Kerry's Update From India

Dear all,

Greetings from Turkey, my vantage point for reflection upon India. I have been meaning to write sooner and had started this email some time ago, but I just haven't put it all together until now. I can't offer anything like a final impression. Summaries seem inappropriate.

I guess I have been thinking that the cultures I encounter are far away even when I'm right in the midst of them. There's just so much that I don't understand. But maybe it's like an impressionist painting and I'm too close. My nose is an inch from the canvas and I'm trying to figure out what the ten blotches might signify. "This is Shiva? It looks like a blob to me." Each experience is a new blotch coming in to my vision, and the addition of each one is a step back—in a good way.

A step back. I feel like I've taken a few of those. I keep seeing these deep habits and patterns that pop up and say "yeah, still here, always here, wake up!" If it weren't for my traveling companions (particularly my coworker), I might not see them at all. Or else I might have been tempted to keep ignoring them, with the soothing, ashy blindness that results. Ash, like a taste of death in the eyes. Washed out, but not white. Grey. No taste. Sucking the juice out.

I've lost count of the illnesses I've suffered. They have blended into one another (was that the last leg of the infection or the onset of the virus?), sliding under antibiotics and watchful eyes on meals. But no resentment. In some ways India has seen me healthier than I've ever been. But that's only because it has shown me the fragility of health, mental, physical, and moral. On the downside, I see how close I always am to failure. On the upside, I see how the smallest reformations make all the difference in the world.

So much abstraction. Here's a story. In Bangalore we visited a place called NBCLC, the National Biblical, Catechetical, and Liturgical Centre. It's a Catholic institution and this one prides itself on fusing Catholic and Indian identity. So I'm watching the service, the priest sitting cross-legged, garlands around his neck, chanting "Om" under ambient lighting. The choir, wearing local traditional dress, sings bhajans (devotional hymns) in Hindi and then mounts the stage to perform an interpretive dance of the trinity. Anyway, we get to communion and he invites the congregation to come forward. Among the guests, us included, are a ton of non-Catholics, and I find myself shaken out of my academic, tolerant, appreciative-of-cultural-diversity daze. "Catholic-Indian fusion or no, if he gives communion to all these people…." [I'm too ashamed to publish the phrase that popped into my head at this moment; "he's out of line" would be the more palatable completion of the sentence] Not that I had, or should have had, a dog in this fight. But I sensed that he was approaching a serious transgression. I didn't go up, but Deva, who's part of our coordinating staff and an ordained Protestant pastor, did. He gets to the front of the line and the priest asks him if he's Catholic. He says no, and the priest says sorry, you can't have any, and Deva returns to his seat. My sense of analytical order is confirmed and the service concludes a little while later.

So afterwards we're standing outside and I'm talking with the priest when Deva comes up. He is incensed. "Why can't I take communion? I'm a Christian. I accept Jesus." The priest gives the answers you might expect. I can't even remember them they were so unremarkable: something that says and doesn't say "there are rules and I have to follow them." So Deva says something like, "this is supposed to be an Indian service. In India nobody is refused Prasad [food that has been blessed]." The priest comes back with further deflective explanation. Then Deva says, "you are Tamil, right?" The priest nods. So Deva lets loose in his native language: "[Tamil Tamil Tamil Tamil] Martin Luther [Tamil Tamil Tamil Tamil]." The priest comes back in English. Deva comes back in Tamil. Finally it falls into Tamil back and forth. Meanwhile, I'm doing an interpretive dance of Swiss foreign policy: standing still, head swiveling back and forth like it's a tennis match.

Finally they break off, Deva exasperated and angry, the priest pained and conciliatory. Deva then asks me what I think. I can't come up with anything better than "I think they're Catholic." You're familiar with the perspective. It's their club; they can let in who they want. The answer doesn't do much for him. He repeats that this is exactly what Martin Luther was talking about. On the bus ride back he's ablaze with righteousness: "Jesus wasn't Catholic. They wouldn't give him communion either." The students are fawning over him, the valiant rebel speaking truth to power (especially the women, which gives another dimension to the dynamics here). I'll admit I was jealous. Why doesn't my neutrality dance garner me such adoration? But as with so much that is motivated by ego, the obvious irrationality of my position does little to make me feel better.

So a little self-reflection is in order. Why didn't I come to Deva's aid? Or more precisely, why wasn't I moved to do so? Of course, as a guest and a teacher with a comparative religion program I am obliged to "bracket" my perspective. But when that practice proceeds to the point where the bracketing is no longer felt as a dislocation, a rankling restriction, doesn't the bracketing become an act of discipline and the resulting perspective an effect of power? If as teachers we enforce regular practices of bracketing, but remain only doctrinally and theoretically open to judgment, then do we not in effect risk destruction of what we are supposedly committed to preserving as a possibility? I think Catholics and Protestants would agree that, as a Christian, you at least ought to be moved by this question, and that those who are equivocal are further from righteousness than the passionately wrong, whoever they may be.

Anyway, there's my missed opportunity at reformation. It wouldn't have taken much to take a more courageous, less milquetoasty stance. And it all happens so fast, with habits ingrained over years jumping so quickly into action. To be clear, it's not like I feel I've committed a mortal sin. And guilt is not the operative emotion. It's dismay at becoming a pattern, a habit, with the life that results, out of control and largely unseen.

Well, I'm sliding into summary statements, I guess. But I'm happier to let the fragments take over. That's how I see my future conversations: tips and icebergs, an occasional gouging, some melting. Enjoy the pictures: (that´s the first album devoted to India -- another one is on the way). My commentary should give a better narrative sense of where we've been and what we've been doing. I dream of a restful summer, hopefully one spent with you, if only for brief visits. I miss you all and look forward to my return.

Love,

Kerry