Poem- പച്ചയിലേക്കു ഒരു ജ്ഞാനസ്നാനം (Baptism into the Green)

സംഗീതാത്മകമായ ഒരു ജീവനം
പ്രകൃതിയും പ്രപഞ്ചവും
ഈ മഴയും, ഇളവെയിലും
മുങ്ങിനീരുന്ന ഉത്ഥാന സൗഭാഗ്യം
ഇത് തന്നെ ബുദ്ധാനുഭവം !

എന്റെ ബോധമണ്ഡലത്തിലെ
രൂപക്കൂടുകൾ, സമ്മർദ്ദങ്ങൾ,
കലണ്ടറിലെ പേടിപ്പെടുത്തുന്ന
ചുവപ്പു ചിഹ്നങ്ങൾ !
എല്ലാം കഴുകിക്കളയുന്ന
ജീവന്റെ പ്രകാശവർഷം.
ഒരു ജ്ഞാനസ്നാനത്തിന്റെ
കുളിർമ്മയും ,പുതുമയും !

ഒന്ന് പെയ്തൊഴിയുവാൻ
കാത്തുനിൽക്കയാണ് കരിമേഘം.
ഒരു സാന്ദ്രമായ ഇരുട്ട് മൂടിയിട്ടുണ്ട്
ഈ ലൈബ്രറിയിലെ പൂച്ചെടികൾ
ആഴമായ എന്തോ ഒന്ന് സംവദിക്കയാണ്.
ജീവിതത്തിന്റെ ഘനതയെപ്പറ്റി,
ആഴത്തെപ്പറ്റി, എത്ര തിരഞ്ഞാലും
ബാക്കിയാവുന്ന അറിവിന്റെ നിഴലുകളെപ്പറ്റി
ഹോ..എന്തൊക്കെയാണവ പറയുന്നത് !
എന്തുതന്നെയായാലും
ഒരു അനര്ഘനിമിഷംഅതെനിക്ക്
സമ്മാനിച്ചു! ഈ ചെടികളും ,
പുറത്തു സാന്ദ്രമായ ഇരുളും പച്ചയും
 എല്ലാം ഒന്നുചേരുന്ന പോലെ!
പ്രകൃതിയിലേക്ക് ,പച്ചയിലേക്കു
സ്നേഹാർദ്രമായ ഒരു സ്നാനം.
ഇതുമതിയെനിക്ക്
ഇത്രമാത്രം !

Planetary Conviviality: Celebration of Redeemed Relationalities

Each of us is the destiny of the other.

      -Jean Baudrillard

We are living in a world of exclusions. Exclusions abound from the supposed benign globalization on one hand and from various forms of militant reactionary movements on the other. The politics of fear and exclusion seem to be evident everywhere. Inevitable violence between the self and the other is assumed, which produces a proliferation of “gated” communities. The notion of “shrinking space” and “Global village” has become an uncritical romanticization of the homogenizing tendency of the free market culture at the expense of the local and vernacular.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes a distinction between the notion of “globe” and of “planet”. Spivak lucidly puts it: “The globe is on our computer. No one lives there…The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system and yet we inhabit it, on loan.” Therefore, she declares, “I propose the planet to overwrite the Globe. Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere.”[1]

What does it really mean to be a human in this time of exclusion and violence and what are the responsibilities endowed to us as Christians? Namsoon Kang, the famous diaspora theologian, asks the same question: “What does it mean to continue to live as a human, to remain faithful to the divine while living in a cultural, socio-geo-political, and a religious world where power disparity between humans based on their nationality, citizenship, gender, race, class, ability, religion and so forth still prevails?”[2] An active Christian living, especially in the diaspora context, involves responding to these questions and stimulating the practice of freeing and enlarging human possibility in everyday realities. If loving one’s neighbor as oneself, the core message of Christianity is merely a spiritualized, romanticized the rhetoric that people simply acquiesce to in the church without rigorously wrestling with the profound questions of the faith—such who is my neighbor, to who am (are) I (we) neighbors, and what constitutes loving oneself and neighbors—then the significant value of loving one’s neighbor as oneself loses its profound meaning. Based on the Spivakian idea of planetarity, Namsoon Kang proposes the idea of “Planetary Conviviality” as a paradigm for authentic Christian existence, witness and duty in a fragmented world like ours. Planetary conviviality emphasizes the duty to understand and to care for those who are on this planet as our fellow beings. The biblical idea of “the Kingdom of God” is proposed as the ethico-political and theological space of planetary conviviality. A few dimensions of this idea are expanded upon below.

