India's Unending Journey_Finding Balance in a Time of Change

by Mark Tully

  Partly because of the attack mounted by the Hindu nationalists, the main denominations of the Church today have realised that the only way to ensure that Christianity will survive in India is to support pluralism. This means avoiding the old missionary tactic of claiming that other religions are in some way inferior to Christianity, and being very cautious about conversions. When I asked an Indian Jesuit whether the Church still had a mission in India to convert, he said, ‘The Church does not convert; God does, and God does not seem to regard this as a high priority…’

  A leading Dalit priest put it a little more positively, saying, ‘Conversion is not our priority, but if people want to come, what can we do? The truth is that there is much more sheep stealing going on than conversion.’ The ‘sheep stealers’ in question are Protestant sects outside the mainstream Churches, such as the Apostolic Christian Assembly, which declared on its web site recently, ‘Heartening and praiseworthy, demanding special thanks given to the Lord, is the ever increasing number of persons being baptised and added to each of our branch churches, the proof of the Lord’s continuing work and presence in the Branch ministries.’ Unfortunately, this kind of activity is grist to Dr Togadia’s mill.

  It is because the main denominations have come to accept India’s pluralist tradition that they are reluctant to make converts. But this presents an obvious problem for any Christian organisation, as Christians believe that Jesus was not only an incarnation of God but the only incarnation, and as such the one way to God and to salvation. That is why it has been the mission of the Church to convert since its foundation. This dilemma is particularly difficult for Roman Catholics in India to deal with, as they have traditionally claimed there can be no salvation outside the Church.

  The Jesuits were in the forefront of the Church’s conversion drive in the colonial days, and established the Inquisition in Goa, one of whose tasks was to prevent any Hindu practices seeping into Catholicism. Now they are spearheading the move for the Roman Catholic Church to accept pluralism, to shed its Western identity and to become recognisably Indian.

  I have long been intrigued by the Jesuits; when I was at Cambridge a Jesuit Father by the name of Joe Christie made an indelible impression on me when he wiped the floor with his opponent during a debate about the existence of God. A friend who had been educated by the Jesuits told me stories about their long and arduous training, their discipline and the discipline they enforced in their schools. So quite early in my time in India I was fascinated to be introduced to a Jesuit priest in the Jesuit Formation Centre at Kurseong, which lay halfway up the mountain road to Darjeeling. At the time I was still naïve about Indian religions myself, but even so I was taken aback by his contempt for Hinduism and his insistence on the Church’s mission to convert India, which seemed rather ambitious to me. But perhaps he was an exception, as some years later I met a very different Jesuit, the elderly Father Van Exim, who had advised Mother Teresa in all her negotiations with the Vatican when she was establishing her new order.

  When I met him, Father Van Exim was living in one small room in the Jesuit college in Kolkata. He was rather frail because he could not throw off the effects of having been poisoned by a rat bite when he was working in the slums of Howrah, across the river from Kolkata. He certainly came from a harsh tradition: when his order sent him to India as a young man he was told he would never be allowed to go back home to Belgium to visit his family. However, he was anything but a harsh man himself and was in no way dogmatic. He had spent his time in India studying Islam and trying to establish a dialogue with Indian Muslims. When I talked to him about Mother Teresa he would say, ‘You have to understand that she is a very orthodox Catholic.’ The latent implication from the smile on the elderly priest’s face was that he himself was not so orthodox.

  Now the Jesuits have moved from remote Kurseong to Delhi, where it’s all happening, and there is no question of any of their number showing contempt for Hinduism. I was once asked to organise a gathering of representatives of all the major faiths in India to meet Prince Charles. If I remember correctly there were at least eight faiths represented. The Jesuit scholar Father Samuel Ryan explained how his Church was now adapting itself to the Indian plural tradition. He also maintained that it was because of Indian theology that the Vatican no longer claimed there could be no salvation outside the Church.

  I had first met Father Samuel when attending the daily Mass in the Jesuit Formation Centre in Delhi. I remembered a Catholic diplomat friend of mine who had also gone to Mass there saying, ‘I hope I am a reasonably progressive Catholic but that was too much for me.’ So I was not surprised to find that the Mass had a distinctly Hindu flavour to it. All the teachers and students sat cross-legged on the floor. The altar was a small, low table reminiscent of those on which the image of the deity is placed when a Hindu pandit performs a puja, or ritual, for a family. Like a Hindu pandit, the priest celebrating the Mass sat by the table wearing a simple shawl instead of a vestment.

  Acceptance of pluralism and what is called the ‘inculturalisation’ of Indian Catholicism, demonstrating that Christianity can be as Indian as any other religion, requires a major theological rethink. Two Roman Catholic theologians who have pioneered the search for a theology of pluralism have both spent many years in India. Like Father Van Exim, Jacques Dupuis was a Belgian Jesuit. He was also a renowned scholar, who after teaching in India for twenty-four years, went on to become Professor of Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome. There, he wrote a book called Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism. The difficulty of the task he set himself became apparent when the Vatican Congregation, headed by Cardinal Ratzinger, declared that his book contained ‘serious errors against essential elements of divine and Catholic faith’. After two years of uncertainty, which did nothing for Dupuis’ health (he was suffering from a severe kidney complaint), he was allowed to defend himself before a hearing attended by Ratzinger. The strictures on his book were softened. Although he was warned that serious confusion and misunderstanding could result from reading his book, the Vatican recognised that it represented ‘an attempt to remain within the limit of orthodoxy in his study of questions hitherto unexplored’.

