like... thing. Then, after checking a rather expensive furniture store, I decided I'd love to have a secretaire desk. I imagine this type of desks would be easier to keep clean and organized, but also they are supposed to be actually rather small to beging with as at least half the writing surface gets out of the way when you fold up the lid close.
Without a desk life is quite uncomfortable. No place to put down my bag when I get home, no place to dump shopping bags, place keys, lay down the mobile phone, put on the laptop or write letters. Would you imagine that desks can be that important?
At one of the furniture stores I visited - where the desks were rather cheap and shabby, and not in the good sense - I found a cousin on mine working. It was weird, because this guy has been having a large and disconnected number of odd jobs. He used to work at a private bank selling credit cards, worked at a greengrocery among a lot of other jobs I can't recall. Finding him on a Saturday morning in a cheaper furniture store was indeed strange. I wanted to keep it concentrated on the tasks - get me the desks - but he started talking - or rather shall I say, explaining his being there - going on about how he had been there for a week and a half, and already felt unhappy with the job. He actually said that "oh well, every new shoe hurts in the begining". Let's not go into how actually at the begining of a new job you are wide eyed and excited and only later on you find out the little bad things - if there are any.
My cousin is one of those people who - by some strange reason - has had no luck in his life. He changed his career at the university several times (he says now that he has studies in teology and something about composing music), then got married and had two children, for whom he had to start this chain of odd jobs to be able to support them. Then he got divorced and continued his odd life. He's one year older than mine, but his eyes and face are so tired as if he had rolled in at least twenty extra years. His words quickly rolled down towards religion, asking me "what am I now", since he was sure I had stopped being Christian several years ago. I still believe he must have confused me with someone else, so I tried to explain to him that I'm Lutheran, but he insisted, so when he asked me where did I go to church in here, I told him that in Costa Rica on Sundays I go to yoga, and he hooked on that with a line I have heard before by second hand sources, but never thought to be real. He said that he was okay with the exercise part, but wasn't okay with the meditating, because true Christians only meditated on the Bible (he said The Word). Silly me, I tried to explain to him, that I have been researching religions different than Christianity, and that actually there's no evil in them, and there's something to learn of all of them if you are just open to see them for what they are and not for what you imagine about them.
He launched then on a rather extremist speech, pushing the view of the Punishing God and how that was the only right way to live. I remembered the position of my grandpa has on the matter, how they push this idea that God demands you to become His slave in order to please Him, and that only that way can you be truly free. I don't know if it's just me, or if you can seen the contradiction in this: "become a slave (or servant) and live a strict life of virtue and staying within the narrow and dated rules of a religion, and then and only then can you become free".
Thing is that what's offered is a trap. When you give up everything about yourself, about your life, about your decisions, live in fear of a God who though it's supposed to be all love, He seems to love you only when you do only and exactly what He wants, even if that goes against your own nature - the nature He gave you - for other wise He'll hate you and never forgive you. Say what you want, this in itself is also a big contradiction. Anyway, in order to be free in this view of Christianity, you must make this "god" (I believe God to be a God of Love, perfect and consistent, so He would surely waste no time hating people, nor would He give people a given nature only to demand them to change it. I mean, come on! How could MEN fight against what GOD has made?), you must surrender. However, hoy can you be free while in abyect servitud or slavery? You can't. What's offered is to have an excuse to dodge responsabilities. When you give up, and concentrate only on keeping restricting laws (and bitching about those who don't), then you don't need to take responsability on your own life and how things happen because that's all "God's will". There's no need to fight, no need to struggle, no need to actually seek to be happy (nor like there's any actual way your restricting rules allow you to be happy), and all that is on God.
My cousin reminded me of that, and his words didn't fall far from that path. Has plans, plans to make music, create a church, and for that he needs money, and gets it from his odd jobs. His face is smudged thick with disappointment in life, but he claims to follow God, a God that's hardly God, but a Holy book, a Bible, an idea framed by a religion twisted out of its purpose by the wicked arm of a Church that sanctifies itself and raises itself to be god in place of God. Does this makes him happy? No, but it makes him feel less guilty for not taking the control of his own life and making something lasting, something productive out of it.
I wonder why it is that people often seek religion to have something that excuses their life incompetence, their laziness, their procrastination, their lack of will to actually live their lives, be responsible for their own circumstances and face them. Churches build upon the misery of people, and make sure to keep them miserable just to keep them coming. Like crack, or a bad prescription drug scored on the black market, they are an addictive, destructive force that traps people in false hope and dispair, preaching about a god they make unreachable, unpleasable, like a carrot before a donkey. Is this God? No, it isn't, but hopeless people who are not willing to take responsability for their lives and make their lives happen, don't care, as long as there's an excuse for their misery, as long as they can be tricked into believing that all this suffering and misery actually makes them better, and that it "fills them with joy".
I pity my cousin and people like him. It's never late, and though despair can hurt, desperation can bite, all you need to do is to get up again, look at what you want to achieve and make it happen. It can happen, even if you must retry over and over, it can just happen, if you make it happen.
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