Who Are You? Part-2

Revd Dr. Valson Thampu

[Part-1 of this article appeared in FOCUS– October, 2022, FOCUS Vol. 10. (4) Page 18-20.]

The Self: The Atom of the Spiritual Universe

To Jesus, the self is the crux of the matter. It is the operative point of contact with reality. The degeneration or illhealth of the self-distorts everything that human beings do, individually and collectively. The fact that something is advocated and perpetrated in earnestness is, hence, no guarantee that it is true or real. In certain mental states individuals hallucinate, which they take for reality. Individuals indoctrinated through propaganda adopt attitudes and agendas that run counter to truth. Many in the days of Hitler mistook the Nazi propaganda for truth and were willing to die or kill for the implementation of it. It is for this reason that T. S. Eliot agonized over the perilous nature of martyrdom. One could well be committing suicide, believing oneself to be a martyr for a cause.

If the aforesaid is a reality and it matters to us, we would also be persuaded that there is a need to re-examine the denominational-nurture imparted to generation after generation of Christians, especially in relation to the divisive and exclusivist emphases that lurk in it. As a rule, what is exclusive to a sect or denomination is emphasized not necessarily out of concern for, or commitment to, truth, but out of the eagerness to keep the flock fenced in. Is this a necessary thing? Well, it is necessary to the extent that one needs to know where one stands. But where one stands cannot be disconnected from the wider context of the Way of Jesus. This is true of the world as a whole. You may be standing on an obscure, tiny spot of the globe, but you are connected to the whole of the cosmos, howsoever indirectly. Your life will be imperilled, if the Sun refuses to shine for a day or two. The illusion that one can live in incubators is at once false and dangerous. It's as silly as insisting that the moon shines only on my house.

The spiritual re-orientation that Jesus sought to impart pertained to truth. Truth is a function of wholeness. Whatever is taken or read in part is sure to fall short of the truth. All man-made walls and labels are tantamount to denials of truth.

The starting point in spirituality is the realization that one is not what one has come to be. What we mean by the self is no more than the sum total of the conditioning we have received through the accidents of birth, time and place. Sure enough, we need to be local. We are born in a place. We are nurtured in a slightly larger context. But it is manifestly unhealthy to stay stuck exclusively to the same spot. Growth implies liberation. The mustard seed, as Jesus said, must send its branches to the end of the earth. That universal reach is the outcome of liberation- as-growth. Confinement to certain delimited parcels of religiosity or demography mocks the very essence of being human.

Else, Jesus would not have enunciated the Kingdom of God. Judaism had come to be, by way of the distortion resulting from the ‘hiding orientation’ of the Jews, as Isaiah suggests, ethnocentric and geographically confined. This aberration was projected to the Person of God. So, God’s interests were deemed identical to the interests of the Jews. It is a recurrent theme in the prophetic books that this prejudice untenable. It runs counter to truth. God cannot be partial to anyone or any group, as Peter is taught through the vision given to him in the Acts of the Apostles.

The liberation that Jesus offers involves ‘opening the eyes of the blind’ (Lk.4:18). It is primarily to the state of the self that one's eyes are to be opened. When one’s eyes are so opened, the need for repentance becomes real. It is in relation to the self that the need for repentance arises. Hence, a basic need and it applies to all. Repentance involves a radical reorientation of the self. Jesus denotes this also by being ‘born again’.

Self-denial, which happens through repentance, is a profound spiritual discipline. What is denied is the self-inaberration. More precisely, it is the conditioned ego, which is anything but the self, though it is widely mistaken for the self. The goal of self-denial is, therefore, to become the new creation ‘in Christ Jesus’. That new creation is distinguished by the ‘mind of Christ’ (Phil.2:5). That mind, the light of the world (Jn.9:5), is free from walls and labels of discrimination and alienation.

To understand this a bit more clearly, consider the Incarnation. In Incarnation, the ‘Word’ became ‘flesh’. Note that it is not some scriptural tradition or church dogma that became flesh. It is the Word. Note further that it is the ‘flesh’ that the Word became. Both ‘Word’ and ‘flesh’ are all-embracing, universal categories, not parochial labels of exclusivity and separation. If Jesus is indeed the Wordbecome-flesh then, surely, Incarnation embraces the whole of the created order. We mock the scope of Incarnation by making it religiously exclusive; unless, of course, we argue that flesh is only denominationally Christian, which we can’t do without inviting ridicule upon ourselves.

