What is important, ultimately, is not what happens; but what we make of it. Events become significant, or insignificant, depending on the awareness that we bring to bear on them. Accordingly, history becomes absurd or teleological. To be teleological is to be guided by an over-arching purpose. Being ‘absurd’ implies its opposite. The Judeo-Christian idea of history and human predicament is teleological. So, when events happen, it becomes a Christian duty to ask, ‘Why?’. And to seek their meanings. ‘Writing on the wall,’ is, after all, a phrase of biblical origin. Writing on the wall is what everyone needs to decipher and heed. Whatever has larger meaning, and pertains to the shared destiny of a people, belong to this category.

The expulsion of Sr. Lucy from her order, for such charges as she is indicted for, is no ordinary event. Else, it would not have evoked deep resonance from diverse quarters. The mark of a community’s spiritual and cultural maturity is its capacity for objectivity. Objectivity is openness to truth. It is the ability to keep prejudices and knee-jerk reactions aside, and to weigh the pros and cons of developments and predicaments. The opposite of objectivity is partisanship, which slams the door against truth and justice. Partisanship is one of the issues illumined by the trial, condemnation and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Partisanship at work reads like this: “Tried. Found innocent. Condemned.” It can also read, “Tried. Found guilty. Let off.”

Now to the specifics. Order is basic to any ‘order’; especially a religious order. Only the willfully contumacious will argue to the contrary. In the biblical vision of things, human freedom is predicated on order. Adam and Eve forfeit their freedom, and come under the necessity of Nature, when they disobey God and exit the order of divine grace. God’s scheme of things – symbolized by Eden – is teleological, or purposive. Freedom, in the Garden of Life, is not an end in itself, or absolute. Adam and Eve, by refusing to abide by the discipline basic to the ‘order’ of Eden, invite exclusion from its felicity. It is a logical consequence, even if it seems harsh.

But ‘order’ -as understood in the Bible is sustained by the mystery of compassion that ‘surpasses all understanding.’ God had said emphatically that Adam would die on the same day that he ate the forbidden fruit. Yet he didn’t. We can circumvent the difficulty this poses by spiritualizing the idea of death; reading it as non-physical death. But, there can a different reading of it. God’s compassion supervened law, holding back in time the consequences of human transgression. He created, thereby, a space of grace that established a distance – a space, a gap – between offence and punishment. This is the moral space. It is only in physical laws that the near-simultaneity of offence and punishment – cause and effect – is inflexible. But for this ‘space of grace,’ human life would become impossible. History exists in this God-appointed space of grace. It also creates the anguish, so well expressed by the Psalmist, that the wicked thrive!

Now a word about the spiritual discipline of religious orders. Its roots lie far back in the Middle Ages. The instance of St Francis comes to mind. The ascetic rigor that St Francis (1181-1226) maintained generated an incomparable genre and genius of creativity. It was not order for the sake of order, which contradicts the teleological discipline. Invariably, those who established religious orders, including Fr Kuriakose Kuravilangad, were profoundly creative. Read the biography of any of them, and you will see it for yourself. The pioneering contributions that Fr Kuriakose made to the theatre traditions in Kerala are widely acknowledged. Kalabhavan too (established in Sept.1969 by Fr Abel), is of Catholic origin.

So, there is a dilemma hidden at the very root of religious orders. The spiritual discipline, maintained rigorously, nurtures profound forces of creativity and the passion for self-expression that goes with them. At the same time, the scope for exercising this creativity is hindered, except along designated grooves and avenues, not all of them being creative enough. Literary and artistic creativity, for example, was suspect. Yet, the Jesuit order produced a great poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins. A large number of early, pioneering scientists were Catholic priests. They were also the intellectual giants of Europe. Yet, the sphere of science continued to evoke, in some respects, religious anxieties.

I have no doubt at all that creativity is basic to the freedom that Christ has secured for us. Indeed, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit, inter alia, of creativity. The Spirit of God pervading over the waters was the prelude to Creation. Jesus Christ is profoundly creative.

Spirituality is a domain of historical dynamism. It must be so, for a tradition that identifies itself as ‘living faith.’ Museum pieces and mummies may remain indifferent to history, even as they survive in history. But living organisms have to be, if they are to exist at all, responsive to what Levi-Strauss termed their ‘life-world.’ A profound, dynamic sense of history, as Nicolai Berdyaev argued in ‘The Meaning of History,’ is the contribution of Christianity to humankind. We need to heed this, even if we do not go over the hill with Hegel and believe that history is God making himself, which dilutes the metaphysical impetus of history: an avoidable modern-secular prejudice.

Time will prove that the Sr Lucy issue is symbolic and proleptic. If so, it deserves to be handled with foresight and historical prescience. Obstinacy is not commitment. Nor is sledge-hammering a metaphor for authority-in-action. There is no authority, except what is derived from God and no authority is godly, if not exercised in a godly spirit; realizing, as I pointed out, that God, in His mercy, has placed life in the ‘space of grace,’ and not under the tyranny of law. Civilizations perished for overlooking this metaphysical foundation which alone sustains the material, historical superstructure of life.