Really amazing Dalit Womanist (though she'd say feminist) lecturer told this story about the Dalits. Can't really shift it very powerful. Peeps here can't criticize India outwith sounding disloyal. But I think the caste system in a post-industrial world is an evil beyond the pale. Anyway final version here I think I have printed it out in which case I'll see what he thinks. But for now I get the feeling hard to judge with orientals, but I feel he thinks I am more of a contemplative would you like to stay on as a brother type more than would you want help finding the Mall and doing shopping. So I may get to stay longer. After this course talk of joining the spirituality class though i am still keen to perfect my mastery of Syriac. Found another gem among the lancastrians it is but a pure coincidental happenstance a mere contingency, yeah so what if she is blond and blue eyed. Not all aryans were the evil marauders of the Mohenjodaro empire, some of it was due to flooding.
The Herstory of Indian Christianity
as revealed through a redaction of
the Purana of Mar Thoma Sliha
and
the Legend of the Wandering Jew.
By Desmond M Coutinho
For Rev Fr Jose Nandikkara
Many eagles ride the wind currents above the Dharmaram. The seduction of Western Empirical Scientific method is to trap, dissect and quantify. The eastern style is to write the Windhover.
So let me tell you herstory. Once upon a time Mar Thoma came to India. He was a mysterious carpenter who built seven and a half churches here. He was a wonderworker who performed many miracles. He was put to death by a lance from which spilt water and blood and he was buried. But when they came to look for his body the tomb was empty. Some say his followers had taken his remains to the West. This much is revealed to us in the Purana or Acts of St Thomas the Apostle. The Syrian Church fathers speak of his coming to Edessa where there too he mysteriously overcame death and still worked great wonders for the people. He appears later as a wanderer through Europe and later America known in one version (that of Michael Lewis, The Monk) as the Great Moghul of India who travels under a curse and can never settle in any one home for the foxes have their holes and the birds of the air their nests but he has nowhere to lay his head. Demons and ghosts fear him. He does good wherever he wanders known by the fiery cross burning upon his forehead. Finally in 1878 at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe New Mexico a mysterious carpenter completed a miraculous spiral staircase in answer to the Loretto Sister’s prayer for help. Interestingly the sisters themselves claim that the mysterious carpenter is Joseph.
Mar Thoma Slihe is the Blessed Twin who is sent. In the Gospels he appears as Thomas Didymus, Hebrew and Greek for Twin the Twin. In Mark 9:1 Jesus states that there are some here present who will not taste of death until the Kingdom had come in power. This was taken to mean that some of the apostles may not die before the parousia (cf John 21: 21-23). Perhaps the prophecy foretells that Apostolic Churches cannot be completely destroyed (cf Matthew 16:18). From the beginning the herstory of Indian Christianity has been a story of Twins of whom only one is given a voice. As if the other twin struggles to break free from her gag as the Purana is retold over the centuries imposter twins emerge. Hence some argue that it is Bartholemew not MarThomas who evangelizes India. Or it is Thomas of Cana a merchant in the 5th century.
Because India is always multi-dimensional, complex, Russian dolls of riddle within paradox within Mysterium; recapitulating the Twin deep structure this Thomas has a wife and a mistress each providing a northern and southern parish of legitimate and illegitimate Mar Thoma Nasranis. Both the purana of Mar Thoma and the legend of the Wandering Jew highlight an essential theandric truth, that if you believe in Christ you will not die, and if you die believing in him he will raise you up. The karmic cycle of Samsara from the Hindu legacy of the Mar Thoma Nasranis is a typology of the eternal life of the Spirit. The Wheel is replaced by the Mar Thoma Sliba. Pentecost is our Moksha.
On a structural level Purana catechize Indians through the four purusarthas, Kama, Artha, Dharma and Swargam/Moksha, Love, Wealth, Duty and Liberation. The Purana of Mar Thoma takes the typology of Hindu Catechesis and retells them through what Tillich describes as broken myth. Thus Mar Thoma is given wealth by King Gondolphes but instead of making more palaces for him as his architect he gives the money to the poor. Instead of a building buildings to praise the king, he builds up people the new wealth of the Kingdom of Heaven. When he gives talks to the King’s harem instead of teaching them to be obedient buxom concubines he encourages them towards greater self-determination and introduces proto-feminist catechesis telling them that they are in control of their own bodies and that sex is not just a pleasure for the King, the chastity of the Kingdom. Dharma is the life of Mar Thoma to live the gospel service to God in love and truth fearless of the consequences. Thus the traditional purusarthas are represented in the Purana as the Evangelical Counsels. And the Swargam/Moksha that derives from these three liberates us into the kingdom of heaven upon earth, the Ramraj. In this world he begins eternal life and hence leaves no rotting corpse.
In terms of the myth of the eternal return. If the agricultural cycle happened only once it would be happenstance. It is by repetition that the coming of the monsoons derive gravity, become part of the theandric truth, instead of floating away into dark space. Indian culture knows these cycles as the three yuga. The purana of Thomas is prefigured in the Ramayana and from the Christian impact transmutes to purana of the later Bhakti Tradition of Tamil Nadu.
At the heart of the Purana of Mar Thoma and the Legend of the Wandering Jew is the truth that true faith is always a stumbling block, one which the builders reject. The story of the true church has always been one of persecution responded to with the joy of the spirit of life, and the alleluiah of the Resurrection. In addition they hint towards the eschaton whereby all will be reunited in Christ. For we so love our poor twin brother. We love his hard working simple honest ways. It is his smell we cannot stand. It’s not that we don’t want to give him voice. We fear his accent will make his words unintelligible.