  Dupuis, who was considered too liberal by the Vatican, was regarded as too conservative by his colleagues when he taught in India. Father Rudi Heredia, the Jesuit who told me as much, once warned his fellow Indian Jesuits in their theological journal that if Indian Christianity did not engage with the country’s religious pluralism it would certainly end as ‘a nihilistic relativism, if it does not collapse in annihilating chaos’.

  The questions Dupuis raised had been largely unexplored in the past because there had been a lack of dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and other religions. Dupuis commented, ‘Until recently, theology often seemed in Christian circles to belong to Christianity as its exclusive property; worse still, in Western Christianity First World theology seemed to have the monopoly.’ Dupuis recognised that pluralism must be part of God’s intention for us and warned that Christianity had to discover what the place for other historical religious traditions was in God’s plan for mankind. He suggested that this plan was a ‘marvellous convergence’ of these traditions, a coming together of them. That coming together could not merely be determined on the basis of a single religion’s theology and tradition. It couldn’t come about because Christianity, or any other religion, had proved itself right and the others wrong. That said, Dupuis maintained that it seemed possible to speak of ‘a general convergence of religions upon a Universal Christ who fundamentally satisfies them all’. But he said that the convergence would have to respect the differences between religions fully and create a ‘mutual enrichment and cross-fertilization’ between them all. ‘Dialogue,’ Dupuis noted, was ‘the necessary foundation of a theology of religions’.

  Dupuis’ book is detailed and in places quite dense reading, but I got the impression of a scholar doing his utmost to pay respect to the various religions he had
encountered in India, and hence to stand in the country’s tradition of religious pluralism and dialogue. I was particularly impressed by his insistence that dialogue between religions should not be merely an attempt to find the lowest common multiple or, indeed, the highest common factor; rather, it should involve a willingness to learn from each other. At one point in his book, Dupuis acknowledged that ‘contact with Hindu advaita mysticism may help Christians to purify and deepen their faith in the divine mystery’.

  Another prominent Western Roman Catholic theologian who believed there ought to be an understanding between his own tradition and the Indian religious tradition of pluralism was Bede Griffiths. He was a Welsh Roman Catholic monk of the order founded in the sixth century by Saint Benedict, who is often called ‘the patriarch of Western monasticism’. Bede lived the latter part of his life in India, where he attempted to marry the faith he had been taught with the insights that country had given him. His best known book is called The Marriage of East and West.

  Bede Griffiths came to India because he had begun to feel that there was something lacking in the Western Church, and indeed in the Western world as a whole. ‘We were,’ he said, ‘living from one half of our soul, from the conscious, rational level and we needed to discover the other half, the unconscious intuitive dimension.’ He sought to re-establish balance between the two, which is the traditional search that Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan writes about in his book The Hindu View of Life.

  I regret never having met Bede Griffiths, who died in 1993 at the small ashram in south India where he had lived for the last twenty-five years of his life. However, after his death I went to his ashram, where I met Father Christadas, one of his disciples. Father Christadas looked more like a Hindu holy man than a Christian monk; he was bare-chested, with a straggling beard and unkempt hair, and wore a plain saffron lungi wrapped around his waist and extending to his ankles, and beads around his neck. I remember asking him why, when he was a Christian monk, he should want to look like a sadhu. He replied, ‘Since I am an Indian I don’t want to lose my identity, and the Christian heritage doesn’t exclude me from practising my rich Indian heritage.’ This, I thought, was an answer that would have pleased Bede Griffiths.

  The ashram itself was a celebration of Bede’s marriage of East and West. The chapel was known as the temple, and its bright technicolored dome was surrounded by Hindu iconography, with Jesus in the centre, also clad like a Hindu holy man. Like the Jesuits in Delhi, Bede Griffiths used to celebrate Mass by sitting on the floor in front of a small low table for an altar in the manner of a Hindu priest. In the garden there was a statue of Jesus meditating and enfolded by a lotus, a flower sacred to Hindus. Bede Griffiths also used to meditate in front of that statue.

  Bede Griffiths’ marriage of East and West was a partnership of equals, with both giving and receiving. He wanted to find a meeting point between the West’s emphasis on reason and the East’s emphasis on imagination. He was not blind to the faults of either side, saying once that:

  The tragedy of the modern world is that reason has taken charge and driven imagination underground…. The East must learn the use of reason, in science, in industry, in politics, and I would say above all in moral life…. But the West has to recover its lost imagination, not only in art, but in economic and social life, not least in sex.

