Feb 20-22, Asirvanam, Bengaluru
I was to preach in the morning Friday, the last day of the meeting, and my talk was to be the very last conference on the very last day, at 3 that afternoon. I wanted to open and close the talk with a song as is my wont. But this time I decided to try traveling without having to check any baggage, so I wrote ahead and asked if I could possibly borrow a guitar while I was here. I got an enthusiastic response back, Yes! I knew I was talking a chance, but, hey… So the prior Fr. James here did scrounge me up a guitar. It was small (smaller than my Taylor mini SG) but at first strum it seemed adequate for two songs. But then the ebullient prior decided that I should do a concert on Tuesday night. In any other circumstance with my own guitar I would have said absolutely yes, but the guitar was really bad, just this side of a toy and the low E string was totally out of tune after the second fret. Everything else on the higher frets was pretty bad too but I could have found ways around that. But he insisted and then he announced it to great applause. Humility. I spent most of the day practicing, meaning trying to find ways to play around the tuning problems and picking songs that were not going to be a problem, trying to rely more on the voice than on guitar pyrotechnics. Long story short, when the time came ‘round, I was ready for the humiliation of it all but felt I could pull something halfway decent off. Dorathick told me of an old Tamil proverb that I skilled craftsman could turn a blade of grass into a tool. And so… As fate would have it, some of the young guys who were helping to set up were surprised at what I was playing on and told me that there were better guitars around. Five minutes before the “concert.” And one of the set off looking for it. So I launched in on the toy and pulled off a pretty decent version of “Circle Song” to wild applause. Just as I was finishing that song the chap showed up with another guitar, much better. It had heavy gauge strings (I use extra light) but the sound and the tuning were a world apart. I had decided to do two poems (Circle Song and Awakening), two liturgical pieces (Streams of Living Water and Unless a Grain of Wheat) and two interreligious pieces (Lead Me and The Ground We Share). It was a smash hit with everyone, especially there young pre-postulants who are finishing their schooling, maybe 18-21 years old. The admiration and appreciation on their faces was very moving. Some of them do not yet speak English well and just stood there stammering but you could read it in their eyes.
But before that… As I finished, singing a soft nama japa from Shantivanam (Hare Yeshu) with the crowd to close the night, Prior James then invited an American girl from New Jersey who is here to teach English to come up and sing some more songs in English. She spoke very indistinctly into the microphone and told everyone that she didn’t really know much music and she wasn’t very good but she had learned a couple of sea chanties. She then balanced her smartphone on her knee and played Rory Cooney’s “Canticle of the Turning.” She had to stop occasionally to scroll the lyrics. She then launched into a rendition of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a very long song with so many words that I can’t imagine anyone understood. It was bizarre. Then the prior invited Sr. Lynn, also from the US, who is the head of Communio Internationalis Benedictinarum, the women’s version of the Benedictine Confederation, to sing something. She wisely decided to lead the crowd in the Salve Regina and call it a night.
Anyway, aside from the post-performance additions, it was a real success of a night, and reminded me yet again of how the addition of music changes everything. And yes, from now on I always being my guitar.
Thursday was an outing for the rest of the group and I had orchestrated going for another visit to Jyoti Sahi and his wife Jane, but this time I wanted him to meet and Jyoti wanted to meet him. Not much to add to what I wrote about my encounter with them last March: Jyoti as always a fountain of wisdom and experience, and Jane the model of hospitality. I am quite touched that he is still painting every day and still reading copiously. As a matter of fact he showed me his marked-up copy of Rediscovering the Divine which he said he found “helpful.” His knowledge of Indian culture is astounding, and he writes in a very scholarly way himself. Dorathick as always shows himself to be an even deeper well than he appears at first in terms of the breadth of his knowledge and his ability to articulate complex things in a straightforward way. He actually has just self-published his first book and gave it to Jyoti on “The Cosmic Christ.”
Friday was rougher and I almost don’t know if I can write about it. Just the facts.
I preached in the morning. The odd thing was when I showed up for morning prayer at 6 AM (Mass was at 7), there was hardly anyone there outside of the young monks. None of the participants in this meeting! They had had their outing to Mysore yesterday, a three-hour drive. I thought that they were just going to visit our Camaldolese nuns there, but they also added in a trip to the famous palace and something else, and didn’t get home until 1:30 AM. So the prior had told them to skip morning prayer. Those that dragged themselves into 7 AM Mass (certainly not all the men) looked like something the cat dragged in (as Mom used to say).
I blame it on the fact that I am a born performer (not entertainer, mind you) and a communicator, but I work so hard on things like this. I get five maybe ten minutes to say something to an important group of people––not important like VIPS, important like nuns and monks, superiors, from Sri Lanka and India––and I want to make the absolute most of it. It was the feast of “our” St. Peter Damian and I had adapted an old homily from a few years back on “the heart of a reformer.” (Maybe I’ll clean it up and post it too.) That morning at about 5 AM I cut out half of it. (Do you know the old saying, “If I had had more time I would have written less”?) Presiding at Eucharist in a new place is somewhat awkward anyway, but here they have a certain way of wearing the priestly garb, and certain seating arrangement, etc etc. But it went really well.