Epiphanies of Face

 According to Immanuel Levinas, the ethical relation is fundamentally a “face-to-face relation.” The simple gaze at the face of the other beyond one’s name, one’s gender and all other constructions, is transformative and divine. One’s face precedes one’s proper name and any kind of identity marker. There are several Biblical parallels for this sacred gaze at the face. It is in Jacob’s gaze at the face of Esau (Genesis 33:10) that Jacob realizes the “divine” on his face. The face was a sacred epiphany to Jacob. Jesus’ gaze in the story of his encounter with Zacchaeus is another example. Jesus did not preach nor criticize him for being wrong. Instead Jesus looked into Zacchaeus’s face. When Jesus looked at his face, a miracle, an unexpected transformation, happened (Luke 19:2-10). For Zacchaeus, as a short person and tax collector, it must have been the first time in his lifetime that someone truly looked at his face without judgment—an embracing, affirming genuinely human gaze. What Jesus did was to look at the face of Zacchaeus, and Zacchaeus also was able to see the face of Jesus. There was no hierarchy of beings between these two faces. When Jesus calls his disciples at the beginning of John’s gospel, the unconditional, face-to-face encounter, leads to the act of following. Thus the primary responsibility of discipleship becomes facing the deep and the divine in the face of the other.

Radical Hospitality

The event of face-to-face encounter is liminal in character.  No one could predict the actions of this event. In the Zacchaeus story, Jesus’ first act was looking at Zacchaeus in his face, in which his first utterance was “I must stay at your house”. There was no question of conditionality. The very liminal space between hospitality and hostility turns into the absolute willing of hospitality from both Jesus and Zacchaeus. Here the seemingly self-evident the border between the host and the guest becomes blurry and is made pointless through Jesus’ act of traversing the border. Zacchaeus completely welcomes the uninvited visitation, and Jesus offers an invitation of himself to Zacchaeus. Jesus initiates moving beyond the rigid boundaries between the home, the host and the guest, and the borders between visitation and invitation. In this event, the absolute welcome of the epiphany happens in the face of the other. Abrahamic hospitality also serves as a paradigmatic illustration of radical hospitality: the unconditional welcoming of the epiphany of the face of strangers. As a host, Abraham bowed down to the ground (Gen.18:2) to welcome the faces of the three strangers and then served the strangers water, bread and meat. Without calculation or pondering their identity, Abraham offers hospitality to the guests. Planetary conviviality demands such radical hospitality, which goes beyond the hierarchy of host and guest. When there is no hierarchy of beings, there would be a genuine exchange of smiles and laughter. The song "Welcome Home," a celebrated song by New Zealand singer/songwriter Dave Dobbyn, rightly illustrates the notion of radical hospitality. Dobbyn was inspired to write the song after seeing Christchurch anti-racism protests and the sense of community that came through them. The song affirms an idea of radical hospitality -“I made a space for you.”

Redeemed Relationality

Radical hospitality redeems us to the point of celebrating our relationality and interconnectedness. The story of Zacchaeus ends with the affirmation of redeemed relationalities. Zacchaeus was inspired to celebrate redeemed relationality by exemplifying neighborly love, along with deep and radical compassion for fellow beings. Such reconfiguration of relationality is the central message of Christianity.  In the Coming of Cosmic Christ, Mathew Fox calls us to reconfigure our relationship with the divine, fellow beings and the mother earth. Fox challenges us to enact the resurrection of the living Cosmic Christ in our beings and then in our actions in order to transform society and bring healing to all the world’s suffering, broken parts through the practices of love, imagination, peacemaking, and environmental, moral and social justice. Fox argues that restoring the mystical mind of compassion, the Christian work of love, can bring a global renaissance to the entire world, including every aspect of society, from religion to sexuality, from peacemaking and disarmament to the mentoring of the youth. In nutshell, Fox calls for the celebration of redeemed relationality. Obviously, the remodeling and refashioning of the uneven world requires planetary conviviality, the transformative love for the planet and planetary beings.

