It is deemed impious to tell the truth about one’s religious dilemmas in public. Doing otherwise, as I intend to do, incurs the risk of being perceived as impious. Even though truth is held to be an attribute of God, the freedom to tell the truth, especially the truth about one’s religious pains and puzzles, is practically denied to believers. This must change, if we are to break the shackles of hypocrisy. It is not an accident that, from the perspective of Jesus, hypocrisy is the foremost religious aberration. Hypocrisy results from the denial of truth, which consigns individuals, who are obliged to seem godly, to a life of painted piety.

I believe that spirituality, like creativity, must arise naturally from the soil of one’s being. Every human being is a product of a specific context. Every people have a genius of their own shaped through millennia of experiences, struggles, suffering and spiritual discipline. I don’t believe, for that reason, that religions are the same. Religions are the same only in a generic sense; for example, in the sense that all human beings are the same as humans. But, within that bracket, we are refreshingly unique individuals. The same goes for religions too. Each religion comes stamped with its own genius.

The Christianity in which I was nurtured was twice removed, as Plato would have said, from reality. The first was the distance from Jerusalem to Rome. Rome adopted and adapted Christianity and in doing so, turned it, as sociologists of religion point out, into a phenomenon distinct from the way of the Galilean. Western Christianity is more Rome than Jerusalem; especially in its polity. The high Anglican ‘yells, smells and bells’ have no eastern ring or tang. When the Archbishop of Canterbury made a formal visit to St Stephen’s College, its spiritual profundity was lost on me. It was no different to me from the visits of President Zial-ul-Haq of Pakistan, Prince Charles, the Prime Minister of Poland, and the Foreign Minister of Australia. Nor did he have anything to contribute to my life of faith in any way.
Various attempts were made in the last century to indigenize and inculturate Christian liturgy. Theologians made well-meaning efforts to translate the order of worship into the idiom and symbolism native to the Indian context. It was doomed to failure because this effort was not founded on any spiritual urge. It was driven more by a craving for novelty. The catechetical inculturation agenda died out and not many remember it today.

In comparison a Hindu, if he is religiously sincere, has an inherent advantage. His gods and goddesses are closer to him that Jesus Christ can be, given the multi-layered cultural baggage imposed on him. I believe that it was because of this that attempts were made to invent a Christ of faith who visited India, as indeed other parts of the world. This has two variations. In the first, Jesus visited India and spent a lot of time mastering Indian religious traditions before He returned to the Holy Land to undertake His mission. He is believed, especially, to have been influenced by the Buddhist tradition. In the other version, Jesus is believed to have not died on the Cross but survived Crucifixion and, managing to escape Palestine, made His visit to India. This tradition is very strong in Kashmir and many Kashmiris – Hindus and Muslims alike- cherish this to be true. Jesus’ shrine – the Roza Bal- attracts pious visitors from diverse faiths. While the historicity of such traditions remains unverifiable, they point to the fact that there is a connection between religion and the soil. The special affinity to Jesus that the Indian psyche feels needs an explanation rooted in the soil and the soul of India.

The dilemma that I experience, as sketched above, is however not the whole story. Even as I continue to experience a feeling of otherness about the liturgical and ritualistic baggage of church-centred Christianity, I do feel a sense of profound intimacy with Jesus Christ, even if it doesn’t happen within the formal framework. It is in and through the spiritual struggles of my life in the world out there that I experience communion with Christ.

Christianity, like all religions, has two parts: the ceremonial-ritualistic and the spiritual-ethical. Jesus, as portrayed in the four gospels, is evidently focused on the latter. Even though He does not place Himself in explicit opposition to ritualistic religiosity, He is seen nowhere as attaching any great importance to it, either. Of course, He prays; but prayer for Him is different from prayer as we practise it. He prayed on mountaintops and in gardens, rarely in synagogues. When He went to attend the Festival of the Jesus, He went to the community of invalids at Bethsaida and not into the grand Temple of Jerusalem. There is a significant contrast between the hurly-burly of the Temple carnival and the spiritual agenda of human liberation that Jesus pursues at Bethesda. Religions have their festivals; but spirituality is in itself the festival; the festival of liberation.

The contrast between the festival in progress in Jerusalem Temple and its spiritual counter-culture being unfolded at the pool of Bethsaida is, to me, hugely significant. I feel instinctively at one with the latter. The first is a divine outreach; the second is a human over-reach. The more its size and splendour increase, the more lost I feel amidst it. While standing inside the cathedrals in the UK and Europe, I could not help wondering how anyone could have a God-experience in them. It is not an accident that worship died out in many of them. I could not imagine Jesus feeling at home in them or about them.
To me, intimacy with Jesus Christ –cf. ‘Abide in me, and I in you’- is better attained through partnership with the ‘Word become flesh’ in the warp and woof of life. Borrowing an image from the third chapter of Revelation I would say, it is easier for me to feel intimate with the Jesus who stands and knocks at the door than the one who is represented within the framework of formality, where the Word resonates as a droning ensemble of words.

Fortunately, I don’t have to relate Jesus ‘only’ through liturgical formalism and church polity. Jesus as an expression of God’s love for the world (Jn.3:16), is engaged with the world –the world of hurts, wounds, deprivations and aberrations, as Mother Teresa realized. God abides with those who suffer. He is to be found where human dignity is crushed; where the poor and the oppressed thirst and hunger for justice, where human beings endure unspeakable suffering, where helpless human beings –especially, women and children- are violated and doors of justice are slammed against them. Being with them opens the door to intimacy with the Jesus Christ.

The Suffering Servant is intimate with me. It suffices that He is. At this level, the thought of helping Jesus via indigenisation jars on me. He is the living waters that flows through the parched life of life, even we they are unconscious of it. It is not necessary that the dry land knows the name of the river that waters it. It suffices that life is kindled in it. Intimacy is just another name for this life-kindling.

Valson Thampu