Valson Thampu

The French Revolution gave humankind three immortal ideals: liberty, equality, fraternity! Liberty, said Martin Buber, went westwards, domesticated itself in North America, and degenerated into license. Equality went east words, made Eastern Europe its home, and produced the faceless collectivity. Fraternity, Buber laments, ‘had no takers’.
It was this concern for humankind’s inherent indifference to its own fundamental welfare – the anomaly that human beings often act zealously and sacrificially, against their own best interests – that made me write a couple of pieces earlier in this column, on the on-going Ukraine-Russia blood-letting. Both countries will, no doubt, theoretically endorse the need for fraternity. Both countries are nourished by one of the richest traditions of Christianity. How can the land of Dostoevsky, Solovyov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn be spiritually bankrupt for long?
Tolstoy’s novella, Master and Man, portrays the birth of fraternity between a master and his slave in a situation of extreme physical rigour. Fraternity, according to him, has the power to transform master and slave alike, enabling them to discover that, in the final analysis, they belong together. The Good News for the slave is that the master may become human. The Greeks and Romans valued friendship greatly. That betrayal by a friend, Brutus, broke Julius Caesar’s heart proves the value that the Roman culture ascribed to friendship. In the Bible, Jesus is betrayed by a disciple; that too, ‘with a kiss’. Betrayal is the seed of humanity’s sorrow. So, God takes the initiative to reconcile human beings one with another. Reconciliation is the spiritual antidote to betrayal.
The tragedy of the Ukraine-Russia cauldron of suffering is that there is none to remind the leaders of both countries that they are at least neighbours, if not kins, besides being Christians who are mandated to love one another. Putin goes as far as to want a Christmas ceasefire, but does not want to go far enough to abide by the spiritual vision of the one whose birth anniversary Christmas celebrates. The pattern is familiar: ritual and reality part company.
I am reminded of what Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about France in his introductory essay for Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. France, he said, was for long the name of a country. ‘Now it is the name of a disease’. It is not inappropriate to apply Sartre’s words to the putative ‘God’s own land’. Kerala is fast becoming a disease.
It worries me that churches and Christian leaders in Kerala do not regard these aggravating signs of social illness significant enough to address. Sermons are preached urging Christians to be ‘the salt of the earth and the light of the world’. The function of salt is to accentuate dormant goodness. The capacity for kinship, present in everyone, needs to be activated, given that the world is organized on a contrary paradigm. Light, likewise, symbolises the calling to respond to situations in terms of what they lack. The light that God willed into existence -’Let there be light (Gen.1:3) – was the light of creativity. Creativity is the ability to manifest the potential, as God did in Creation. ‘Let there be…’ clearly means, ‘It isn’t there, but can be there, and needs to be there’.
Michelangelo was asked, ‘How does one create a masterpiece like David?’. It is simple, he said. ‘You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David’. The Christian task is similar: to chip away, from the given situation, everything that shouldn’t be there, going by the will of God for us and for the world. Bad blood, for instance, should not persist; so ‘love your enemies’. Bring love, if you are a child of God, into a world of organized lovelessness. Creativity is the irreducible essence of every response that is Christian. Healing is nothing, if not creative.
The wise men of the world -Putin, being only one among the many in that illustrious company- stand Michaelangelo on his head. They add grotesque and delusional extensions to the given block. So, Russia, according to Putin, faces ‘an existential threat’ from Ukraine. Ukraine, on its part, adds many a chip to its own block, and insists that it can survive, given how murderously its neighbour is disposed towards it, only with the help of the US, the NATO, Europe, and the rest of the world. I call this ‘satanic creativity,’ which pushes Michelangelo’s ‘David’ deeper into the block of stone. So, he who sets out to make a David ends up forging a Goliath.
This, in the words of St Paul, is ‘the pattern of the world’ (Rom.12:2). The third temptation of Jesus Christ is a symbolic warning that this pattern is forever with us. Atop the mountain, Satan seeks to disfigure the block Jesus would work at. If the nations of the world belong to Satan, the prospect does not good promising for Jesus, right? In that sense, it makes better sense to be in league with him. After all, it is the end, not the means, that matters. The temptation to succumb to the temptation, to adopt its perverse logic is real and powerful. That is the pattern of the world.
In this regard we need to be concerned especially about the growing bonhomie today between a certain section of the Christian leaders and members of the Sangh Parivar. Admittedly, they too must be loved, but loved as neighbours, and not as patrons. We could feel tempted to adopt the ‘light’ of the Parivar and borrow the baggage of Hindutva. The metaphor of the ‘family’ (parivar), merits attention. Allergy to otherness and craving for homogeneity are comparatively greater in family. Jesus breached the worldly idea of family in favour of the Kingdom of God re-appropriation of it. Only when family is understood in this spiritually enlarged fashion that it becomes capacious enough to accommodate the ideal of universal kinship. The question that Jesus raised two thousand years ago are acutely relevant today. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother’ (Mtt.12:8o-50).