Rangoon
The first few rows were taken up by the more ostentatiously pious of the congregation, elderly women mostly and a few schoolgirls wearing last year’s Holy Communion dresses. To their left, sitting in front of a statue of the Virgin, was a phalanx of nuns wearing the starched and forbidding habits long ago abandoned by their trendier sisters in the Western world. Behind them sat middle-aged husbands and wives, the latecomers and the doubters, and your correspondent, sweaty and portly and dressed unbecomingly in T-shirt and shorts, the necessary uniform of the foreign reporter posing as a tourist in totalitarian Burma.
Far above us starlings and pigeons fluttered between the beams of St Mary’s Cathedral, whose solid red-brick walls had withstood a terrible earthquake and the Japanese invasion during the second world war. As we queued for communion I noticed that I was the only Westerner there. But I was greeted with smiles of welcome and urged to the front of the line, a kindness I politely declined but which those around me continued to insist on. There is a gentleness about the local manners here which I have never encountered elsewhere. Gentle, that is, until the subject of the regime is brought up.
At several points around the cathedral the priests had placed blackboards upon which they had written a quotation from Psalm 95: Harden not your hearts if you hear his voice today.
The Psalm is an urging towards faith in the darkest of times, urging the Israelites not to be tempted into doubt because of their trials. Rangoon is full of very hard hearts these days. And one might forgive the Burmese of all denominations if they were tempted not only to doubt but to despair. For the spies haunt every corner.
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