There was a death in the village

Yesterday was a difficult day in Jogiwara. I woke to cries of anguish when Hari’s mother discovered the lifeless body of her oldest son. The sun was barely up. Hari came into my house unannounced and told me that his brother had died in the night. I got up, put on some clothes, and went to the room where this lovely, friendly man’s body lay. His face had been covered with the blanket that had kept him warm during his last cold hours. 

People had already started to gather. There is no ritual book. Tradition takes over. It is all unspoken. People talk amongst themselves, but there are very few words spoken. No one has to tell anyone what to do. People know their roles exactly. The men and the women separate. The women gather around his mother and his wife. They fill one side of the room and sit quietly. Some of the women cry, but surprisingly, no one tries to comfort their mother. They just listen silently; they help her when she gets up. The young girls sit with the women. His nieces cry. At some point, Hari’s middle daughter tells me tearfully she doesn’t know what to do. She looks at me. I cannot help. Saying I am sorry is not enough, or it feels totally inadequate. 

There are almost no tears among the men. The young boys, the oldest of whom is his son, who is just 20, stay close to the men and help where they can, but they look a bit lost. Later at the cremation ground, his young son will be the only person dressed in ceremonial white to light the fire. I get the impression that this is one life lesson that has to be learnt by imitation. A few men sit with the body opposite the women. His uncles, both the Sikhs and Hindus, are joined by one Tibetan, a monk who lives in the village. He married, but still shaves his head. All the men are older than this young father. He was not yet 50. He had been sick. He had been in the hospital, but his death was still sudden. I try to read the hidden signs of grief, but I am lost. The women show much more emotion than we are comfortable with in the West. The men are far more restrained.

More men gather, but for the most part, stay outside the room. More arrive. I notice that some of them begin to disappear into the forest that abuts the house. A steady line begins to shuttle back and forth, carrying wood, large logs, and small brush. My guess is that a jeep has arrived on the road to carry the wood to the cremation ground. Each village has its own. I have been to three cremations during my time here. The first was an ex-pat Brit. It was traditional; the Indians took over; we, his western friends, stood and watched. Then my cook's mother died. We went to a gnat more distant from the village, down a long, steep path to the river.  

After about 3 hours, his body is carried from the room to a wide area outside the house. Some of the men begin to prepare it for burning. There are elements to add, flowers, seeds, and a yellow scarf. A more colorful blanket is spread over his body, and he is carried to another jeep on a pallet. If there are prayers I don’t hear or understand.

By the time I reach the cremation grounds, the bottom of the pyre has been stacked tightly with kindling underneath.. Only men are allowed; a large number are doing the work of carrying and preparing the logs. The pandit actually seems more like a work foreman than a priest. The fire must burn for at least 5 hours so that the ash is fine enough to be carried to the Ganges, 11 hours away. Suddenly, four or five women push in. They cry and shout. Again, I am startled by the indifference of the men. After a few minutes, the women are ushered out. Then his body, enclosed in a metal grate, is moved onto the huge stack of wood that came from the forest next to my house. It feels intimate. More work assembling more heavy branches on his small body with care. Many hands. The priest has to make sure that the fire does its job and burns his body, and that the logs don’t fall and spill his ashes into the wind. They have to make it to Rishikesh. His assistant smokes a cigarette. It’s just a job. 

It has taken a long time, but when his son lights the fire, it starts quickly. If the wood were green, it would seem to burn hot. The men take off their shoes and put either green leaves, what’s left at the beginning of winter, or small pieces of wood, soaked in water, into the fire. We wash our hands and leave. 

Taking about talking about God

A correspondent was asking if the Nicaean Creed's phrase "True god of true god" implied a multiplicity of gods,

Can I post a fairly long response? There is a piece missing from this conversation. In the days of Google Translate, we think that there is a simple equivalency between words of different languages. That is especially true when it comes to language about God, god, gods, Greek gods, the Hebrew god of Abraham, Allah etc. They are all words that stem from a particular time and place.

The Council of Nicaea was held in 325 in a town in what we today call Turkey after the emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople. It was the first council in the history of the Christian church to attempt to address the entire body of believers. Constantine convened it to resolve the controversy of Arianism, a doctrine that held that Christ was not divine but a created being.

So it is not about a multiplicity of gods. It is about the “essence” of god and Jesus. It was also the beginning of the move (or maybe an expression of a movement already afoot) to formulate church doctrine in terms of Greek philosophy. The council fathers (no mothers represented) were trying to formulate a statement declaring that the Lord Jesus was (and is) god by asserting that he was (and is) of the same essence as god.

The language of the Council was both Greek and Latin. The official text coming out of the Council was Greek. I don’t know Greek, and I can't be precise even with a dictionary. In Latin however, God of gods does not refer to any multiplicity of gods. I think it is probably best described as a logical tautology: “God is of the essence of God.” Deum verum de Deo vero; natum, non factum; ejusdemque substantiae qua Pater est. As a matter of fact, looking at the Latin, the elaboration of the tautology, “light from light” (light is always of the essence of light) seems to be missing, perhaps an addition or a variant text.

