I Want to Take You to the Island

Friday 28th November 2008. That’s a line from a Mary Black song, by the way, in case you were wondering, although a quick Google suggests the writer was Paul Brady.

Penang is an island just off the coast of the north west part of peninsular Malaysia

Spending the weekend in Penang. What a lovely place! And what hospitality! A phone call to the Immaculate Conception Parish secured a generous offer of accommodation. And a couple of parishioners even came to meet me at the bus station!

Philomena and Mike picked me up and whisked me to the Church, where I met the Parish Priest, Fr Marshall Fernandes, and Assistant Priest, Fr Mark Michael. After a little refreshment, Father Mark took me for a visit to Penang’s historic seminary, the College General, which in its time served as a seminary for a whole swathe of Southeast Asia, and was the alma mater of an impressively long list of martyrs, especially in Vietnam.

Back in Britain, Catholic leaders have started talking about “Basic ecclesial communities” as the future of the Church and are trying to foster their growth. Here in Malaysia, they have had them for years. Father Mark was saying the annual house Mass for one of the B.E.C.s, as they are known, and invited me along to the gathering of about a dozen people in a flat outside of George Town. On the way back to the church we stopped off at a barbecue in the house of another parishioner. Life here seems to be just one long social whirl!

 

In the footsteps of Xavier (sometimes you just have to go with the cliché)

Helen and Roy at St Paul's Church

Thursday 27th November. Helen Chua and her husband Roy took me out for the day to Malacca, where St Francis Xavier landed on his epic missionary journey to the East.

We set off early – at 7.30 in the morning (after the 6.15 Mass) – for the two-hour drive south. We dropped off Roy’s Mum to have her hair done, and then our first visit was to the (now ruined) St Paul’s Church where St Francis Xavier was first buried, before being moved to his final resting place in Goa.

A street in Malacca

From the fifteenth century, Malacca was a vital port and a centre of power in this region, and the home of a Chinese community from whom the Peranakan (also known as “Babanyonya” or “Straits Chinese”) are descended. This is Roy’s heritage – and we got to visit his grandfather’s house, which is now the Babanyonya Heritage Museum.

In later years, Malacca was occupied by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British. You can spot all these influences as you look around at the people, the architecture and (always important in Malaysia) the food.

Cheng Hoon Teng Temple

We visited the Cheng Hoon Teng Temple, the oldest Chinese temple in Malaya, according to the plaque, which dates from 1704.

Traditional Malay houses stand a few feet above ground level

Then we went on a river cruise, which was fun and gave us a view of a traditional Malay village with houses which (you can just make out on this picture) are built on stilts to allow air to circulate beneath the floor. This keeps the house cool during the day and, I am told, also allows a fire to be lit under the house in the evening to create smoke which deters mosquitoes. You’d want to be be careful not to set fire to your house, though, wouldn’t you?

Kampung Kling Mosque, Malacca

One of the unique features of Malacca is that the mosques here don’t have domes in the arabic style like you get in the rest of the country, but a more local-style, pagoda-like roof. For some reason, I much prefer this. I was wondering why, and I think it is something to do with cultural imperialism. Just as people criticised European Christian missionaries for exporting their European culture along with Christianity (an Irish Oblate, for instance, told me about his predecessors teaching African boys to play hurling) so I have noticed a tendency in this Muslim-dominated country towards “Arabification” – if you can call it that – in architecture at least (even secular architecture) – as if to be Muslim is to be Arab. The domes of mosques look like marks of Arab imperialism in a part of the world thousands of miles from Arabia. But this mosque looks more local and indigenous, and not a sign of domination.

St Francis Xavier's Church, Malacca

Finally, we visited St Francis Xavier’s Church. Given that Francis was here in 1545, it was quite disappointing to see that this Church dates from quite recently, 1849, so it was probably the least historic place we saw all day! And certainly very European in design (see the above comments!) but very nice inside.

 

A Retreat in the Hills

Maranatha Retreat House

Wednesday 26th November. Dominic Tan, one of SFX’s parishioners, took me to visit the Maranatha Retreat House today, which he helps to run, in the foothills of the Genting Highlands. It’s a beautiful place – purpose built just a few years ago in a peaceful location in the cool of the hills.

The Chapel

The house is light and airy and very aesthetically laid out, and set in beautiful gardens which they put a lot of work into maintaining. They run a lot of weekend retreats here and occasional longer ones.

They say that when you go anywhere with Dominic, you always eat well. There was no disappointment today, when we went to lunch in a nearby village and feasted on what he called South African Queen Fish (a kind of Tilapia, I think) cooked with ginger and fresh coriander – delicious!

 

The Ryanair of Southeast Asia

So what is Air Asia's unique selling-point, then?

Monday 24th November. Walking around KL Sentral station, I noticed this advert for Air Asia, founded by Tony Fernandes, which offers cheap flights around southeast Asia. They work on the same model as Ryanair, it seems, offering some headline-grabbing “zero fares” (though you pay a fair bit of tax), quite a lot of cheapish fares, and recouping the losses by penalising later bookers and those who want “frills” like food, water, baggage-handling, etc. They are doing very well, it seems, but I wonder what Michael O’Leary would make of their advertising strategy.

 

What does Kuala Lumpur mean?

The Klang River in Kuala Lumpur

Muddy river-mouth, I am told. And when you look at this picture, it’s not difficult to see why. The city is at the confluence of two rivers, the Klang and the Gombak, my guide-book tells me, and was originally a tin-mining settlement. (You see what I mean about flyovers, by the way!)

