Desliguei. This week’s Portuguese word. I heard it twice in two separate conversations I had on Monday, and then again on Thursday. “ I switched off...”A young guy in a park. Talking about faith and religion. And being brought up in the church, baptised confirmed, even taken to the Catholic shrine at Fatima by his grandparents. But then in his teens “Desliguei...” I switched off.
Librarian in the local library where we went to join. Said “you are missionaries?” (noticing what we had written on the form for profession). “I was too .... once. I was training in Rome ... to become a priest. But...
“Deslliguei...” I switched off. It was not the faith, or the theology. It was the control. The hierarchy. The sense that I was no longer able to think for myself. So I left it all behind. A long way behind.
And the interesting thing in these two incidents, that both have switched on again, one to a living faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and the other to follow the precepts of an Indian guru.
The danger in switching off from the religious system of institutionalised Christianity is that you throw out the baby with the bath water. Throwing off the shackles and confines of a religious upbringing, you tend to run a mile from anything that even smells of Christianity, and run toward whatever is different, esoteric, and “non Christian”. That’s why the shelves in the local bookstore are stacked with books on spiritism, buddhism, mysticism and every other “ism” than the Bible
There’s a lot of people around us who are “desligado”, switched off, and the challenge for us is to be able to enter that void, as in the case of Nino, the boy in the park, and introduce them to the living Jesus, not the religion.
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