Faithful

During break time at school at the end of this past week two of my students approached me and handed me an invitation at an event. The details of the event were slightly unclear, but I got the impression that there was going to be a concert or show with various people playing music and/or performing short skits. I accepted it and finding myself with free time on the day in question (today) I headed to the address.
Imagine my surprise after arriving at my destination and climbing four flights of stairs to find myself in a kind of Sunday School. It was a Christian gathering, no questions there, with people singing praise and worship songs on stage while the audience - largely children - sang along. The songs were all in Chinese, though I recognised various ones through their melodies. Being an atheist I felt a little out of place. One of the students found me and after a short while I was introduced to his mother and we proceeded to chat until the songs ended.

What happened next was apparently what the invitation was all about. We were presented with a short play involving five actors and aimed at presenting a moral, as you would expect from a religious gathering. This was followed by a ten minute break and then another play, this time with four actors. I only understood bits of the Chinese, but as it was a play and aimed at a young audience I could guess just about everything that was said.

Looking around the room I saw something both alien and very familiar. The alien sense came from me being a foreigner viewing an aspect of a culture which has adopted a foreign religion. The familiar part was seeing a group of people gathered for religious matters. I once followed a religion, back in the day before I began forming my own questions and understanding of reality, and I know the comfort that people get from being dictated to and being relieved of the stress of individual thought.
But there was also something else I noticed. As I could not understand enough of the language, all the talking around me was reduced to white noise and I found myself analysing the situation. What I found compelling was the sense of community created by a group of people coming together to socialise through the medium of a common interest. Though I could fault them for choosing a religion as that medium, I cannot fault them on the joy and excitement they all shared in connecting to one another. It's a bit like gaming, in a way; a group of people getting together to have fun and to play around with some fantasy.