LITMIR.BIZ

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of the stories of Manarcadu is that in a time of war in Kottayam two sisters fleeing invaders ran to the Manarcadu Devi temple and tried to hide there, but there was only room for one, so one stayed at the temple and the other sister ran to hide in the church, a kilometre away. They were both saved, and so to this day the temple and the church celebrate parts of their festivals together. Some say the goddesses, meaning the Devi of the temple and Mary for the church, are sisters. That works better for Hindus than for Christians, but I like the idea of Mary having a fierce, protective sister and Jesus a Malayali aunt.

      I went to visit the temple a few years ago. There is an old-style house with an open courtyard; a snake grove for the auspicious feeding of a cobra; a sacred, healing tree; and a low, small open-sided building to house the Devi statue. The priest I met is also a tech worker in town. I asked him how the temple started. He said, ‘Hundreds of years ago our people came here from Kodungaloor in a time of war. The goddess came with them.’

      ‘Wait. What? How did they know the goddess came with them?’ I asked.

      He said. ‘She came.’

      ‘Do you mean they carried the statue? Or a symbol? Or was it a feeling?’

      ‘She came,’ he said, ‘and our ancestors made a small statue and a place to honour her. And after a while the local people also wanted a place to worship her.’

      The goddess in Kerala is a powerful creature. She is not a spouse. She is creating, justice-seeking and raging. She is a force of power and she can manifest compassion.

      The Syrian church also tells the story of migrating from Kodungaloor and bringing the faith that came to us from Thomas the apostle and their devotion to Mary with them.

      ***

      A few years ago I googled St Mary’s.

      On their webpage I found a section in quotes from the diary of a young English missionary stationed in Manarcardu in the 1800s. In the quote the missionary claimed that the infernal chanting to Mary (from my beloved church) was driving him mad, so he went down to the church and preached his very best to get them to stop.

      In response, he wrote, the chanting only seemed to grow louder.

      Hilarious. I wonder what summer intern got away with posting that on the website?

      My people.

      Until I read this story I had never thought about how we, as the indigenous Indian community, appeared to those European missionaries and traders who arrived in our locality. I suspect they were expecting to introduce Christianity, only to discover the locals already worshipping in an Orthodox Christian Church. I had never thought about us as influenced or even defined by these encounters, but clearly part of my questioning and confusion on that day came from their understanding of what a Christian is, which for them was Roman Catholic or Protestant, Western European in culture, and probably white and straight appearing.

      ***

      I grew up in Dallas, Texas. I came out to myself when I was seventeen, and immediately remembered the Gospel passage in which Jesus says, ‘If you follow me, you will lose mother, and father, and sibling,’ or something like that, and wondered how he knew what it meant to be a queer Indian Christian kid living in Texas in 1989.

      I had heard about being saved from the ways of the world from Baptist friends, but it had never occurred to me that self-knowledge could mean something like this. I had been saved from an illusory sense of myself, into knowing something true and difficult. It felt as if the Gospels that I had heard every Sunday of my life were starting to make sense, but in a way that made me irreconcilable to many kinds of Christianity.

      I was fortunate to be raised by Orthodox people and believed deeply that I was made in the image of God. Thank God for that kind of teaching in the church and in my family for a dark-skinned kid growing up in the American South. I remember wondering if there was such a thing as God and how that might be defined while at the same time understanding without question that God’s love for creation, of which I was a part, was inescapable. That wonderful, critical space of intellectual honesty alongside the experience of a life of Christian practice, which for me includes curiosity about what people find sacred and a trusting of myself, has offered a generous and creative space for faith and self-­acceptance.

      Those missionaries noted Indian Orthodox worship as something that required reformation but recognised the importance or maybe the holiness of the old churches. I remember the feeling of placing my body on the cool floor of that church as a tired and scared twenty-two-year-old and asking the most terrifying question: ‘Can I be?’

      I remember understanding in the most peaceful way that I am not a compartmentalised or fragmented person but whole, as we all are, before a certain kind of theology and economics told us otherwise.

      I don’t know if it is that people have worshipped in that site for so long, or that my own people have, or if it is the way they chant, or that I must have gone a few times as a child and remember it fondly, but I love that place.

      I am a child of immigrants, so yes, I do have nostalgia and sadness for a culture whose shadows I see in my parents’ lives, but I’m not sure nostalgia is enough to account for the draw of that site for me.

      ***

      I am dedicated to St Mary’s Church because I was born two months early and with clubbed feet. My mother prayed to Mary at Manarcadu from a hospital in Dallas, Texas, that I would survive and be able to walk. She made my dad fulfil her promise to take me there when he took me to India a year later. That must have been an awkward visit, but I suspect he didn’t dare skip it. When my mother goes to that church, she offers the little metal foil feet for my legs. Increasingly, we offer all the little metal parts, because we and all of our parts are aging. It feels foolish, and yet, I am living, and I can walk and run.

      That day when I heard the voice say, ‘Get up and walk’, I started to stand up. It is a quote from the Bible, from Acts 3 – I had it read at a service when I became the rector of St Mark’s in the Bowery in New York City. The disciples ask a man waiting to be carried down to the gate of the temple to ask for alms whether or not he wants to be healed, and then command him to be healed, right then. Jesus does the same in the Gospels.

      I still ask for my mother’s prayers, and she for mine. I don’t pretend to know how any of it works, except that there is this place that we get to go where we lay down all of our pain, confusion and limitation in the presence of a wonderous holiness who, like us, knows pain and loss. I know that I exercise and work my legs so that my walking draws no attention most of the time. It doesn’t always work. I use the tools I can to have the most mobility, just as the auntie I pray for daily also goes to chemo. I wonder if we are also creating a holy space among us that holds the ambiguity of our human experiences, our broken parts and our queer little community, and reminds us of our place in the long journey of a people from a particular plot of earth in search of meaning amid the seeming arbitrariness of daily suffering.

      ***

      You might hear in my wondering the usual questions of the children of immigrants. I think that’s true. There is also a clarity and connectedness that has resisted binaries, boundaries and definitions. Something ancient and modern in tension with and formed by the Christianity that came with the colonial period. Something resisting nationalisms and the simple answers our existences defy. Something questioning and sure, like a priest at an altar, a reader of books, a lover of the sacred manifest among us.

      I wonder about the sacred power of the earth and the truths our bodies carry for us. It is a learning and unlearning to recognise the baggage in our lives of other people’s limited imaginations and the true freedom of becoming ourselves. Mary and her sisters, the raging goddesses of Kerala, for me speak to the reality of women’s experiences through history. Loss and vulnerability and the rage that we would manifest, if we could, when we can, at the indignities or losses that are simply too much to bear. We don’t talk about Mary as raging, as far as I can tell, but it wouldn’t be a bad response to her life. Her beautiful baby vulnerable. Her little family threatened. Her adult son murdered. Her people conquered. She sings a pretty raging song in the

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