Sunday church experience

Malagasy people love to ask as many questions about you as they can. Its not completely uncommon to meet a market vendor for the first time conversationally and have them ask, before they know your name, if you are married? Single? American? And what church you go to. It’s the Malagasy version of a dating service for foreigners. This information is then passed from that one vendor to as many as he or she can tell not only to show how that they have spoken to the local vazah, but also to spread word that they might be able to marry off a son before the process has ended. The conversations run a little like this, although of course in Malagasy… I have translated for your benefits. The key to the entire conversation is laughter, as is with so many conversations in this country.
Vendor :Hello! How’s your health?
Me: Hello, my health is good. And yours?
Vendor: It is good. American yes?
Me: American! I work at the CEG teaching English and live here in Maeva. It is nice to meet you.
Vendor: It is nice to meet you. Already married?
Me: No, not married. Maybe someday.
Vendor: Someday soon? Why aren’t you married?
Me: I have to work here in Madagascar! I don’t have time for marriage.
This solicits a riotous uproar of laughter from any who have now stopped to overhear the conversation.
Vendor: You can marry a Malagasy man. (Here have this one.)<- optional and used only if her son is standing near by.
Me: No but thank you. <- at this point I usually walk away as I am saying it… the vendor and passersby start shaking their head and laughing and chattering under breath to each other and I move on.
I wonder how many hearts I have broken?
Another favorite conversation with the people here is religion. Protestant and Catholic are the dominant religions on the island but a whole slew of Christian factions also reside here, including Pentecostal, and Adventist. A few Sundays ago I took the opportunity presented by one of my students to accompany them to their local church. I was hesitant at first wondering what the message I was sending to the community was but once she presented the “great cultural experience” argument I couldn’t refuse. I headed off with her mid-morning for a three hour church service at the local Pentecostal church where her father was a Pastor. I got to meet her whole family which was a great experience although a little awkward but her mother took to me at once and sat next to me through the whole service helping me find hymns, read the bible in Malagasy, and translate small phrases. Her most exciting translation, of course, being when a gendarme (local military presence) stood up and asked god for a wife then looked straight at me. She eagerly translated that for me four times although I had understood on my own, recognizing those exact words from so many other conversations. “He asked for a wife!” “Yes I know.” “No, he asked for a wife!” “Yes, I understood it.” “No but….” I laughed inside keeping my outward reaction to a smile only. Sitting down in the church before service was a happy moment for the locals coming for worship and each took the time to come shake my hand and greet me with the local greeting phrases and a large smile with a slight touch on the elbow as a sign of respect. My student was beaming and felt she had to let me know how happy everyone was to see me there. I just fanned myself in the sweltering heat that began to build in the church taking in everything around me, from the plush red velvet drapes behind the stage to the little fire bolts carved in the wood of the podium. The loud and very cheesy sounding music that you grow to love her in Madagascar and is played, over the capacity of the speakers for every event was on, of course and we waited for everyone to come to church. As the women came and greeted me they went to the front of the cement stairs, knelt on the cement floor and began to pray. Then they began to cry, and sob, and plead. At first I thought they were just inhaling deeply and making a wailing sound but in truth they were crying their prayers with such intense emotion I had to look away worried about breaching some cultural nicety. Their prayers came so fast all I could catch were phrases “I want to understand but I can’t” “Please help him” “I beg you” etc. On the cement floor, on their knees hunched over a cement stair in their Sunday niceties these women and some men pleaded for answers to any suffering they or their loved ones were experiencing.