What we have is the council's answer to the followers of Arius. Jesus is truly god of the truly god, he was born (as a human while still remaining god) but not made (in the same way that god made Adam). He, the Father and the son and the spirit (filioque) are substantially the same. The filioque would drive another split, but that just gets way too complicated. I vote for Unitarianism just because it’s simpler and more beautiful, but that’s a pond I don’t want to dip my toes into here.

Driving in India as Spriritual Practice

Let’s begin our journey by taking a spin around an Indian traffic circle. For rigid westerners, the driving here is totally insane; thinking that the roadside altar dedicated to Mother Teresa of Calcutta actually points to an Indian Catholic church is as misdirected as believing that the road crew in charge of installing shrines had a master plan. 

I wondered if following the blue dot on Google Maps could help me trace the route that the Apostle Thomas took to India. After an interesting side trip into Nestorian Christianity and questions about the exact nature of Jesus as both divine and human, I decided to return to the original focus of my exploration. 

Continuing my madcap trip around the Indian traffic circle, I wound up in Chennai, where I completed an informal pilgrimage to the three basilicas dedicated to one of the Apostles of Jesus. I visited the Basilica of Apostle Thomas, and felt that it pointed to something larger than just maintaining the prevailing view of Christianity.

I’m going to try to construct a meditation about Thomas. Let me try to rip away some of the garbage I think surrounds Thomas, and point to why I think we might pay attention to him as we meander through India, or the world.

I will posit that we don’t know much about Thomas because he was not a church guy. I think he actually might have been the smart ass, geeky kid, maybe even an obnoxious asshole.  I found this brief article about the “Gospel of Thomas” by Elaine Pagels and a talk she delivered at Stanford 17 years ago, My friend Bonnie Johnson would have loved Pagels’ work, and you might appreciate how Thomas sides with the slaves who are unwillingly forced to disrupt things trying to get a high caste lady’s sedan chair to the front of the crowd. 

After Jesus was crucified, the Apostle James and a few others stayed in Jerusalem, preached about the risen Jesus, and kept kosher. Paul went off trying to translate his take on radical conversion into Greek, adopting the first non-Jewish cultural idiom. Peter traveled to Rome, where he, according to legend, set the course for the Teaching of Jesus to dominate the Western world. 

But Thomas apparently went in the exact opposite direction; he struck out for India, alone or with maybe a few followers. The churches and the communities he established were not as cohesive as the ones established in the Greek and Roman worlds. Maybe my speculation that the Indians were just not going to submit to conforming beliefs way back then, like right now, is basically correct, and any communities he established disappeared or were absorbed by local cults. India in the first years of the common era was religiously similar to what I experience today, mystics and wandering sadhus.

The most famous story about Thomas, and he is only mentioned a few times in the official record, is that he did not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead because he hadn’t seen him, that he would not believe until he actually placed his hands into the wounds of the torture that had killed Jesus. So Jesus appeared and held out his hands with the wounds still open. Thomas says, My Lord and my God, I believe. Then Jesus says:  "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed [are] they that have not seen, and [yet] have believed.” Pagles says that this is the formal, or dominant church, getting a recalcitrant believer to cast aside his or her doubts and enter into the fold. But something else might have been going on.

What if our Thomas was really just a stubborn guy who not only demanded a different kind of evidence when it came to belief, but insisted on an interpretation of the message of Jesus that included everyone, not just the proper ladies but also her slaves, the outcasts, even the homeless? And since the older Apostles in charge couldn't forbid him from coming to the Lord’s table, they sent him to India instead, telling stories about him to bar him from the proper European landholdings.

You don’t have to join me in India to upset the picnic table. That is not a rhetorical question.

The ride around India (or anywhere) is much better with a companion; I remember Ashish Gupta driving for the first time in India, in Goa, where the traffic rules are slightly more recognizable for the likes of us. It is the main headquarters of the Jesuits in India and has been since about 1543, plus or minus, so there is a bit more ingrained European sense of order in some things. But Ash still almost got us killed. My last longish trip here was twice to Amritsar, where I got my Covid Vaccination. A 12-hour round trip to a private hospital that offers vaccinations to foreigners. It really did save my life, and I was scared to death on the highway across Punjab, where drivers think nothing of driving against traffic on a two-lane divided highway if it gets them closer to home. 

So I don't have any real questions. It is more of a floating inquiry--how we open to the Spirit for more than just pinpointing a destination. My observation is that it's almost as if to thwart our good intentions, sometimes the movement of the Spirit is like barreling up the freeway in the wrong direction, or maybe to be accurate, facing that guy who needs to get back to his cows who's barreling towards us, and we know we really shouldn't trust his driving. 

And suppose you can't join me in India (not a declaration or assessment but a kind of wild daydream--you, me, and Rinku driving across the high Himalayan plains in Kashmir!). In that case, we still travel as spiritual companions and check out Saint Thomas. What a blessing.

Of course, after all that travel--a postcard!