The Tin Drum, a novel by Guenter Grass, is about the Nazi past of Germany, which brought more destruction than creation: In it we read of twenty-three deaths as against three births in war time. Through this novel Gunter Grass succeeded in making the German society confront their past. An injury that causes dwarfism in the protagonist of the novel, Oskar Matzerath, described at the end of the second book of the novel, bears comparison to the growth of Germany after a destructive war. The destruction that happened during the war was a nightmare, but correcting the mistakes of the past, is the only way forward.

The former president Richard Von Weizsacker in his speech said, “All of us whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by the past and liable for it. The young and old generations must and can help each other to understand why it is vital to keep alive the memories. It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. This is not possible; it cannot be subsequently modified or undone. However, anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity of their past, is prone to new risks of infection.” Grass’s novel is a post-war sensation in German literature for its concept of moving from the past to the present by correcting mistakes, and the novel can be regarded as the conscience of the German Nation.

The Syro-Malabar Church has come out of a big crisis which should not have taken place in the first place. Let bygones be bygones. It was a crisis of leadership, a leadership which refused to be spiritual and moral, a leadership relied on cunning rationality. But sense returned to the Church and the Pope was instrumental for it by repeatedly speaking of the importance of conversation. He told the Syro-Malabar Church: “The guiding criterion, the truly spiritual one that derives from the Holy Spirit, is communion: this requires us to do a self-examination of our dedication to unity and our faithful, humble, respectful and obedient care for the gifts we have received.” We read in Emmanuel Levinas about a Jewish thinker who said, “Spiritual life is essentially a moral life.” He further wrote that the very act of conversation is ethics and went on to say “language is justice… The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face…” It is a pity that it took three years for bringing the conflicting parties around a table for a face-to-face conversation in the Syro-Malabar Church. Festering wounds were inflicted during these years on both sides. We have to realise that, even while fighting as foes, we are brothers sharing the one and the same Eucharist. The wound that the controversy has created in the Church is mortal. The world community as well as Kerala’s secular community is scandalised beyond limit. Above all, the youth have been driven out of the Church by the unchristian and unethical way we fought and engaged in repeated scandals. We have to look back in contrition on our refusal to hear this cry of God: “Hear O Israel” (Deut. 6:4-9). I return to Gunther Grass’s novel: Oscar who refuses to grow in a world of the Nazis asks child Jesus to beat the drum like him and intervene: “And Oskar was kneeling at the left-side-altar, trying to teach the boy Jesus how to drum, but the rascal wouldn’t drum, offered no miracle. Oskar had sworn back then and swore again outside the locked church door: I’ll teach him to drum yet, sooner or later.” We fail to hear the beat of his drum, for we are not attuned to him. We do not listen to the prayer of the other. “The speech which already dawns in the face that looks at me looking introduces the primary frankness of revelation.”

We created an apocalyptic revolution of nihilism. Why did it happen? The answer will only be found in the opposite of narcissism, not in destructive ‘sameness’ but in ‘otherness’, in the experience of the Other who appears in its absolute vulnerability and as a place where God as the Total Other comes to mind. Our minds were shut in our fight. Even the concept of the Messiah will have to be redefined. The Messiah is not so much of a figure that miraculously will save all people: ‘I’ become the Messiah for the Other when he or she risks to be overwhelmed and destroyed by the dominating powers.