The service finally began, those praying dried their eyes and I thought that part was over as a more private version of the prayer service, only I was completely wrong. The Pentecostal Malagasy service is singing, reading from the bible, speech/sermon saying hello to me every time, then group prayer in which the entire service walks up to the front of the room an claps as one person on the microphone leads with their own prayer. Everyone begins their own conversation at the same time, the crying begins, the sobbing begins and the hands go up beseeching the unseen. Some of the pastor’s helpers would place a hand on the face of a sobbing woman for strength or comfort or something of the sort. A woman next to me was crying so hard her entire body would start to shake and the tears would just run down her face. Then, once the prayer was done every eye would dry in the church, clothes would be composed and the process would start again. This happened four times. Each time accumulating into a prayer that was twice as intense as the one before it. Each prayer I would look around as discretely as possible to see the reactions of the nearby people and mostly the children, who couldn’t peel their eyes off of me as we stood there. I started making faces with one little girl in a purple frilly little dress and no shoes. She was so beautiful and would stare just as intently at me until I returned her gaze. Then she would giggle into her hand, shrug up her shoulders and do the little turn children do when they are pretending shyness. Each prayer she would get closer to me and each prayer I would make faces with her and a few other children who sat watching the adults with a mixture of wonderful expressions.
The fourth prayer was the accumulation of three hours of service and repentance and money donations. It was by far the most intense and the most emotionally charged and the only thing I can compare it to for me is a service I saw on TV in a religious studies class. I have never experienced the kind of emotionally powerful prayer as I did on that Sunday and when the Pastor’s wife placed her arm around my shoulders and whispered that she would pray for me I felt a part of me moved not only by her actions but by the motherly gesture that went behind it. Another woman, that I had sat to for the entire service, rubbed my arm (a very common touch in Madagascar between women who are friends) and smiled at me through her tears. A woman down the crowd was in hysterics, tears streaming down her face and neck, fists clenched in emotional fury, body rigid. On her head was the hand of the pastor’s assistant who was the counterbalance of not only her body, but of every signal she was sending. Her body was the strain waiting for reception and his was the relaxation you find in those who truly believe they are giving the touch of divine. I don’t know any other way to say this but only hope that you all can understand through an experience of your own. It is in my own experience with many different religions that both priests and priestesses administering any God’s divine grace on another seem to carry within them what can only be described as a personal strength and peace as they bestow it on others. That’s what he carried and with the same outward signs of strength and ferocity he was passing it into the woman a stair below him. It was an amazing thing to see and I had a very difficult time looking away.
When the prayer had concluded once again everyone was recomposed within a matter of seconds and we poured out of the church in the Sunday heat of the afternoon where a crowd quickly gathered to speak to me as much as possible before I ran away. I thanked the pastor and his wife for their invitation, which was countered with another invitation for a dinner that night that I had to decline but assured them that I enjoyed their service and their church very much and was very thankful for the chance to come and visit. They invited me back again and their daughter walked me to the market. It took me a few days to get the sight of the woman receiving the blessing out of my mind only because I have never seen anything like that before and because that was an experience I shall never forget. The energy in that room was electric and tangible and I wasn’t caught up in the words or the prayers themselves, just the people surrounding me. For those few moments there were no foreigners, there were no women, no men, and no people, just forces of energy, each one contributing its own to the environment we had created. It was a truly amazing experience that only increased the depth of the Malagasy culture. When we study cultures and societies in school we never omit religion, but so often as foreigners we are unable to experience the religion or religious practices of another culture. So different from our own experiences in our own countries these are difficult to gain access to but should never be missed. Maybe that is where our obsession with religious architecture comes into play. When you experience a religious experience with a foreign culture you gain an insight you didn’t have before into the people that were once there. As I have had my daily walks since that Sunday I have felt something a little deeper for the people I am living amongst. Their smiles, their lives, their way of surviving, have this undercurrent that we can find and share with any culture anywhere in this world. When I participated in this event, as I will find as I participate in so many others to come, I felt immediately drawn in and connected to this current that blended and runs parallel to the feelings of universal humanity that I already felt myself carried away on. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t my religion or my belief system that I was a part of; it was much deeper and farther than any words or structures we can impose on spirituality. While I said my prayers to my own divinity in that space with all the others I was a participant and willing released my own energy into the current that carried the room. This is the same feeling I had lighting incense at the Buddhist monastery in China, while saying a prayer for my family. There really is no such thing as isolation. You just have to teach yourself to let your soul do all the talking.