Valson Thampu

 The most haunting word from the Cross on Calvary, for me, is ‘Father, forgive; for they know not what they do’. What was it that they did? They tried to save their religion. A goal, no doubt, laudable on the face of it. But in the process, they killed what they were trying desperately to preserve. This is the scariest irony in religious life. Do wrong for one’s own sake, it’s secular crime. Do wrong for God’s sake, including stoning prophets to death and crucifying the Messiah, it becomes religious zeal. It is rarely realized that religious atheism constitutes the framework of the Passion Narrative; for there can be no worse form of atheism than killing God. How does this come about?

Perhaps the first thing we need to reckon is the psychology of closed spaces. Religions create – Judaism had a special genius for this – impregnably enclosed spaces set apart to house the majesty and holiness of God. Apprehensions of purity and pollutions are native to religious enclaves. The foremost symbol of this in respect of the Jerusalem Temple was the ‘Holiest of the Holies’, which only the High Priest could enter annually with fear and trembling. While this seems reasonable, there is also a pathological aspect to it.

To be within enclosed spaces is to develop, gradually and unawares, a besieged mentality. Whenever human beings created an ego-diagram or a cosmic-diagram, they used framing lines either in the form of a circle or of a rectangle. To have an individual ego is to have walls erected around oneself. Walls include and exclude. Whatever is outside of the wall of ego is the fearsome ‘other’. The ego needs to be protected from everything different to itself, which is the logic of the insecurity that skirts the human ego at all times. To have an ego is to have to live in anxiety. The ego has a knack for inventing enemies and dangers where none exists.

What is true of the individual ego is also true of the collective ego. Every religion implies a collective ego, with fixed boundaries of taboos, prescriptions, proscriptions and otherness. Christians, despite endorsing the Incarnation, drive a wedge between the church and the world, the sacred and the profane. ‘Profane’, by the way, literally means ‘outside the temple premises’. So, the profane is a by-product of the temple. The limitations and apprehensions of the community ego are projected on to God. Thus it comes about that God is omnipresent but he is confined to places of worship. He is omnipotent, but has to be protected by us from his adversaries. He is the Creator of all, but he belongs only to us. All these bespeak a besieged mentality.

Consider now the religious life of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. There was no enclosed space wherein they had fellowship with God. The Garden was as much their worship place as it was their work place. When the Jews were a wandering people, God was present with them in the form of an Ark. God moved with them. When they settled down, God too did. The world was divided, as a result, between Jews and Gentiles. Even as the urban culture dawned, the idea of building a palace for God, comparable to the splendour of the king’s palace, gripped the Jews. How could the heavenly king be homeless when the earthly kind lived in splendour? Advances in architecture came to the aid of man in creating a suitable accommodation for God. The Jerusalem Temple has two major nuances for us. First, it is a marvel of architecture. Second, it denotes an unprecedented extent of distancing God for the warp and woof of life.

We don’t live by the means and mechanisms that our forefathers used a few centuries ago. We don’t even worship in buildings similar to what they used. Yet we assume that God has nothing new to reveal to us relevant to the adventure of our life in the present. God is light; but this light can shine only from the dim, distant past. But Jesus has mandated that we should ‘seek’ and find. Seek only the resources of the past? Not the will of God for us in the present?

The problem here, as Fyodor Dostoevsky states in the Grand Inquisitor – is that religion is assumed to be a closed and perfected system which it is impious to change in any respect. This denotes the zeal to preserve, which makes the Jesus-mandated duty to ‘seek’ a religious offence. To seek is to be in a state of open-mindedness. That we cannot be, unless we dare to doubt the ultimate validity and absolute sufficiency of whatever is entertained –and how they are understood and lived- at any given point in time. So, it happens that being ‘poor in the spirit’, marked by sanctified scepticism, not blind faith and insensate cocksureness, is the appropriate disposition for true faith, the denial of which results in practical atheism. ‘The fool,’ writes the Psalmist, ‘says in his heart that there is no God’. He could well be doing so, even as he busies himself with preaching and proving the existence of God.