by Xiang Xiang Liew

Created on: December 21, 2009

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”

 –Mark Twain

It was one of those rare mornings where I woke up feeling a sense of obligation to pray. With my eyes still crusted over with gunk and my limbs heavy from sleep, I pushed the blanket off me and crawled into a kneeling position on my bed as the rusted springs creaked under my shifting weight. I bowed twice, clapped three times, and then lowered my forehead to the musty sheets.

“Sukuinushisama, Oshienushisama, o mighty God, thank you very much for allowing me to wake up again on this beautiful morning, alive and healthy…”

I was still a young girl at the time, at that stage in my life where my mother kept trying to get me into training bras, while I clung stubbornly to the more comfortable white cotton singlets (undershirts) that I was used to. It was one of those singlets that I put on that morning. But this one was special. My mother hand washed it separately from all our other clothes. It had a little white pocket sewn into the middle of the neck line so that it lay right at the top of my chest. After I washed my hands with soap and carefully dried my hands on a small pink towel placed aside solely for that purpose, I took my omitama – a gold-plated circular locket wrapped in a cotton satchet – out of its red velvet box and slipped it into the pocket of my singlet. As I buttoned up the front of my school uniform, the thin pewter chain felt cold against my neck and I remembering wondering if a prefect would stop me for wearing it, even though I knew the school allowed the wearing of jewelry for religious purposes. I didn’t wear my omitama to school all that often. First of all, I was lazy, and secondly, it was too troublesome to explain to the prefects what  Mahikari was, and what the omitama did. But that morning I did, and as I sauntered through the schoolyard before class started, I surreptitiously turned the palm of my hand outwards and began chanting, under my breath, the purification prayer, Amatsu Norigoto. As I did, my body filled up with the true light of God, channeled by the sacred pendant I was wearing, and spilled out of the palm of my hand, purifying my surroundings of all spiritual negativity.

Or so I believed, in that time, in that place. I believed that I was helping my fellow students by filling up our space with the positive energy of God. I sincerely

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