- Valson Thampu
As the wars raged in Ukraine, in Congo, in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iran, between India and Pakistan, my whole being remained resounding with the words with which God inaugurated history: Let there be light! It seemed as though human beings were saying, Let there be darkness!
There is no spiritual tradition in the world which does not imagine God as light. So, it is not inappropriate to understand the scope and meaning of the First Pronouncement, as ‘Let the Divine become manifest’. Yet, when the Divine does become manifest via matter, it seems other than the Divine; but without being divided from God. We cannot see, or name God, even though we are in His image and likeness. Humankind as an integrated whole manifests the Divine; without any man, race, or nation, representing God.
As Jesus puts it, the original light is still within us (Matt 5:14). Every human being is a reflected ray of the Light that God is; and humankind, if God-oriented, is a festival of the Light, or the Deepawali of the Divine, so to speak. But ‘the light within’ exists only as a hidden, unexpressed, often frustrated, longing for God. The cause of that suppression is our absorption in the world of appearances. Hypocrisy, as Jesus knew, inheres in the religiosity of appearances.
The world of appearances is necessarily transitory, partial and perishable. In it, nothing remains the same from moment to moment, day to day. Change and instability, as Lord Buddha said, is the law of nature and life. But, within this scheme of transience, human beings remain thirsting for stability. Stability in relation to the temporal is security. Stability in relation to the Eternal is immortality.
Integration is the hallmark of Spiritual life. In it, time and Eternity co-exist. Alienation, or division, torments the temporal. The Spiritual is the manifestation of the Eternal within the temporal. Hence the insight in the Hebrews: Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Such an affirmation is irrelevant to the world of appearances; which is a plane of incessant change and decay. To the extent that human life is caught up in the temporal alone, it is subject to chronic disenchantment. ‘He who drinks this water,’ said Jesus, ‘will thirst again and again’.
While ‘thirsting again and again’ is symptomatic of living on inappropriate foundations -being oriented to the temporal alone- ‘thirsting’, as such, is a positive force. Because the ‘lost son’, in Jesus’s parable, ‘thirsted’ for his lost home he trudged his way back to his loving father. You thirst for two reasons: (a) you are in the ‘far country’ and (b) you still have a home to which you can return, if you so choose. This thirst is the essence of our spiritual life. Our soul is restless, as St Augustine said, until it attains oneness with God.
Human beings, when alienated from this at-one-ment with God, remain tempted to ‘play God’. The logic is simple. If you cannot be one with God, as Jesus was (cfr. Jn 10:30), the next best thing you can do is being god yourself. Such a man says: Let there be light; and there is darkness everywhere. Thus begin the Bible of the Almighty Man. The control-freaks in politics invoke God as development in vain. Their counterparts in religion take the name of God in vain.
All the while, because God is still God, humanity remains poised between ‘blessed life’ and ‘blighted life’. Men of the world flaunt and proffer the perks of the latter. Trump promises to make America ‘great’ again. To him, ‘greatness’ is Power: the power of the Dollar and the power of the military. The pity is that the American Bible Belt, and the bandwagon of Christian fundamentalism, echo the chorus, believing, as many in India too do, that Trump is the appointed messiah of Christianity world-wide. It is as if Jesus was a fool to have said ‘NO’ to the devil on the mountain-top. He said ‘NO’ to the alluring offer and ended up on the Cross. Trump says ‘YES’; and he becomes the saviour of Christianity today.
It is a quirk of history that the two most powerful men in politics and religion at present -Trump and the Pope- are American. Trump wants to be the centre of the world. Pope Leo XIV represents the potential alternative. Trump claims the loyalty of about 140 million Americans (less than half of the population). The Pope shepherds 1.4 billion Catholics. The latter should, therefore, be able to exert a counterbalancing influence on the world. Today, the world can ill-afford to have him fail in this regard.
Humungous thinking, strategizing and investing is done to dominate the world. Nothing comparable is done to influence the world spiritually. Christians have forgotten the God Jesus revealed in the Gospels: The God who ‘loves the world’. More specifically, they have forgotten Jesus’s mandate ‘to preach to the nations;’ as also the duty to be the ‘salt of the earth’ and ‘the light of the world’. We have withdrawn into our shells of false security and world-denying smugness. We exist for ourselves alone. Jesus says: ‘Behold, I send you like sheep among wolves’. This outward flow from our churches into the wide, wild world is the need of the hour. It was foreseen centuries before Jesus. Every God-conscious person and people-group must be like the river in the vision of Ezekiel. It originates from under the threshold of the temple, flows out and away from the church, gains in depth, and serves as a life-kindling influence wherever it flows.
Where there is no vision, says the Bible, peoples and nations perish. What is lacking today is not wealth or power, but a vision for the wholeness of life. It is not ‘rare earth minerals’ or the technology to colonize planets that humanity needs is repentance and the realization that we have taken the way of death, rather than the way of life.
‘I have come,’ said Jesus, ‘that they may have life; and life in all its fullness’. The quintessential Christian task is to practise, preach and propagate’ a way of life in which the Light of Life, rather than the Darkness of Death, becomes the choice of humankind. We need to shift from the religious agenda of conversion to the spiritual goal of transformation. So long as we fight shy of this goal, the Trumps, Putins and Netanyahus of the world will be your idols and golden calves that keep you safe by exterminating all your neighbours.
To repent is to go back to where we belonged, and to hear the benediction with which it all began: Let there be light!
