Letting go of God

Last Sunday afternoon I had a very pleasant experience. I went to a tiny flat in Wanchai. It was an eye opener. It was one of if not the best designed small flats that I have seen in my life. Each available inch of the tiny space is used: the space below the raised floors of the two rooms, the overhead space skirtng the walls beneath the ceiling, all the other space beneath the kitchen and bathroom sinks being used for storage, the spaces between columns,  as cabinets, shelves, as stores, with mirrors placed at strategic locations to increase the illusion of size, with narrow strips of wood nicely attached to wooden panels on the wall to break its monotony and to create a sense of texture. The color scheme is good too. It is predominantly white to increase the brightness of the space but suitably mixed with light greyish brown to give a sense of cosiness and a metallic look at the kitchen area in silver and black to add a certain "coldness" and "clincally clean" feeling by contrast to the warm glow of the wood panels.  The whole space is lit with lights on one half of one side of the long walls of the oblong shaped flat hidden in a lighting trough coasting the ceiling so that the light was shining towards the ceiling and then reflected back down, supplemented with one or two standing lights of burnished steel of lean streamlined look and white lily shaped lamp shades also shining upwards towards the ceiling. The entire space is neatly divided into 4 sections:  the bedroom and the walk-in wardrobe, library cum store room on the long arm of the L-shape and the toilet cum bathroom on the short arm. Then outside of the toilet is an open kitchen, fully fitted with hotplates, refrigerator and storage cabinets, spice racks etc opposite to which is the working area with a writing desk, computer and flat screen monitor. Then the open space continues towards the windows facing  the street below, with the "sitting room" area where squats a three seater sofa on soft brownish beige fabric of rough texture against the wall and facing the partition wall separating the bedroom from the "sitting room" area. To save space, one sliding door serves both as the door to the bedroom and the walk in wardrobe cum store room.  On the partition wall hung a flat screen TV below which is a shelf for placing DVDs which actually intrudes into the space under bed inside the bedroom! Really clever design! That precious bit of Wanchai real property belongs to a member of the UUHK, a late 30-ish female free lance journalist of Hispanic origin from Bronx, New York, writing for one of the local English language magazines who just rented it about half a year ago. She told us that the designer is actually a close friend of the landlord. No wonder so much thought was put into the 430 square feet flat. She simply loves the design. Who doesn't?

In her flat were 7 other members of the UUHK: an American professor of economics specializing in Chinese economy and teaching at the HKCU and his friend, a free lance PR consultant who gives courses to staffs of the PCCW, another management staff of one of the very active local NGOs in Hong Kong, a young officer of the Human Rights Monitor whom I frequently meet in my talks at the HKSHP and a senior Government radiologist and his wife. We were there to see a DVD belonging to the PR consultant. We had been planning to do so for quite some time but the details of the meeting were only finalized last Saturday! The DVD is one by a very famous American comediene, Julia Sweeney, who hosts the long running TV talk show ¨Saturday Night Live¨. The DVD was called ¨Letting Go of God¨ which traces her journey of discovery from being a young girl from an all Irish Catholic family from Spokane, Washington,  born, educated in an all-Catholic school to eventually becoming an atheist. It was really hiliarious the way she described how that happened, receiving rather surprising but non-committal but worldly-wise replies from her parish priest who was forced to tow the official Church line, with less than full conviction, as she began to ask certain embarrassing questions at various stages of her growing up and her encounters with certain Mormon proselytizers in business suits eager to save her soul for God.  She is a really good actress. I love the way she mimicks the facial expressions and the tones of voice of the characters she describes. Simply superb!

The following is her brief biography downloaded from the Internet.

Benevolent, sweet-faced, actress and comedienne Julia Sweeney, who was born in 1959 in Spokane, Washington, is normally identified with one single, highly unappetizing androgynous character. This sniveling, chunky-framed, springy-haired, plaid shirt-wearing, grotesque-looking character named Pat was the basis of many hilarious sketches that toyed with revealing his/her true gender. The oldest of five children, Julia demonstrated an early talent for mimicry but downplayed any interest in performing for serious college studies. She first came into contact with the show business arena following graduation. Behind the scenes she worked for five years as an accountant for Columbia Studios in Los Angeles. Developing the courage to realize her dream, she started taking classes on a whim at the famed Groundlings Theater. After fine-tuning her skills in improv, character development and sketch-writing, Julia was escalated to the big time when she was selected to join "Saturday Night Live" (1975) in 1990 as a featured player. Though she became a regular cast member the following season and found an instant audience rapport with her creepy Pat character, she was vastly underused, which seemed to be the case for many of its distaff team at the time. "Pat" would outshine practically everything else she did on the show, including her timid wallflower type named "Mea Culpa," whose character became the basis of a stage show co-written by Julia and actor/writer/husband Stephen Hibbert called "Mea's Big Apology" in 1992. Discouraged, Julia parted ways with SNL in 1994 and worked up a feature film version of It's Pat (1994) while her irons in the fire were hot. She co-wrote the script with Hibbert and co-starred with Dave Foley who played Pat's equally androgynous partner "Chris." The feature film did not generate great buzz, however, as it was basically a one-joke premise stretched to the limit. Following this and a few other insignificant character cameos on film, life turned extremely dark for Julia. Divorced from Hibbert, brother Michael developed lymphoma. She and her family vainly tried to nurse him back to health. Following his death, Julia herself was forced to fight a life-threatening illness -- cervical cancer. The whole process triggered an outpouring of writing which evolved into a hit one-woman stage show entitled, "God Said, Ha!" Applauded for its candor, wit and humorous handling of such painful subjects, the monologue debuted in San Francisco in 1995, and was playing Broadway by November of the following year. Preserving her work on film, she wrote and directed, with Quentin Tarantino in the producer's chair. While embracing this second career-defining moment, Julia won an Audience Award at the New York Comedy Festival in 1998 for her efforts, and earned a Grammy nomination for the CD version. She went on to complete a trilogy of personal sojourns. "In the Family Way" (2003) recounted her experience adopting a daughter as a single parent, and "Letting Go of God" (2004) traced her religious roots from devout Catholic to atheist.

I found that the kinds of questions she described in her inimitable ways were exactly the those that I asked and to which I have never been able to get any satisfactory answer. Although I have got  nearly conclusive answers to many of such questions in my almost decade long sporadic reading on the subject of my dwindling "faith", it is still a struggle for me whether it is necessary for me to quit the Church altogether or whether I would do more good to act as a bridge between the traditional "God" of the Catholic Church and other Christians on the one side and other world religions and atheists on the other. Whatever the ultimate course that I shall eventually take, we had an enjoyable evening chatting about the kinds of problems the other members of the UUHK, who are either practising or ex-Catholics or ex-Protestants or Buddhists, are facing in their respective quests for spiritual fulfilment under the dim lights amidst the clatter of forks against dishes of colorful enchilladas, quesadillas and the clanging of glasses in toasts of margaritas, sangria and beer with another of our host's female friends from Texas who had arrived in HK to visit her, at the attic of a nearby Mexican bar-restaurant against the mildly exciting salsa or rap rhythms of various Latin American Spanish songs in the background.