 

The Twin Towers

Looking up at the Petronas Twin Towers

Monday 24th November. They are certainly fond of prestigious, modern-looking projects here – the city is full of big, shiny, new buildings. Perhaps the most famous is the Petronas Twin Towers. The tallest building in the world when they were built (though pipped since then by a couple of others and most recently by some massive thing in – you guessed it – Dubai) they were too tall to get into my camera shot from where I was standing. I walked right to the end of the little ornamental garden at the foot of the towers and still couldn’t get them in. So I resorted to an arty shot looking up the towers from the base.

Then I thought, “my camera does movies”, so I shot a little movie scanning the towers from base to top.

Then, finally, I thought, “just get further away” – though that was not as easy as all that – remember what I said about pedestrians? – and lots of other tallish buildings threatened to block the view.

Just about got them all in from this side street

But eventually, having crossed a few wide and busy roads, I found a side-street where you could just about see the whole of the twin towers and get them into one shot. Of course, a wide-angle lens might have saved me a lot of walking!

 

The Old and the New

Monday 24th November. Took a train into town today and wandered about.

The Old Railway Station, Kuala Lumpur

One thing struck me straight away. Wandering about is not what you do here! Firstly, it’s too hot and humid to be comfortable walking around outside. You get sticky and sweaty and find yourself looking for a shop with aircon to dive into just to cool off. Secondly, this city is very clearly built for cars, not pedestrians. It’s full of flyovers and slip roads and concrete structures of all kinds. If you’re walking, you have to find your way around all of these things. Often there’s no pavement, and sometimes no way through at all.

But during the wandering I did while I was learning this valuable lesson, I did see some interesting things. One of the prettiest is the old Kuala Lumpur railway station, built by the British, and considerably prettier than King’s Cross. It is no longer the main railway station, having been replaced by a new one called “KL Sentral”.  Given it’s location, I can only suppose that Sentral must be the Malay word for “about three quarters of a mile further away from the city centre.”

The KL monorail in front of the huge Berjaya Times Square complex

To be fair, though, KL Sentral is a good, modern transport hub, linking the international rail services with the train to the airport and the local rapid transit commuter trains as well as the space-age-looking monorail, pictured here.

 

A Bit Overdressed for a Badminton Hall

Sunday 23rd November. As well as being Parish Priest of Saint Francis Xavier, Fr Simon looks after another parish in nearby Subang Jaya, known as CKK. The parish has no church, and has had difficulty getting planning permission to build one.

This badminton hall becomes a church for the CKK community on Sunday mornings (not my photo - by alfaexpressions)

So, the parish hires a badminton hall every Sunday morning and celebrates Mass there at 8.30 and 11.30. A team of parishioners arrives at 7.30 and starts to get the hall ready, preparing the altar, putting up the Stations of the Cross and devotional pictures, and a makeshift confessional. I concelebrated both Masses with Fr Simon and was surprised at how solemn and dignified they were in the circumstances – no corners were cut – there was a team of fully-vested altar servers, incense, music led by an excellent choir. One bonus of using the hall is that is has air conditioning, which makes it much more comfortable than most churches – especially for someone wearing an alb, stole and chasuble on top of their ordinary clothes (it’s the stole that does it, of course – it’s so hot in those things).

It also has a considerably greater capacity than most churches, seating about a thousand. And both Masses were pretty full.

Some of the parishioners took Simon and me out for breakfast between the Masses. I am getting used to this business of being taken out for breakfast, and I have to admit I don’t mind it at all.

After the second Mass, vestments and a host of other liturgical accoutrements were packed away, altars, tables were dismantled, and the hall returned very quickly to its secular state. Quite an impressive operation I have to say, which says a lot about the dedication of the parishioners.

The good news is that the parish finally has permission to build a permanent place of worship (not in a prominent place, mind, but in the middle of an industrial estate – Christianity, I am reliably informed, is not allowed a high profile in this country) so all that remains now is the relatively simple matter of raising the money.

 

Shah Alam Mosque

Shah Alam Mosque (photo not mine - by Lerdsuwa)

Saturday 22nd November. Visited Selangor’s state mosque at Shah Alam, known as the ‘Blue Mosque’. Claims to have the largest dome in the world. The Malaysia tourist web site says this building is “a symbol of the supremacy of Islam and the sovereignty of Muslims in Malaysia”. Muslims are 61% of the population here. Difficult to imagine York Minster’s web site saying that the building was a symbol of the sovereignty of Christians in Britain (which is 71% Christian), isn’t it?

Visitors, of course, remove their footwear when entering the mosque

Having taken the trouble to come here and shed our shoes at the steps of the mosque, we encountered a notice at the door to the main prayer hall saying non-Muslims were not allowed inside, so I stopped outside the door and looked in, whereupon an attendant, seeing my pale European face, hastened over to make sure I was not tempted to go any further and sully the holy floor with my unbelieving feet.

He did have the courtesy, though, rather than just assuming, to ask me first if I was a Muslim. I said “No.”

Another fruitful day of interfaith dialogue, then.

 

Early Morning Mass for St Cecilia

Saturday 22nd November.  The Feast of St Cecilia, and I thought I should try and get into the rhythm of life in a tropical climate by getting up for the early morning Mass at 6.15 am. Still suffering from jet-lag, I hadn’t slept too well and had just managed to nod off when my alarm sounded at 5.30 (though I needn’t have bothered with the alarm, as the church bells rang out not long after that!)

This is how dark it was when we began to celebrate the 6.15 am Mass.

It was still dark when Mass began. I hadn’t expected that. I kept looking out of the church every few minutes to see if it was light yet. Only by the very end could I see anything at all outside.

The parish’s musicians made a special effort for this Mass, and were kind enough to invite me and Simon Yong, the Parish Priest (and my gracious host for these weeks) for breakfast afterwards.