Everyone is aware, even concerned, that Kerala is drifting into greater societal and cultural ill-health. Surprisingly, there is very little discussion on what may be done to stem the rot. Does it mean that we are giving up on ‘God’s own land’? Or, is it that our faith in God’s competence is so high and comprehensive that we would rather leave everything to him to mend or bend as he may please?
Biblically, the Church is mandated to be a healing presence in any given context. Preaching, as Jesus envisaged it, should have a healing impact. We are to preach ‘and’ heal. That is, healing is basic to preaching, if it is to be something more than the ‘sounding of brass and the tinkling of cymbals.’ We are to serve as the salt of the earth and the light of the world. So, we must have a beneficial, reformative influence on the context. To fail in this respect is, in the words of Jesus, to be the ‘salt that has lost its saltiness’ that merits ‘trampling underfoot’.
How are we to, if we are so inclined, evolve a response model as an agent of healing in the Kerala context? Is it too audacious to believe that we can be?
The three pillars of a society are: family, work, and education. These are also the points of contact between the faith community and the society. The question arises, therefore, if we have a contextually proactive spiritual outlook, powered by a sense of mission, focused on these crucial spheres. Incidentally, these foci of engagement also the ones most at drift at the present time.
As Christians we believe that family is a God-ordained institution with well-defined spiritual scope and substance. Family was the womb of the Incarnation. It must forever remain so. That’s where the Word is most apt to become flesh. Nothing else can substitute family in the plan of God. The erosion of family results in all-round homelessness. Far too may children are, de facto, orphans in their own homes. They grow up deprived of the ‘milk and honey’ – nourishment and sweetness- of life.’ This emotional famine has sinister inter-generational implications. This is the outcome of the wider erosion of relationships, brought about, to a large extent, by the rise of individualism, characterized by obsession with individual rights and personal liberty.
This is further aggravated by the ascendancy of the pleasure-seeking, pleasure-maximizing materialistic culture in which home as a locale of happiness loses out to the hotel-restaurant-fast food-outlets-combine. The shallowness bred by soulless consumerism takes a toll on interpersonal relationships, weakening the foundation of family. The obsession with rights and the corresponding indifference to duties makes family an aggregation of individuals, not an organic, closely-knit human web nourished by love, mutual commitment and the solidity of selfless service. A famine of lovelessness is sweeping through our society, and family is enfeebled by this deprivation. Home becomes, as an American poet put it, a place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Well, we are not be there as yet; but we may not be far from it either.
Family and Church are the schools where men and women can be trained and equipped for the art of living wholesomely. The extent to which this is addressed is anybody’s guess. Even the basic fact that where there is ‘faith’ there will also be ‘faithfulness’ in every aspect of one’s life is mostly ignored. A major issue here is the deflection of attention from life-here-and-now to the life-to-come. Christian family as a spiritual space in which it is possible to pray meaningfully, ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ is nowhere in our scheme of things. In our homes, bodies are fed, and the rest of the human personality left to starve. Hardly anyone realizes that ‘life in its fullness’ is the norm for family life, not just for Christians, but for humankind in general.
As regards work, it doesn’t have to be argued that ‘work culture’ is the proverbial Achilles’ heel of Kerala. It is to our credit that we are ahead of other Indian states in respect of the rights and dignity of the working class; but we lag behind them vis-à-vis work culture. Work is a powerful determinant in character-formation. Negativity to work and inclination towards indulgence belong together. Work nurtures in us a sense of human solidarity. The lazy lack fellow-feeling and compassion. That was why Jesus said about himself, ‘The Son of Man has come not to be served, but to serve…’ Negativity to work and the idolization of consumerist enjoyment constitute a fertile breeding ground for corruption, callousness and cruelty. This fuels domestic violence, including dowry deaths.
Education has tremendous potential to serve as a healing influence on society. But this remains the most neglected aspect of how all its stakeholders understand and practise education. Education, as of now, is aligned to personal ambition, covetous-consumerist lifestyle goals and the appropriation of privileges. The development of the humane in the human hardly figures in this significant resource for nation-building. Today it sounds naive to suggest that education must be geared to nation-building. Not surprisingly, education is the last priority for the State. A greater concern for us should it be that the so-called ‘Christian Education’ differs from the prevailing mode of individualist-consumerist idea of education in no significant way.
Shouldn’t it be possible for the Churches in Kerala to constitute a study-cum-research centre -even as a measure of concreting Christian unity- to monitor and address issues pertaining to the three areas noted above? That is what we’d do, if we have a sense of mission and ‘faith-as-large-as-a-mustard-seed’ that we can make a beneficial difference. The worth of a faith community or people-group depends entirely on what it does, as well as the scope of its engagement with the given context. No individual or community that exists for oneself or itself can attain respect or relevance.
When a faith community loses its spiritual mission-dynamism, it reimagines its mission as mere survival. Churches thus could come into a mode in which they exist for themselves. It would then seem that the only sensible option is to ‘turn one’s face away from challenging realities’, as the priest and the Levite did in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Faith, in contrast, implies the inspired dynamism to engage with the given context so as to make the Will of God prevail in it. And God’s Will for all people is that ‘they should have life in its fullness’.
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