The God Edition: Prophets and Profits Deep down in my dark heart, I s

I am at peace with the knowledge that religions might not be able to provide the answer to what or who God is, and I am even resigned to the idea that I might never find anything. But I am happy just to keep on searching

There was a time in my life, and it was many years ago now, when I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour. I was 17 and hungover the Sunday it happened, and the church was of a kind I had never been to before: bass and electric guitars, keyboards, drums, amateur Christian rock musicians. And teenagers, lots of teenagers. Arms raised heavenward, obeying the falsetto-voiced lead singer’s instruction to “keep pressing in, press in towards God”.

It was in February, late summer, in Harare, and it had poured down with rain the night before. The green lawn of the old sports club, where the church had set up a marquee and plastic garden chairs, looked as though it been washed and rinsed clean. After we finished singing, a sprightly American evangelist stepped forward to deliver the morning’s sermon. I forget his name now but I remember thinking he had the kind of face, radiating power and prestige, you would expect to see in a high-end real-estate brochure.

In the end I can’t really tell you what did it. Possibly the remorse and self-loathing that follows a night of binge drinking: the Saturday before, out on a weekend pass from boarding school, I was literally blind drunk and remembered circling our house a few times in a cab unable to find it. In any case I felt myself impure, surrounded by all those sincere faces, and in need of forgiveness.

At the end of the service, when the pastor called on those of us who had sinned and wished to be led back to the Lord to step forward, I was among a handful of solemn, tearful teenagers who made their way to the front, stepping on the wet grass to the sound of hands clapping.

“God is celebrating, huh, people,” the preacher said, speaking excitedly like a game-show host when you have picked the right box. “There’s a party right now in Heaven for the lost sheep who have come back to the flock.”

And for a time I had come back to the flock.

God, it seemed, was everywhere when I was growing up. Across the street from us, in an enormous blue house, was the Apostles of Christ Ministries and, to the left, a much smaller, nondenominational church. At school, we sang hymns three times a week at assembly, which ended with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. And every special occasion, a wedding, say, or a funeral, was marked with hymns and prayer. For my part, I had no objection to all this, and it would be a while yet before I did.

I was one of those children you see sometimes on Sundays, parodying adulthood, dressed in suits and bow ties or in a shirt and trousers held up by a pair of braces. My family belonged to a small local congregation, which was old-fashioned.

There was stained glass, wooden pews and organ music dull enough to occasionally induce sleep among the faithful. My favourite part was going to Sunday school. I loved reading the illustrated Bible stories, printed in A5 chapbooks. By the time I was 12, I could recite from memory most of the canonical passages in the Old and New Testaments: the Sermon on the Mount, Psalm 23, the Ten Commandments, I Corinthians 13 — “if I speak in tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal”.

There was also a girl, Nyarai. We were the same age and our houses were separated by a thin web of streets. She had a round face, a set of perfectly white teeth, and dimples sure to leave any 12-year-old breathless. In my daydreams, I imagined us remaining chaste until we said our vows before the Lord, and later raising children.

I say all this to you now with a certain degree of embarrassment at how clueless and two-dimensional my vision for the future was. But it is also telling of what I valued. I prized nothing greater than to remain “blameless and pure before God”, as we are instructed in the book of Philippians, “shining like bright lights in a world full of crooked and perverse people”.

As a high school pupil, I began to drift away from the church, one missed Sunday at a time, until I had severed my connection. It was perhaps the most agonising period in my life. Though I never outwardly expressed this inner turmoil, my conscience remained unsettled, plagued with guilt and shame.

“We are never far from our nervous old mother, the Church,” says a character in Grace Paley’s short story, An Interest in Life, “and she is never far from us.” No matter how great the distances we may travel, we will always hear the faint echo of her hourly bells tolling.

The children of pastors, like Hollywood child stars, don’t have a great reputation for being well adjusted. They tend to veer towards extremes, either of belief or hedonism.

Pastor Ruth was no different. Her faith was rather severe. I met her shortly after I was born again when she appeared as a guest at one of our Scripture Union meetings. Thinking about it now, I’m struck by how young she was, maybe in her mid-20s, but when you’re 16 or 17, anyone not in a school uniform seems a great deal older than they actually are.

Pastor Ruth was thin and not very tall, and often wore long dresses that stretched down to her ankles.

For the short time that I knew her, I trembled at the thought of looking at her straight in the eye. I had seen people sway and fall at her feet after she had lain hands on them and I was afraid that, if our eyes met, by some miraculous power she would be able to see through me, to divine the secrets of my dark heart.

I attended a semiprivate all-boys school, hypermasculine in every respect, but I was never quite sure about the nature of my feelings for some of my schoolmates.

It was inconceivable to me then to imagine Pastor Ruth as having any sort of sexual desire, however latent. She seemed to exist on a different spiritual plane to the rest of us, beyond the sinfulness of the flesh.

“Remember brothers, when Jesus was in the wilderness the devil tempted him with bread, loaves of bread! And Jesus answered: man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”

She had once told us that after receiving a word from the Lord she had gone for seven days and seven nights without food or water and, at the end of it, Christ himself had appeared before her. Most people would have called her a fanatic and kept their distance, but I was not one of them. Put simply, I was in awe of her and everything she represented. I saw in Pastor Ruth the embodiment of an ideal I had been striving for all my life — purity.

In the winter, the Spirit spoke through Pastor Ruth and said we had to fast for 40 days. She called it the “Jericho fast” and it would be a test of our faith, and I suppose, too, our willingness to serve the Lord.

“Therefore,” she said, quoting from Paul’s letter to the Romans, “I urge you, brothers and sisters, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship.”

It was evening and we had congregated