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Book Review
Religion in a secular state
Susan Visvanathan
CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY FOR THE NEW DAY IN INDIA: Mathai Zachariah; ICSA Books, 107, Pantheon Road, Chennai-600008. Rs. 100.
Mathai Zachariah has always stood for the most austere aspect of Christian life, that which identifies with the poor, while accepting the desperation of everyday existence. While murders continue at a rate which leave us baffled, faith in the little things, the ordinary things remains the watch guard of hope for all our communities, along with the secular belief in justice.
It is nice to hear Mathai Zachariah’s quiet voice again in this little booklet. There are no exhortations, no loud protestations of faith, no heraldry of any kind: love for ideas, and a preoccupation with Gandhian village economy, as understood by a townsman predominates.
Many decades ago, when Mathai was in his Forties and I was seven or eight years old, we went for a walk past a winding river that no longer exists in a small village called Niranam, where St. Thomas the Apostle is believed to have made his first convert, a boy returning from the temple. Mathai was back from a foreign trip. He was always on some foreign trip, and brought back interesting and funny stories. The one he told me that day, as we walked carefully past the encroaching lilac water hyacinths, with their pollen dusting off when we tried to pick them, went like this: “A man, hungry and jobless, was travelling in a train, hoping to find a job that day. He was dressed in his best clothes. When the train stopped, he got off. He stood there wondering what he should do next. The only people at the station were a group waiting with flowers. As he looked expectantly around, they came to him, gave him the flowers, greeted him respectfully and jubilantly. He was too surprised to say anything. Before he knew it, he was whisked off and given a wonderful meal, and then escorted into a packed church, introduced as Pastor So and So, and then invited to make his speech. It was too late for him to admit to sharing in a mistake. He got onto the podium, bowed his head and said, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’ After five minutes of standing there quietly, after having said this, he came down, and all the people in the church crowded around him, and said ‘That was the best speech we ever heard!’ Then he was given another reception, more food, and sent on his way.”
Quest for living Christ
Mathai’s theology was always very ordinary and very brilliant. When he told us this story, we laughed and laughed, because ignorance, mistakes and foolhardiness particularly on the part of adults pleased us very much. Forty-five years later, I can still remember Mathai’s insouciance as we walked. The essays in this book are all centred around the quest for the living Christ. It communicates that conversion is a principle from which we understand metanoia…the transformation of the individual. Like Raimundo Pannikar, Mathai believes that rather than seeking for Christ, we must release the Christ within us. In that sense, the Gandhian imperative that Christ does not belong to Christians alone is a resounding statement of his continuing optimism.
Politics and participation
The essays, written as introductions to journals and books right through the 1970s and 1980s, look at the context of politics and participation. There is optimism, disappointment, renewed hope. Most of the essays are very contemporary, dealing with floods, famines, political crises, fundamentalism, corporate and luxurious living, and the continuous presence of the poor as a symbol of Gandhiji’s talisman for our postmodern lives. There is no ideological disturbance here: can the Church afford to be rich or corrupt when the living poor are witnesses to this excess? Can the state remain silent when people are killed in the name of religion, or in sentiments of vengeance? Some of the intellectual moves that Mathai makes express the Syrian Christian’s incandescent desire to be accepted and assimilated within mainstream life. I’m not sure this is always necessary. While the world shifts and changes, and suffering is both collective and individual, faith remains personal, but justice must remain public. Unless Indians accept that communalism is indeed an offshoot of fundamentalism, secular policy will always be at risk. To accept judgments which argue, as in Orissa, that fundamentalism is not antithetical to the Constitution, would be extremely problematic, as much as suggesting that the right to make lifestyle choices depends on the customary desires of the people. People have a right to their faith, and have a right to choose their faith, but when it comes to murder, arson, rape and loot, only the secular state can stand by its citizens.
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