  How did this translate into traditional Christian terms? For Bede Griffiths, the Bible had to be interpreted as myth, and that required imagination, because he saw myth as the ‘symbolic expression of reality in terms of the human imagination’. Jesus was a person who went beyond imagination to the realisation that he was at one with that reality. Bede Griffiths inevitably accepted that knowledge of this reality was not limited to Roman Catholics or even to Christians. To get around this issue, he suggested that the Church should embrace all those who sincerely seek God, ‘because there is no limit to the grace of God revealed in Christ. Christ died for all men from the beginning to the end of time, to bring all men to that state of communion with God, with the eternal truth and reality for which they were created’. But this didn’t mean that the Church should dispense with its own particular doctrines and sacraments. What’s more, Bede Griffiths did not offer comfort to those who believe that they can do without organised religion. He insisted that he had not rejected anything he had learnt of God, Christ or the Church. He saw the Church’s doctrines and sacraments as ‘human expressions or signs of the divine reality’. His ambition was to go beyond those signs to reach what they signified – the ultimate reality. But he argued, ‘As long as we remain in this world we need these signs and the world today cannot survive unless it rediscovers the “signs” of faith, “the Myth”, the Symbol in which the knowledge of reality is enshrined.’

  When I was a young man, rationalism was so firmly drummed into my head that I couldn’t see there was any difference between a myth and a lie. Either it had to be true that Jesus was the one and only son of God, or it had to be untrue. My faith diminished and my doubts grew when Anglican bishops and clergy cast doubt on some of the miraculous stories about Jesus’ life, such as the virgin birth and the resurrection. But the more I came to understand the importance of experience in religion, the more I came to realise that what mattered was the impact these stories had on me. As Bede Griffiths might have said, it was what they were signifying and the reality they were symbolising that mattered.

  I remember attending a Mass in Old St Paul’s Church in Edinburgh a few years ago that preserved the High Anglican tradition of mystery and was accompanied by beautiful music. As I was kneeling at the altar rails to take communion, I said to myself, ‘I don’t know exactly what this means, but I do know it means an awful lot to me.’ That feeling could be dismissed as mere emotion, even nostalgia, induced by an inspiring service. Obviously it was not a rational thought. But, to my mind at least, it was a sign of the deeper reality enshrined in the sacrament.

  I recently came across a passage in Karen Armstrong’s book A Short History of Myth that helped me to understand why that Mass had meant so much to me. Comparing the medieval Catholic Mass with the communion service of the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers she says, ‘Like any pre-modern rite, the Mass had re-enacted Christ’s sacrificial death, which because it was mystical was timeless, and made it a present reality. For the reformers it was simply a memorial of a bygone event.’ Because the Mass in Edinburgh had been celebrated in the Anglo-Catholic tradition and because it was celebrated with such reverence for the mystery of the sacrament, it had become a present reality for me. But I have nevertheless found that myth can be seductive. The concept of a meaning that can’t be expressed in words has sometimes lured me into forgetting the importance of expressing in words whatever we can.

  Like Christianity, Islam is a Semitic religion, and it is as difficult for Muslim theologians to accept pluralism as it is for many Christians. Nevertheless, there are Islamic scholars in India who have taken a public stand in favour of pluralism. One of them is Maulana Wahiduddin, who lives on the other side of the main road from my flat in Delhi. The Maulana was one of the religious leaders who met Prince Charles at the gathering I organised. In a brief presentation he said, ‘I am a Muslim; Islam is my religion but I honour other religions.’

  When I set out to write this chapter, I went to see Maulana Wahiduddin again. He was quite elderly now and, with his long beard and untidy hair held down by a traditional turban, no one could have mistaken him for anything but a Muslim scholar. I was anxious to get the Maulana, who is an orthodox Sunni scholar, to expand on what he had said at the meeting with Prince Charles.

  ‘I can put it quite simply,’ he explained. ‘There is this quotation from the Holy Koran: “For you your religion, for me mine.” So the only logical formula is mutual respect.’ He went on to tell me a traditional story from the life of the Prophet. One day when the Prophet was living in Medina, he saw a funeral procession passing by and stood up as a mark of respect. One of his companions asked him why he
had paid respect when it was the funeral of a Jew, not a Muslim. The prophet replied, ‘Was he not a human being?’

  I asked the Maulana what he would say to those who dismissed non-Muslims as kafirs, an abusive word for non-believers. He explained that this was a specific term that was relevant only to those who were contemporaries of the Prophet and had heard him preach for twenty years but who still did not accept what he taught. It was a word that had had no relevance since the Prophet’s life time. ‘According to my studies,’ he said, ‘everyone is a human and no one is a kafir. If you say a Hindu is a kafir that is a heresy.’

  The Maulana rejoiced in India’s religious pluralism and believed that Muslims enjoyed ‘far better conditions’ in India than in any Islamic country, saying, ‘In Islamic countries they either have peace or freedom; in India they have both.’

  ‘Why is that?’ I wondered.

  ‘Because India has respect for all religions,’ he replied. ‘The credit goes to Hinduism. It is a very special kind of religion, which believes all religions are true. No other religion on earth believes that.’