Now let us consider practicalities

Man and woman, the book of Genesis tells us, become ‘one flesh’ through marriage. The female is the sexual other of the male, and vice versa. Should this otherness constitute a theatre of mutual antagonism? Or, should it be the resources for harmonious complementarity? If we extrapolate the mindset that governs parochial Christianity, man and woman have to be caught in interminable gender wars for the reason that they are different from each other. In that case we have to admit that same-sex relationships should be the norm, and deem heterosexual relationships as aberrations. In matters of sexuality, we assume the commingling of differences to be the norm, but in relation to inter-denominational differences we believe ardently that differences are, and must be, a hindrance. This is quite astonishing, to say the least.

An obvious by-product of the allergy to differences and the dogmatic insistence on homogeneity is intolerance. Intolerance runs like a red thread through the tapestry of church history. Whatever is different from the set tradition or notion is damned either as non-conformity or as heresy. Not surprisingly, Jesus was tried as a heretic and blasphemer.

This allergy to whatever is different from what we are used to and the corresponding craze to re-fashion everything after our own image – likes and dislikes – vitiate our idea of mission, especially the practice of conversion. In this we lose sight of the difference between being fishers of fish and fishers of human beings. The former can be undertaken as a selfish activity. In the latter, no one is to be ‘caught’, but everyone is to be ‘gained’ for God, which rules out altogether the prospect of shaping them after ourselves either individually or parochially. The C.S.I mission that results in the conversion of non-Christians the scope of which is limited to their becoming only members of the C.S.I church is inherently suspect. This is a mockery of the idea of conversion-as-trans information. Every church community is distinguished by homogeneity. Belonging to what mandates homogeneity can never be a transforming or liberating experience. It can only be a change in the mode of conformity and enslavement. Till yesterday a person was in a Hindu prison. Today he has been shifted to a Christian prison. The obsession with homogeneity, conformity to which is deemed the foremost expression of faithfulness, is inherently and blatantly unspiritual. Jesus never enjoined conformity of any kind on anyone. The New Creation, like the Old Creation prior to the Fall, can have no labels. All labels denote fallenness. Labels, not God, demand homogeneity. We need to distinguish between wearing labels of Christian identity on the one hand, and being the disciples of Jesus Christ on the other.

Labelling or branding human beings, classifying them in different groups and categories, treating them entirely by the labels slapped on them, and not by the individual and human realities they embody is the way of the world. Even a cursory glance at the public ministry of Jesus Christ makes us aware that labelling people was utterly unacceptable to him. Not only that. He removed labels of discrimination and rejection from those who were obliged to carry them. He touched the leper, visited the Roman Centurion’s house, acknowledged his coming into con- tact with the ‘woman with an issue of blood’, conversed with the woman of Samaria, had fellowship with ‘sinners and tax collectors’, accepted the ministrations of the ‘fallen woman’, and so on. In two thousand years, we haven’t gathered the moral courage or spiritual authenticity to even remotely approach that liberating and transformative freedom.

The outcome? Well, we have become the salt that has lost its saltiness. What does this mean? Habituated as we are to homogeneity as a norm, we adopt conformity as the sole mode of relating to the world. The salt sans its saltiness is the salt that is indistinguishable from the world. It has nothing to impart and make a difference. How can we impact the world by conformity to it? So, even as we preach passionately on the need to be different from the world, and we exploit these notional differences to our advantage, when our convenience or exigencies so demand, we happily adopt conformity to the ways of the world. Instances abound. They don’t have to be cited.

In all this, the operative truth is that we don’t know who we are. So, in practice, we become glorified chameleons. We run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Where this could end up is clearly indicated by Jesus. On that day, he said, many will come to me saying, ‘Lord, Lord, in your name we did many wonderful things But I will say to them, ‘Depart from me, you evil doers. I KNOW YOU NOT.’

It is only natural that Jesus knows us not, if we do not know ourselves and are averse to knowing ourselves other than what the world tells us we are.