Secret Royalty On Tour

I asked our guide Sio what the pathway was for someone who didn’t necessarily want a god-fearing life.

He looked at me with the particular blankness of someone who has been asked to describe water to a fish.

“They would have had to have been brought up off the island,” he said. “Our whole life is church.”

I nodded. I wrote nothing down because I was too busy absorbing the quiet absoluteness of it. Not defensive, not evangelical, just factual in the way that weather is factual.

He told me there is a curfew at six in the evening. Nationwide. So that families go home to pray together.

How long, I asked.

Up to forty-five minutes. An hour, if you have a lot to ask for.

I sat with that. An hour of asking. Every evening. The whole island, simultaneously, on its knees in negotiation with the same deity, settling the day’s ledger before dinner.

I didn’t know whether to be inspired or gutted. I think I was a little bit of both.

What I kept circling was the question of room. Not the room in the house where the praying happens, but the room inside a person to challenge, to grow, to feel like an individual human rather than a component of a communal faith. A curfew exists, by definition, to prevent you from being somewhere else. This one exists to ensure you are exactly where Samoa has decided you should be, on the floor of your faith, contributing your portion to the collective conversation with God.

Sio used the phrase “god-fearing” without irony, which I appreciated. It was his phrase, not mine, and it was precise. Not god-loving. Not god-curious. Fearing.

I travel, in part, to have my assumptions disturbed. I got what I came for.

I still don’t know how to feel. But I notice that I keep thinking about it, which is probably the point.