Silent night
THE Balinese new year, Nyepi, is celebrated in silence. For 24 hours each year, the normally buzzing island falls silent, and there is a strict prohibition on leaving your accommodation or kindling a light that can be seen from outside. The rules are enforced by the Pecalang, a religious police force appointed in each village, recognisable by their chequered sarongs. This year, they caught an American tourist wandering along the street. We avoided any such trouble by staying inside our hotel — as the pool and restaurant remained open, this didn’t involve any great privations.
Since Nyepi is supposed to be a day for reflection, cultivating harmony with nature and the divine, I turned off my phone and spent most of the day reading St John of the Cross’s commentary on his poem Dark Night of the Soul. The poem had helped calm me to sleep when suffering from anxious insomnia while on assignment in the Caucasus (Diary, 3 November 2023). Now, I found that the book in which the author unpacks his spiritual prescription resonates with the Balinese tradition.
The “dark night of the soul” refers to a period not of existential angst but of “purgative contemplation”. The task is “to allow the soul to remain in peace and quietness” in what St John describes as a “passive purgation”. He acknowledges that those practising it might feel that they are “doing nothing and are wasting their time”: reassuring words to anyone who has ever struggled with prayer or meditation.
I so enjoyed the enforced quietness of Nyepi that I suggested to my partner that we adopt its strictures for every 1 January. She seemed to find the idea preferable to indulging in my family’s New Year traditions: “If it means not having to go on a bloody freezing hike, then great.”
Dancing with demons
BEFORE the silence and the darkness of Nyepi, there is noise and light. After nightfall, huge sculptures of gods and demons, ogoh-ogoh, are paraded through the streets and shaken wildly to the accompaniment of drums and whistles. We waited for the parade on a street corner in Kuta, on the south-west of the island. The team of teenagers cavorting with the ogoh-ogoh had to cleave a path through the dense crowd of onlookers. On a bamboo frame, they carried a larger-than-lifesize diorama depicting a story from one of the Hindu epics, with lights flashing frenetically as it swung to percussive accompaniment.
The most common explanation for the ogoh-ogoh parades is that they are to scare off demons, and the silence of Nyepi is to trick any lingering spirits into thinking that the island is uninhabited. An alternative rationale is that the cacophony is to draw attention to offerings made at earlier, pre-Nyepi ceremonies, and the quietude of Nyepi itself is symbolic of the harmony between nature, humans, and the divine that has been inaugurated.
Interfaith island
I LEFT the UK, and permanent employment at the Church Times, in February. After some time in Australia and New Zealand with my partner’s family, we are now on a journey north through South-East Asia, heading for Hong Kong. No longer being a full-time journalist gives you permission to disconnect from the news cycle; so I became aware of the political brouhaha about Muslims praying in Trafalgar Square (Comment 27 March) only when we were staying near a Balinese roadside complex of religious buildings, the Puja Mandala.
It would make the perfect setting for some sort of interfaith sitcom: the mosque stands next door to a Roman Catholic church, which neighbours a Buddhist temple, a Protestant church, and a Hindu temple. In Indonesia, everyone can practise being in a minority. Islam is predominant in the country as a whole, but, on Bali, Muslims are in the minority, while on other islands there are Protestant or RC majorities.
Such pluralism is not frictionless. There were concerns about what might happen if Eid al-Fitr fell on Nyepi, as projected, but the lack of a crescent moon sighting meant that it actually took place the day after. As Ramadan ended, the mosque in Puja Mandala was playing prayers on loudspeakers. In another part of town, thousands had gathered for the high-octane community celebrations, including beauty contests and traditional dance, which follow Nyepi, while, in the RC church, the choir was rehearsing for Palm Sunday.
The revelation that the report The Quiet Revival was based on unreliable data (News, 2 April) also jarred with my Balinese experience. I read it just after attending, with some 500 others, a Sunday-evening service in the RC church. I was there because it was conducted in English, but the priest’s Indonesian ad-libs suggested that most of the congregation were attending mass in their second language. It turned out that the morning service, held in the vernacular, was too crowded, and, even in such a large church, it was hard to get a seat. It left me wondering whether one of the reasons that religious pluralism seems to work in Bali is that almost everyone seems to have a faith and makes a commitment to it as part of their identity.
Tempus fugit
WE SPENT the business end of Holy Week in George Town, Penang, home to the oldest purpose-built Anglican church in South-East Asia. Growing up in the Church of England, I always found Maundy Thursday services agonisingly poignant — departing in silence, with the altar stripped and the lights extinguished. In St George’s, Penang, the familiar rhythm of the liturgy washed through me, carrying me back to the village church of my youth.
How far away that old home is now, both in miles and the years that have elapsed! As I emerged from the silent church into a night of un-English humidity, the air alive with cicadas, it was too dark to see whether my cheeks were stained with tears.
Ministry of welcome
BUT, after the silence and the darkness, there is noise and light. Early on Easter Day, we walked through the historic centre of George Town. Approaching Armenian Street, we saw dhol drums being unloaded from a taxi for an Indian wedding before we passed the grand Kapitan Keling Mosque, which was quiet between dawn and midday prayers. Further down the road, a flow of devotees were offering incense at the Chinese temple, and, at the far end of the street, opposite the Courts of Justice, were the white columns and dunce’s-cap steeple of St George’s.
About 200 had gathered for the eight o’clock eucharist. Jubilant flourishes on the organ, a young cantor intoning the psalm with some 40 “alleluias”, and ever-louder responses of “He is risen indeed, alleluia!” were followed by a bustling breakfast of sweet coffee and nasi lemak bungkus (sticky rice with spices, anchovies, peanuts, and egg enfolded in a banana leaf). I might be far from where I grew up, but foreign ports can still contain the quiet warmth of home — and the after-church refreshments put a rich tea biscuit to shame.
Francis Martin is a writer and journalist.