We celebrate planetary conviviality not in vacuum but in community. Community is not a romanticized imaginative space, but a realistic challenging space where we lose ourselves to find ourselves more meaningfully. Jean Wanier says that “Community is terrible place. It is the place where our limitations and our egoism are revealed to us. When we begin to live full-time with others we discover our poverty and weaknesses, our inability to get on with people, our mental and emotional blocks, our seemingly insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies, our hatred and our wish to destroy. While we were alone, we could believe we loved every one. Now that we are with others, we realize how incapable we are of loving, how much we deny life to others.”[3] Being in community always demands a re-positioning of ourselves for the betterment of the community. Planetary conviviality is such a revolutionary mode of understanding and reconfiguring the self, the others and the world. It is an ethic of responsibility, compassion, hospitality, as well as an ongoing exercise of interdependence in the face of violence, war, and exclusion. In the light of planetary conviviality, I would like to re-define Church as the community which happens in an amazing serendipitous way in the midst of our everyday life with its complexities. Church is a wonderful space for the celebration of the epiphany of marginal faces, radical hospitality and redeemed relationality through the paradigm of Jesus Christ.

 _____

Bibliography

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Death of Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Kang, Namsoon. Cosmopolitan Theology. St.Louis : Chalice, 2013.

Vanier, Jean. Community and Growth. New York: Paulist, 1989.

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[1]. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of Discipline,72.

[2]. Namsoon Kang, Cosmopolitan Theology, 181.

[3] Jean Vanier, Community and Growth (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 17.

The Sacrament of Holy Qurbana: The Celebration of “Third Space”

Hebrews 5:1-14

Every high priest is selected from among the people and is appointed to represent the people in matters related to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. (v.1)

A priest is not an ontologically different being but one among God’s people called out to represent the people before God. Through ministry, the priest creatively engages in the becoming process of the people. This priestly engagement is through constructing and celebrating a “third space” (a concept popularized by Homi Bhabha, which refers to a cultural space of creative relationality) of restoration and hope in the everyday life of the people.  This celebration of the “third space” of restoration can be found in its most splendid form in Holy Qurbana. The empty space between the broken pieces of the bread in Holy Qurbana always reminds us a “third space” of restoration and hope.

Jesus’ ministry was specially marked by the event of the last supper. Paul recollects this event of Lord’s supper in his letter to Corinthians as a reminder to the Corinthian Church. “The Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took bread and gave thanks” (1 Cori 11:23). The word here used for thanks giving is “Eucharisteo”. This is a “radical” thanks giving. A thanks giving which opens up the possibilities of a “third space” of forgiveness and reconciliation. Paul reminds the Corinthian believers to reconfigure their relationships on the basis of a Eucharistic living, by creating a third space of redeemed relationality. Ann Voskamp in her poetically written book One Thousand Gifts says: “Eucharisteo is the central symbol of Christianity. Christ, at his death meal, set the entirety of our everyday bread and drink lives into the framework of eucahristeo”. Elevating everyday realities into the level of eucharistic living is a priestly challenge in a non-eucharistic world.

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews portrays Jesus Christ as the high priest in the order of Melchizedek (Hebrews 5:10). It is meaningful to note that Melchizedek shared bread and drink with Abraham as they were marking a new space (third space!) of restoration, peace, and hope (Genesis 14:15-24). Celebrating such “third spaces” through a eucharistic living will definitely make this world redeemed and beautiful.

Payer: Lord grant us the ability to celebrate the “third spaces” of restoration and hope in the midst of our everyday brokenness.

Thought for the day: The only real fall of human is his non-eucharistic life in a non-eucharistic world.

                                                        -Alexander Schmemann