During the imperial age of colonization they became the two lungs of the Church the Padroado Christians and it’s poorer twin the Mar Thoma Nazranis. Our elder brother in the church is Dalit to us because it is more Indian. Yet to escape a murderous band of Brahmans Mar Thoma at first transforms into a peacock the symbol of the local God. The lecturer on Hinduism complained that English has too many irregular verbs unlike Sanskrit with its pure root and conjugation system. Let me introduce an interesting irregular verb: We inculturate, You Indigenize, They are syncretic.
During the annual Shakti festival in Kerala pilgrimages are made to both Temple and Church. A wise lay Hindu woman puts it thus when we light a candle at the Church it is seen to flicker also in our Temple and vice-versa. There is only really one flame. In simple words an expression of the Advaita philosophy, or Rahner’s theology of anonymous Christianity. According to Dalrymple the parish priest dismisses the exercise as worse than worthless and shuts his door to it.
The wandering Jew of Lewis though a force for good cannot settle in any one place as he is because he has stolen the voice of his darker poorer twin. The contemporary Indian Christian Church cannot survive for long as they are. Part of the forgotten twin syndrome is the twin lungs of our Church and for too long the East has been the poorer unknown collapsed lung. From the West we take the scalpel of low knowledge, the necessary suffering of the Via Dolorosa, but breathing with the Eastern lung, we can draw on the spirituality of the pneumatic Christ and the joy of a Resurrection people. Outwith the lung of the Padroado the Eastern Church might neglect Social Justice. Outwith the lung of the Mar Thoma Nasranis we lack a mystagogy to save us from unfettered materialism.The Mar Thoma Sliba is a beautiful rendition of this mystery. Why do you seek the living among the dead. The cross of Mar Sliba is not empty it is flowering, flowering on a bed of lotuses, and soaring as a windhover is the Spirit of Life animating the kingdom with the flowering cross at its centre and periphery.
To end the Purana here outwith deconstructing would be to perpetuate a fascist lie. There is a dark vicious tale of attempted and on-going infanticide in the history of our church. In the East Thomas Didymus is called the Judas. How did he get that title? There is something ambivalent about the twin, as in all real human beings. From the gospel preamble to the Purana we know that all the Messiah’s family did not support him. Joseph is not mentioned by name again after the falling out at Jesus’ Bar Mitzvah till he asserts his right to claim his son’s corpse from the Roman Authorities after the crucifixion. In between he tries to have his son sectioned. Who else would have been granted the grace of simulacrum to the Messiah but his adoptive father?Thus at the heart of the Purana of Mar Thoma Slihe is another neo-gnostic secret that those in power have kept from the people of God in silent conspiracy spanning the ages, just like the Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood Holy Grail. And what does this sub-text signify? For the true Herstory of Indian Christians to be told we must first debunk the accepted lies perpetrated by Hindutva Fascists that our Indian Legacy, is Brahman. It is as much our legacy as Dutch Boerdom is the cultural legacy of African Christians.
The caged bird song of India, a Dalit version of Herstory plaint that it was the Dalit people who carved temple statuary, built the nation, sowed, reaped. It was the Dalit people through the Tamil master language of India, who wrote our poetry, created our art. These inheritors of the Indus Valley civilizations of Harapa and Mohenjodaro are the true voice of India whose Gita has yet to be heard. When Christendom came to conquer India, they came with Mediaeval feudalism and allied with the patriarchy of its day. Industrialisation always magnifies social evils but the obscene manner in which this is inflicted upon modern Dalits is a sin that cries out to heaven for vengeance.This essay is a Purana song searching for the final resting place of Mar Joseph b’n David, b’n Adam, b’n Elohim known in the East as Mar Thoma Slihe. Having examined the evidence poetically I have taken you to another empty tomb, another burgeoning cross of the Spirit. Is his final resting place in Santa Fe, New Mexico? Neti! Will we find it translating the cheap spirituality of Hindutva Brahmans? Neti! They have poets still inTamil and the South. We the Church have sinned and murdered our twin Brother. In faith let us keep vigil by the empty tomb and listen to our Dalit Saviour’s new songs of redemption. The irritation you feel at this absurd prophecy, the suppressed anger at this arrogant solitary voice crying in the wilderness, if I may my shallow puerile attempt at trying to reduce the Herstory of Indian Christianity to a mathematical duality is the certain sign that Truth is being conceived in your heart. For before She sets you free the Truth gives you a nagging sense of freefloating discomfort.
Bibliography
Chakalackal S, Ramayana and the Indian Ideal St Joseph Press, India (1992)
Dalrymple W, Sisters and Goddesses Guardian Weekend The London and Manchester Guardian (28 June 2008)
Edited Menachery G, Thomapedia St Joseph’s Press (2000)
Lewis M, The Monk (first published London 1796)
Nedungatt G, Quest for the Historical Thomas Apostle of India – A Re-Reading of the evidence Theological Publications of India Bangalore (2008)
Web Reference for the miraculous spiral staircase of the Loretto Chapel http://www.funtripslive.com/santa_fe/miracle_staircase/staircase.htm.
Lectures and discussions with DVK staff and students Bangalore August 2009
The Jerusalem Bible
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