the atheist and the rainbow

He is an quite an intelligent guy
my atheist friend, however,
when he sent me an e-mail with
a superfluity of quotes and
sagacious anecdotes on faith, I
knew that he was up to something deeper. There's
something in every atheist,
itching to believe, and something
in every believer, itching to
doubt. That is what my atheist
friend, let’ s call him Patrick, told me. When I first told him of my faith
in Christianity, I told him that I
was not a regular churchgoer
but nevertheless a staunch
believer. He quizzically looked at
me and asked me how that was possible. “How do you become a sailor without going to the
sea?” he asked, ostensibly to ridicule my philosophy of online
or telekinetic Christianity as he
called it. I did not have a better
answer than to slip open my
confused mouth and smile and
look upwards as if to leave it all to some unseen source for
clarification. Apart from his
heathen flip side that set us
slightly apart, Patrick is not a
“bad” person, whatever that means. Okay, I mean, he does
not steal anybody’ s maize nor uproot any country’ s railway. He is the quintessential modern
bachelor, except he lacks faith
and facial hair. Having grown up in a home
where church was encouraged
but not forced, Patrick had
attended Sunday school as a
means to escape the routine
drudgery that is school. He did not care much for the baby who
was rescued from the waters of
the Nile (even though he insists
that Migingo will not secede to
Uganda while he is still alive) or
his fellow escapist, Jonah or his part-time misbeliever Saul or
any of the other lesson-filled
stories found in the good book.
His idea of church was founded
on escapism. As a child, he used
it to run away from the chalk waving teachers and as a
nonbelieving adult, he uses
church to excuse himself from
work, to pick up potential
girlfriends and to escape paying
taxes. When he set out to find faith,
Patrick did not believe that it
existed, or that it could be
found. He set out on a faithless
mission to find faith just to
prove me wrong, and he almost did. Even though my non-
church-going self is not inspired
enough to speak for the church,
I went pious and waxed
philosophical how it took the
same amount of faith to be godless or a believer. As I spoke,
I felt wiser, better than him and
inspirational. This was my last
shot at the ghost of atheism
that had dwelt so long in my
friend. I attacked it with holy verses. I jabbed at it with
pugnacious prayers. I struck it
with pithy discussions. Eventually,
he (Patrick, not the ghost)
looked at me with dead eyes
and an unrelenting smile with one wave of his hands, dismissed
me and told me to shut up;
he’ d heard it all before. I faithfully obliged. With that, his journey to find
faith began, yet he still claimed
that we believers were not far
from being insane, if not an
outright bunch of ignorant idiots.
To my self-righteous self, Patrick’ s was an imbecilic quest to seek faith because he had
the strongest and unwavering
of presumptions from the
beginning that he was not going
to find it. Hoping to strike a pot
of gold, he followed the atheist’ s rainbow, up the arch and down the slope. What he
found at the end of the rainbow
was a goose instead, the same
goose that has been laying
golden eggs for him for six
years now. When I heard of his business ventures, I sought the
story of his journey. So, on his journey, he met all
calibres of clergymen. He told me
of men-of-the-cloth whose
clothes could feed him for a
decade, and of generous priests
whose food handouts made them hungry for more flock, of
flamboyant pastors who preyed
on his infidelity and threatened
him with horrific stories about
hell and eternal damnation. He
played the part of the confessional sinner and wept,
wailed and spoke in spasmodic
gasps and when he was ready
to enjoy his golden eggs, he was
happily baptized and trained in
the art of using the church as a tax-exempt ladder to social and
corporate wellbeing. He owns a church, not for the
faithful and not by faith, for
business. Patrick is now a
corporate pastor in Nairobi. It
has been six years since he
established his ministry, that’ s his goose. Even though he
dresses like the rainbow he once
chased, colorful suits and shiny
cars, his sense of the expensive
and tasty is inexplicably exotic.
His hedonistic indulgence in “things of the world” is well documented in his memory as he
told me of countless women,
businesses and families that he
had, in his own words, “torn apart”, he says this with a victorious smile and the
cockiness of a tall, dark and
handsome Luhya. From the
prohibited ivory to the rare
gold, the threaded linen to the
threadless satin, his world is a now a royal mix of soft and
shiny, illicit and legal and above
all a blend of faith and doubt.
He is still the same old atheist
inside, with a staunch belief in
the weaknesses of humanity. He professes to be a believer,
but only to his Christian
congregation whom he has a
blessed stranglehold on. Even
though his congregation is very
wary of his expensive lifestyle, inexorable girl chasing and
reckless drinking, the bon vivant
has a growing following in his
church; they follow him
wherever he goes like hungry
sheep would follow a grassy wolf. “They want what I have”, he tells me. “How do you live with all this, a life of lies and treachery?” I asked him. He smiled, looked
straight at me and with his fake
bucolic accent, he explained how
his calling to be an atheistic and
self-serving “man of faith” was nothing worse than a teacher
who does not believe in what
she is teaching, or a builder who
does not believe in the strength
of his cornerstone, or the
doctor who administers a drug while at the same time counting
the hours before the patient
dies. I looked at him, gave him a
sardonic nod and prodded him
on. “It’ s the same twisted thing my friend, you believe but
don’ t act, I don’ t believe but I act.” He told me as he rose to leave for the evening sermon
before the evening drink. "There is a thin line between
truth and fiction. This is that
line."