THE ROT IN INDIAN CHURCHES

MARK RAO RAISED A QUESTION WITH ME

Valson Thampu

Mark Rao is a facebook friend I value for his sober interest in seeking the meaning of life and the relevance of faith to living it relevantly. I haven’t had much of personal interaction with him, but I am encouraged by who he is, and what he stands for. So, when he raises a question, it makes me think. This is not, by the way, peculiar to Mark’s sporadic interactions with me via email, but also of anyone who is interested in relating to life in a seeking and reverential manner, as life deserves to be related to.

Now to Mark’s question: Why is it, he wants to know, that church authorities are keeping quiet about the huge tragedy unfolding in Kashmir? He recalled the shameful instance of the Churches in North India making a bee-line for endorsing the internal Emergency clamped on the country by Indira. He also referred to the brave, bold stand that, especially Juhanon Metropolitan of the Mar Thoma Church adopted at that time. There were others like Dr. M.M. Thomas and a few other thinking Christians.

Well, the answer, in part, is that the church has ceased to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. It has no flavour distinct from the flavour of the world to impart. It is like the church at Sardis: neither dead nor alive.

The main reason for this ‘deadness’ of the church is well stated by Tolstoy in his autobiographical work Confession. I am going to quote a few passages from this work in a short while; but a few words of explanation first-

In this book, published first from Geneva –on account of the hostility of the Russian Orthodox Church- Tolstoy deals primarily with his painful journey to faith. Especially with reference to his class –the aristocratic in Russia in those days- he points out that they had four strategies to cope with the meaninglessness of the life they lived. He adds that the moneyed class has no use for faith. But that is beside the point in our present context-

The four strategies are-

1. Ignorance -one chooses to be willfully ignorant of the meaninglessness of the life one leads.

2. Epicureanism –here one is aware of this meaninglessness, but seeks to ward it off by living a life of pleasure.

3. Courage and energy –this class of people end their lives, in view of the emptiness of the life they live (Tolstoy deals with it in Anna Karenina, among other texts) because they are not weaklings of cowards.

4. Weakness- people of this class know that the life they live is empty and meaningless but go on enduring it for the sheer want of courage to end it.

So, Tolstoy turns away from his class. He then, as the first option, looks to the elite section –our priests, bishops and theologians- for some guidance. Here’s what he finds. I quote the text in some detail, because there are a few who believe that I am critical of the present degradation of various churches because of personal grudges. So, let someone incomparable better than myself speak.

“…they (that is, the church hierarchy) did not live according to the principles they professed. I felt very strongly that they were deceiving themselves and that, like myself, they had no sense of life’s meaning other than to live while they lived and to lay their hands on everything they could. This was clear to me because if they harboured any meaning that might destroy all fear of privation suffering, and death, they would not be frightened of these things. They lived a life of plenty, just as I did; they endeavoured to increase and preserve their wealth and were afraid of privation, suffering, death. Like myself and all the rest of us unbelievers, they lived only to satisfy their lusts, lived just as badly as, if not worse than, those did not believe. –Tolstoy: Confession

Referring to actions that manifest faith (or, as Jesus said, ‘matching knowing and doing” (Mtt.724-28). “…I saw no trace of such actions among the various believers in our class. On the contrary, I saw such actions among the people in our class who were not believers but never among the so-called believers. Thus I realized that the faith of these people was not the faith I sought, that their faith was not faith at all but only one of the epicurean gratifications of life. ”

[That is to say, even in the aristocratic class, the so-called ‘unbelievers’ were better human beings than the believers. I leave it to my readers to compare the situation now with what Tolstoy experienced in his days.]

Tolstoy comes, in the end, to derive encouragement from the life of faith of simple folks. Their faith, he says, is mixed up a lot of superstition but their superstition, he says, different from the superstition of the elite. Elite superstitions are superfluous to their life, even if they are held ardently. The superstitions of the simple folks are an integral part of their life.

Unfortunately, the so-called Christian outlook and imagination are so completely dominated by worldly norms that we think all virtues flourish only in the elite segment. Bishops, arch bishops, cardinals etc. comprise the religious elite. They lose no opportunity to make the rank and file to feel the weight of their social and economic superiority. It is for this reason that they need to lead obscenely affluent and wasteful lives. And we, who are mightily impressed by this theatre of the absurd, are as much to blame as they are. They will change their ways if we choose to be sensible and view these worldly exercises as they deserve to be. They merit contempt. This is why I took a stand against show casing the visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury at an expense, I am told, of Rs. 50 lakhs. This is a show cleverly calculated to mesmerize and hypnotize ordinary believers and to make them forget the degradation to which the church has been plunged. It is an exercise in crass dishonesty. I have nothing, absolutely nothing, against the Archbishop of Canterbury. But his relevance to my life of faith is a blessed, glorified, colonial zero.

Either the church survives for the sake of the religious elite by playing gimmicks like this or it stays a redemptive force. In the latter case it would know how to respond to vast human tragedies like what is being played out in Kashmir. The church of today has neither any credibility nor any moral courage to take a stand in such matters.

The church is irrelevant, and this is a sharper pain, not only to the tragedy of Kashmir, but also to the life of the Christian community. If anything, it has become a hindrance: a buffer between believers and Jesus Christ. But most people are scared to recognize this reality. The popular outlook is, “Let sleeping dogs lie.” That’s fine. In that case, do treat sleeping dogs, as dogs. And not as gods, for God’s sake!

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