As a Protestant, I am supposed to avoid Mariolatry – adoration of the Blessed Mother. Hardly anyone tells me why; but is assumed to be almost heretical in certain circles to give Mary the respect and recognition she deserves.

But I am not primarily a Protestant. I am a Christian. If a Christian, a free human being. As St Paul says, it is to freedom that Christ calls us. We should not slip back in under the yoke of slavery. The Way is what God created. Denominational ways are what man has imposed on the Way, he has not created. I am happy to take the Way with the freedom it gives.

I reflect here in a tragic context. The unthinkable atrocity on Amarnath pilgrims by agent provocateurs. You may wonder why this eminently condemnable atrocity should make me turn to the Blessed Mother. Let me tell you why.

I hold in inestimable respect women like Kaushalya, the mother or Lord Ram, Devaki, the mother or Lord Krishna, Queen Maya, the mother of Gautama Buddha, Queen Trishla, the mother of Lord Mahavira, Aminah bint Wahb, the mother of Prophet Mohammad, and so on…. I hold my own mother in undying love. Why?

Women give life. Men kill it. A neat division of labour? Not only that. They go on to celebrate the canard, the satanic lie, that killing is a great and heroic thing to do. To me the most alarming symptom of human degradation is that we hail and value those who kill, rather than those who give and nurture life. Consider the following:

Why did hunting carry far greater prestige than cooking? The former involves the thrill of killing, the latter involves only nurturing; and that is so, even if cooking involves the meat got through hunting. Strangely, this cooking redeems the killing that we valourize as hunting, as if woman must come in the wake of man’s games and retrieve the debris he leaves behind.

We bring killing -the mother of all perversities- also into religion. Killing one’s fellow human beings is deemed a greater, more compelling, expression of religious commitment and loyalty than anything else! But religion is all about life: not only life in the present, but also life in the world or births to come!

I can go on; but it is not necessary. The point is clear and incontestable. We need to re-orient ourselves -our value systems, our culture, our politics, above all, our religiosity- to life, rather than death. Erich Fromm pointed out some seven decades ago in his classic work, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, that modern culture is necrophilic. To be necrophilic is to be in love with death. Whatever smells of death carries fascination for us. A cruel leader fascinates us much more than a benign one. Nothing is politically more profitable than war and war-mongering; yet nothing is more miserable and anti-life than war-making. This is the perversity that man, with his faith almost entirely in might and cruelty, has erected at the centre of culture and history. God’s interventions in history are corrective and redemptive of this aberration.

The women I have listed above, are not just females. They are mothers of life. They have done far greater service to humankind than Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, and all your mighty, emblazoned, military stalwarts have done. Their achievements are written on water. In contrast, the contributions that women make, against all odds, endure and enrich a great deal more than the heroics of man.

That brings me to the worst form of terrorism. It goes utterly unnoticed, but it is a serious issue. We have created a macho, andro-centric culture that coerces women to take pride in being, alas, ‘man-like.’ This is what existential philosophers call alienation or objectification.

One thing we know for sure, there was no woman among the cowards who attacked the Amaryatra pilgrims. A rifle-wielding female is not a woman! Woman is the giver of life, not its destroyer. A female may become a killer, but a woman.

To me the Blessed Mother is Woman. She mothered the Light of Life. That light, as St John says, is the light that came to illumine the world. Life is not a religious, but divine, category. Life is God’s invention. Man has no authority over it. Woman is God’s co-worker in the service of life. Life is the paradigm of sanctity. Nothing that ruins or endangers life is holy. It is, instead, utterly diabolic.

This, I believe, is the only dividing line between religiosities. (I don’t feel myself bound by the demarcation of religions). There are two kinds of religiosities in respect of every religion: life-centred spirituality and death-oriented religiosity.

What happened in Jammu and Kashmir, to the pilgrims, is the assault of death-dealing religiosity. It merits condemnation not only in this context, but in every context in which it raises its ugly, bizarre head.

Not rifle-toting men on the prowl to kill, but life-nurturing women, who venture right up to the brink of life to perpetuate life, and toil lifelong to enrich the life they birth, should be our culture icons.

God, I believe, responded redemptively to the aberrations that andro-centricity induced to culture and history by entering into a partnership with Virgin Mary. God dared to do, what man could not: to look truth I the face and to open the door of corporate healing. It is such a healing that our country needs to day. Nothing else, and nothing less, will do.