Temples, Fishermen, and Children

Wednesday, 10 December 2008. Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. 10:35 p.m.

South India is home to numerous towns and cities with elaborate and intricately designed Hindu temples. Here one finds the best examples in the world of what is called Dravidian architecture, developed by the Palluva people who ruled here in the 800s A.D. Dravidian temples are crowded, “busy” to the Western eye, formations with detailed carvings everywhere. They usually have central shrines, but sometimes the carvings overwhelm everything else. I was chauffeured – along with the minister, a driver, and three elders – to Mahabalipuram, about 40 miles south of Chennai, on the Bay of Bengal. Here the famous Shore Temple includes important anaconic (non-human-representational) images of the sustaining god Shiva. Mahabalipuram is a treasure trove for art, architecture, and religious lore scholars, but I found the more simple relief carvings called “Arjuna’s Penance” the most to my liking. Here, among the elephant and other figures, stands the warrior Arjuna in a pose of repentance (balancing on one leg) while the great god Shiva stands over him.

These images provide an opportune time to speak about the way Hindu art tells the great stories of the gods and goddesses. For a large population of people who could not read or write, images portraying the stories on temple buildings and rock walls make the stories accessible, and they keep the stories alive for ever new generations. (In Christian medieval Europe, a similar approach is used to tell the biblical stories, through mosaics, frescoes, and sculptures in cathedrals.) But for the Hindus, it is not simply a matter of communication. As Huston Smith says, “In Hinduism art is religion, and religion is art.” Part of what he is saying, I think, is that Hindus embrace all of life – materially, culturally, socially, and spiritually – in their religion.

In Chennai, I have been a bit frustrated, for I wanted to see and experience “real Indian religion and life,” but I’m spending almost all of the time with Church of Christ evangelists while visiting area congregations. And yet, once again my presuppositions and assumptions have been exposed: my hosts are indeed living “real Indian religion and life,” as second and third generation Christians, largely independent of American influences. They are certainly conservative, seeing themselves as separate from the denominations, but they are living a faith on their own terms in their own culture.

I’ve also been disappointed that my hosts here seem uninterested in seeing varieties of Hindu temples, and that they seem not to know much about Hinduism. But then I realized that (a) having anything to do with Hinduism connotes to them participation with idolatry, and (b) that they know about as much about Hinduism as an average Texas evangelical Christian knows about Roman Catholic rituals and saints. This has been a major discovery for me, but it does highlight the long tradition of rich religious diversity in India.

Two moments with these Christians captured my heart today. First, Roy (the Chennai evangelist) introduced me to two fishermen who had been persecutors but now were Christians; they welcomed me with this huge flower thing that I’m now told is called a samandi. Then they took me to meet Mary, the first convert in Mahabaliparum, who then brought the fishermen to Christ. We shared drinks and prayer in Mary’s home (her husband was away fishing), which also serves as the church for 14 members.

Notice in the photo: this home/church is no more than a lean-to shelter, given to the couple after the tsunami took their earlier home away. The Chennai church provided Mary with a boat, which she and the other Christians use to provide for their basic needs, giving 25% back to the church.

Mary and her husband, after they realized that they could not take care of their children, gave them up to the Chennai church’s childrens home for orphans. Most of the children there have been picked up from the street, or left at the church’s doors. The little girl I’m holding was one of two left wrapped in paper at the church building in Chennai. Our visit to the childrens home was celebratory; the children all treated me like a king, sang songs and quoted verses, and held my hands. Notice in the photos how very basic this “home” is. Simple or not, the home has helped many children for the last ten years, including one young man I met at morning prayer who had just graduated from college.

By CPS standards in America, this home would be shut down certainly, and if it wasn’t, none of us would likely want to live there loving the children. And by American freedom standards, none of us would want to call Mary’s lean-to shack a home, and we’d certainly not want it taken over by the whole church at any given moment.

We have much to learn.
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With Christians

Wednesday 10 Dec 2008. Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. 5:30 a.m

Following an afternoon walk through this neighborhood in Northwestern Chennai, I gathered with the local elders for a greeting and soon found myself their honored guest. Through a translator, I answered doctrinal questions about commitments and fellowship – whom should one follow, family or brothers and sisters in Christ? – they honored me with a ceremonial shawl and welcomed me into their church. Then it was on to a weekly preachers gathering, where some 50 or so area evangelists met for worship and Bible study. Guess who was asked to preach? It was clear by then that the stay in Chennai will be different than anything else on this trip.

In the photo I am surrounded by the local leading evangelist, Roy, and his father, the early convert of A.C. Bailey. Roy’s father worked as an engineer while preaching out of his house, now the church building behind us in the photo. When he retired, he was offered a pension or a flat. He took the flat, which he still has to rent, at about $250 a month for twenty years, before it is his property. But this two-family apartment is located exactly across from his earlier home, now the church building, and the flat makes a perfect guest house for traveling evangelists, local elders, and foreign tourists.

Roy has baptized more than 1700 persons in India since he began preaching 12 years ago. He is always on the go, to villages nearby and far, and increasingly he and his rural brothers have become objects of persecution. Seeing scars on the faces of these men, and hearing them sing in full voice with vibrancy, can only humble my Western Christian complacency.

The persecutors are apparently tied to a broad political/religious movement in India, the Hindutva Movement. This group, says economist Amartya Sen (in The Argumentative Indian) is trying to recast contemporary India in the ways of the Vedic Hindu culture. They argue that only the old Hindu ways of caste and honoring certain gods is correct, and they are essentially trying to keep india Hindu, or conservative Hindu. But as Sen and many, many others note, India has always been a pluralistic culture – it was dominantly Buddhist for a thousand years, even – and India’s strength is tied to its democratic governance and tolerant people. There is in the Hindutva Movement a similar kind of idealistic restorationism that recurs around the world. In the United States, many long for a view of Christian America that never was; in the Arab world, large numbers seek an Islamic caliphate that only once existed in a small part of the Muslim world; in Turkey the conservative movement works for the end to secular democracy and the return to an Islamic state. And they are not new – the biblical Pharisees were a similar restorationism. No doubt there are sincere motives in all such movements: a betrayal of faith and purity signals immorality, idolatry, and national collapse, they see. But in the end, all of these groups fail to realize that life’s contexts change, that social and economic progress bring about modernization, that even in the oldest stories and models of “pure” societies, innovations were always challenging and forcing adaption.

(By the way, I suspect that the renaming of so many towns – Madras to Chennai, for example – is partly connected to this conservative movement’s influence. Probably more so, however, it is due to a national pride that wants to redefine the new India as separate from its British colonial image.)
As I write now, at 6:15, I hear the early morning songs. But this time, they are of the Christian men, just a few steps from my bedroom window. I shall join them shortly, and no doubt be asked to provide a word, and a prayer.

Christianity is in fact a part of older – if not the oldest – India. The Christians here, whatever their particular denominational flavor, all claim a certain pride in the apostle Thomas. A long tradition holds that Thomas came here soon after the resurrection of Jesus, and that he established the church here in South India, but by the 400s it had for the most part disappeared. Roman Catholics came as missionaries in the late middle ages / early Reformation, but it was the British who imported Christianity in large measure during the nineteenth century. As far as I know, the Church of Christ efforts here began with J.C. Bailey and his wife, and today the Sunset Church in Lubbock maintains substantial works in areas around Bangalore. What impresses me most about Roy and the churches in the Chennai area is the truly indigenous, autonomous congregations. They seem to have been influenced only in limited ways by American mission efforts, at least in the last 20 or so years.

Away to morning prayers….
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