The Ocean of Life

A couple of months ago I spent a few weeks volunteering at the office of my church. I was on a mission to take photos of records of baptism, confirmation and marriage dating all the way back to the early 1900s. These books – what the staff members called ‘big books’ – have aged over the years and some are falling apart and infested with mites. Digitalising the pages will help retain the carefully handwritten words that marked the important details of each of those ceremonies. So I went along, put on my mask and gloves, took the dusty big books out one by one, and captured each and every single page with a digital camera.

There were more than 60 of these big books. Each was around one inch thick. There were countless pages. There were also a lot of photocopied documents loosely inserted into the big books, and I took care to photograph each of those documents too.

It was repetitive work. It was completely brainless work. There was no variation in the job nature except for some initial setting up. It’s the kind of work that anyone who can operate a basic digital camera can do, as long as you have the time and the willingness.

I have never done anything like this. Even in my first summer job as a young student, there was more thinking involved. If a robot was to do this job, it would probably have done a better and quicker job than I did.

But, the twist here is, had it been a robot doing this work, a valuable lesson would have been lost. I experienced something I had never expected when I first promised to help out with this task.

As I started out with the first big book, which contained the baptism entries starting from 1905, I was mesmerized by the fading yet beautiful English calligraphy on those yellowish-brown pages, carefully recording the names of the person baptized, the names of the parents, witnesses, their hometowns and other personal details.

Each entry carried the weight of a mark in history. In my mind, I pictured a child lovingly dressed by their parents in white, brought before the Father, blessed with holy water. I pictured that happening over one hundred years ago, in the same church where I’m standing. I was aware that many of these people named in this very old big book have most probably passed away by now, that they have had their time in this world, and have now moved on to somewhere beyond my comprehension.

As I turned through the pages covering the periods of World War I and World War II, I noticed that the numbers of proper entries have dropped significantly over these periods, but attached to the books were loose pages showing how priests and nuns have baptized a whole host of people in locations other than the church. I wondered if these were names of people who were in dire straits, who were living in brutality of war in the fields, who were facing imminent death.

Then came the huge surge in baptism in the years after the war. Many of them were Chinese (compared to pre-war years when there were many more foreigners, including the British and Portuguese). Then numbers dropped again in more recent decades. Perhaps in days of relative peace and prosperity, the urge to seek spiritual refuge appears less urgent.

By coming in touch with these endless entries I was taken through the years. There is a life, a real person behind each entry, who at that very point in time had a renewed life ahead of them, however long or short that life would turn out to be.

Sometimes I would come across a stack of loose papers stapled together. As I captured each of those pages with my camera, I also made a note of what those documents were. There were times when I found myself holding four documents in one hand – the birth certificate, the baptism and confirmation certificate, the marriage certificate and, the death certificate. In those moments I was profoundly aware that symbolically I was holding this person’s entire life in my single hand. A precious human life, from the beginning to the end, condensed into these four documents.

I thought about myself, I’m just missing one document in that pile. I hope there’s a whole lot more involved before the last page comes, a whole lot of laughter and sweat, hugs and kisses, dinners and parties, traveling and learning, encounters and bonding – everything that makes life worth living for. But there will come a day, one day, when I, and each one of us, will die and reunite with the people who have come and gone.

On the last day of this project, I photographed the most recent marriage records. Low and behold, I saw my own name in one of those pages. My husband and I had our church wedding 3 years after our civil registration in 2013. As I saw my own name in the big book, an unfamiliar feeling surged inside me – I felt as if I was looking at myself as a third person. Yes, that’s my name and my husband’s name, but somehow those names look distant. Somehow this couple looks like nothing more than another pair in the line, another couple who had made their promise before God to love each other for life, like thousands of other couples who have done so over the years.

I felt like a drop of water in the ocean. And maybe that’s what each of us is after all. The drops of water that make up the ocean of life.

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn said, ‘If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of these people’.

As I looked deeply into the pages of these big books, I saw these strangers alive in this moment. And even though we were not related by blood, I am a continuation of these people.