child like reflection

A CHILD TAKES A SERIOUS THEOLOGICAL TURN!

Valson Thampu

My granddaughter is nearly four years old. She values her knowledge of Bible stories. To value is to want to share. So, she began to narrate the story of Adam and Eve.

The narration came to the point at which Eve ate the forbidden fruit.

She believes the fruit was apple, as many of us do. So, that’s not a problem.

(Three decades ago, my daughter thought, when she was of a comparable age, it was pine apple. That was in view of Adam’s protruding gullet in one of the pictures in our home. She believed that the spiky fruit got stuck in Adam’s throat making it swell in size.)

I noticed that she looked concerned at Eve’s eating the apple. So, I asked-

“What happened to Eve when she ate the fruit?”

“She got stomach ache”, she replied.

Well, that never occurred to me! It occurred to God, though. Why else would God say to Eve, ‘In pain shall you conceive and give birth to children.”

Her insight made me think as follows-

All of our woes are, one way or other, stomach aches. The stomach is involved in myriad ways in our misery.

We think we have a heartache. But, really, it is a stomach ache.

We think life is hurting us; but it is in our stomach that life is hurting us. As Jesus said, we worry a lot about what we shall eat, and what we shall drink.

The beginning of heart attack is in the stomach. It began there a long, long time before the heart picked up its seismic shocks. [Hence the old dictum- “Don’t dig your grave with your teeth.]

The secret of sleeplessness is in stomach. Hence the saying, “Either you eat well, or you sleep well. You can’t do both!”

The seeds of obesity diabetes, liver cirrhosis, high blood pressure and cholesterol, low intellectual interest, laziness, physical awkwardness and low self-respect, and a variety of other unenviable achievements -classified as ‘lifestyle’ diseases- lie in stomach ready to germinate.

Well, even the nightmares that ruin our sleep are hatched in stomachs.

So, we need to take good care of our stomachs. (This includes, inter alia, ensuring that the shape of our stomachs is not distorted like in malicious cartoons.) That is to say, we shouldn’t do what Eve did and invite stomach aches.

There are mothers still in Kerala who advise their daughters on the eve of their weddings-

“The way to your man’s heart lies via his stomach”. [God was a fool to have placed the heart higher than the stomach, or what?]

I would feel insulted if my MIL thought of me in this manner.

The forbidden fruit is real. It is there, low-hanging, in the garden of life. Many go for it. Watch! You can see stomach aches on faces everywhere.

Shallowness in personality results when stomach and face become one, collapsing the heart and the brain into this Philistine formation. It is a terrible condemnation for anyone to be labelled a stomach.

By the way, your stomach is not wholly yours! It is part of the external world. That is how the Creator designed it. You eat. Food travels along a path. It tarries within you for a while. The nutrients are absorbed. The rest is cast out at the other end.

Your mouth is the one end. Your fundament is the other. All ends are meeting points with the external world.

Between the two ends is YOU, the crown of Creation!

But between any two points is only a straight-line. There is no room for depth, paradox or mystery. That is why those whose personality is strictly sandwiched between the two meeting points -the ingress and egress- vis-a-vis food, are a caricature of the human.

It matters little how you are clothed and liveried. If your mouth and your fundament are the only two points of contact and contribution to the world, you are despicably worthless.

The pity is that a vast majority of our fellow human stay indifferent to this. So, they fail to see the muck hiding behind facades of holiness or secular importance.

Next time you see one such bumptious, blustering, boisterous bumble-bee, remember,

“Eve got a stomach ache”.