Pasaribu addresses another young death by suicide, that of his dear friend Christy, who is the subject of the poem ‘Cooking Instant Noodles at the End of the Rainbow’. Christy had doubted the power of faith as just a ‘trick of the light’. Pasaribu takes issue with this and addresses his friend using a deliberate biblical cadence. In this poem, the poet retrospectively posits a religious position as best he can, within the confines of his own determinations about faith and its efficacy:

Christy - who once told you, I'll keep pounding
on Heaven's door. Who knows? It might open - forgot

we are all droplets of water.
We will fall to the ground but not yet.

And love is the Light!
And love is the Light!

By proclaiming love as the source of light and hope for Christians, including Christy (even though she clearly rejected it), Pasaribu echoes the more inclusive and generous Christian teachings of the various saints and theologians he most enthusiastically admires. For Pasaribu, Christianity itself is politically problematic in Indonesia, less so perhaps than his being gay but a source of considerable tension nonetheless. Christianity (both ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’) represent two of the six recognised religions; Hindu, Buddhist, with Islam at the head (Jews and other groups must pick between one of these recognised belief systems for their identity cards. While there have been various attempts to remove religious belief from these cards, the opposition to this basic, democratic notion has been ferocious from those who claim that this would be akin to embracing communism. Muslims represent more than 88% of the population, making Indonesia with a population of around two hundred million, the largest Islamic country in the world. In multiple regions across Indonesia, Christians have suffered intolerance, harassment and attack leading to much loss of life and even the destruction of whole villages. However, there is push-back from Christians and others in the face of Muslim fanaticism across the archipelago. For example, in Bali, as fundamentalist Muslims seek to impose stricter orthodoxy over social behaviour generally, particularly in regard to dress and the consumption of alcohol, the local Hindu population has continued to successfully resist such attempts at puritanical Islamist hegemony.

In this complex socio-political context, Pasaribu asserts the critical place Christianity and faith occupy in his own life, while at the same time lamenting the fact of his church’s (or at the very least some of its conservative leaders’) fundamental rejection of homosexuality. This he resents and chafes against and consequently his own faith is subject to much doubt and angst, perhaps not unlike that of the saints and Christian thinkers he admires. Indeed, Sergius Seeks Bacchus might be seen as a beacon within the context of a struggle, always alive in the author, to reconcile the grim narrowness of Christianity as he experiences it at times, especially publicly, with contemporary notions of the validity of identity differences and political debate more broadly. That said, faith for Pasaribu endures the onslaught of his own doubts and anguish and remains a source of reliable, if fraught, emotional stability within ongoing crisis. Pasaribu’s poetry insists on the existence of love as a healing power.

In a short poem, ‘On the Glory that is Poetry’, the author explicitly praises one of his Christian heroes, the Catholic saint Thomas Aquinas whose own doubts about his work as a philosopher and religious thinker meant the abandonment of several important texts he was working on (prompted by a vision he had of Christ speaking to him directly, which Thomas believed was far superior to anything he could offer by way of his own text). Pasaribu, however, claims that the very texts Aquinas disavowed as unworthy, survive to be revered by Christians and philosophers across the centuries, proof of their importance as articles of faith for many Christians who followed, including the poet himself:

His Summa Theologiae was abandoned,
left unfinished, and yet
to this very day we revere it
and refer to its insights
on philosophy, theology, christology
and consider it one of the best books
written by a mere son of man.

Again here, there is a sense that prose is being cut up into lines to make ‘poetry’, but this may be the consequence of translation or a kind of careless urgency in the telling. Whatever the case, the poet recognises the impact that ‘poetry’ itself has on succeeding generations, even though it might be the subject of intense doubt by the particular author at the time of writing. Pasaribu suggests that literature and the arts (which includes for him, theological writings, those he calls ‘poetry’) have a life of their own and that this possible future impact is fundamentally unknowable. For Pasaribu, his view provides a profound, personal comfort because he too, like Aquinas, is riven by doubts of various kinds that are deeply troublesome in that they test his commitment to his faith. How could this not be the case given that his religious seniors, those he would wish to respect, even revere, deny the validity of his very being in their refusal to acknowledge the reality of his sexual orientation and practice? That he comes down most often on the side of faith is testament to the power of the Christian message he believes in, that of universal love. He is prepared to offer that even to his enemies.

There are no easy solutions available for Pasaribu. He apparently continues to struggle in an ongoing wrestle between his faith on the one hand and the recognition of his sexual difference on the other, a struggle not altogether strange for many gay men and women. Sergius Seeks Bacchus plays this out in an honest book of poems, remarkably free of self-pity or sentimentality; a testament to Pasaribu’s fundamental honesty and courage and to the power of his insights.