But then I was told that my afternoon session was going to be shifted to a third morning session: one at 9, one at 10:30, and me at 12, because so many people were going to leave at lunch. That sounded like a long morning for something the cat dragged in but I said, okay, no problem. I spent hours and hours on this particular talk, overshooting the intellectual level by a good bit. I had already slashed about a third of my 14-page outline, and that morning I slashed another two pages (with footnotes). I also had a PowerPoint. To be fair, I want this to be the basis of my regular talk at monasteries around the world, and perhaps also make an article of it. (This I will also post at some point on the DIMMID website.)
However… the speaker before me was a diocesan priest from Kerala named Fr. Anthony Tharekkadavil. He is a biblicist and a professor in the seminary. As a matter of fact several of the young monks from Kerala studied under him and are very much under his sway. He also told me, later, that he is an apologist. His topics were supposed to be “Living in a multi-religious context in India today” and “World Peace multi-religious perspective.” But in reality both of his presentations were entirely devoted to being vehemently anti-Islam. I am not slandering him by saying this. This was a public presentation, and he is very proud of it.
I’m sure all of this has to be nuanced, but I took copious notes. I wish I could have a copy of his slide show and videos. It was very detailed. It started out beautifully tracing biblical history. But the points that led to were:
We do not worship the same God as Muslims (YHWH is not Allah).
Islam is a false religion (like some others)
He bases his thinking on Cardinal Ratzinger’s Dominus Iesus, not on Lumen Gentium or Nostra Aetate because those latter two contradict the Credo.
“You cannot be friends with a Muslim” (that was the exact title on one of his slides) because they will eventually turn on you out of obedience to the Qur’an.
He kept referring to them “them” and “they” as if all Muslims were like this, and then played clip after clip of extremism Islamist preachers who contradict the Bible, and evangelical preachers who preaching against Islam. Also a clip of someone reading from the writings of Don Bosco in which he describes how absurd Islam is.
He also listed all the ways that Islam says that Christianity and the Bible is wrong. That is fair enough. I think that is worth a hard conversation. How and when and in what tone is up for debate.
He kept saying his main point was that “the only way to real peace is evangelization,” and by evangelization he meant proclaiming Jesus as Lord and converting people. I suppose this might have been his attempt at addressing his assigned topic.
Also Donald Trump, who I think of as anti-Christ if not the anti-Christ, is a great Christian leader because he is protecting Christianity. (It begs the question, as I heard a marvelous Black pastor say on YouTube the other day, “Whose Christianiaty?”!) That was the cherry on the icing on the cake and it was all I could do to stay in my seat and stay silent.
I will not go into my rebuttals of any of this. It’s all so complicated. But at the end of the first session I was literally having heart palpitations with… anger? Frustration? Helplessness? Grief? He was very good, very convincing, fiery. The young guys from Kerala especially seemed to be eating it up.
We ran into each other in the corridor between the first and second session and exchanged some pointed (maybe even harsh) words. I started out by saying, “You have ruined my entire talk. You have cut the legs out from my argument based on the Church’s official teaching,” especially about him dismissing Vatican II, which he doubled down on. (The Vatican Dicastery has experts on Islam and they would never never never speak in this way.) He kept saying, “I’m an apologist” as if that justified his tone. (It came to my mind that there are those who doubt whether apologetics actually is evangelization but that is another question.) I finally was able to stammer out, “What do you want them to walk away with from your session? Fear? Anger? Hatred? Violence?” These are people who living cheek to jowl with Muslims. He is from Kerala and there have been violent acts Muslims against Christians, I understand. And he listed other terrorist attacks around the world so as to say “This is what happens when you let Muslims into your society.” He quoted an Lebanese woman and a Swedish reporter saying pretty much that. Rightly to be concerned, but what is the proper Christian response? “You cannot be friends with a Muslim.” And evangelize using the social media.
Thanks be to God I did not engage him anymore, especially not publicly. My Sicilian was up and I would have spouted stupidaggine. I seriously contemplated not giving my talk at all. I sat through the second session taking copious notes and looking over my own upcoming talk. There was nothing I was going to say that was directly related to what he was saying––I thought there would have been pushback about Hinduism!—though I was going to be quoting Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, Vatican II and all the documents of the Vatican Dicastery over and over again.
I started out singing a cappella a little bit of the new song, “People of the Book (Let Us Come to a Common Word),” which begins with the Arabic verse from the Qur’an and then: “People of the Book, let us come to a common word: that God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God in them.” The only time I mentioned his talk was to say, as I was quoting Nostra Aetate, that I did not agree with Fr. Anthony that this was against the Credo. When I got to the part about studying texts of other traditions I also said that I agreed with him that we should study our own and others’ before we speak. It’s all in the talk. I also said at one point, “You don’t need peacemakers where there are no wars. Just like wouldn’t need interreligious dialogue if we were all getting along harmoniously. That’s why we do it.” In the name of Jesus.
My question to him, which I was only able to formulate later in my mind, was “What if half this crowd were Muslims, how would you have addressed these issues? They are all worthy of the ‘hard conversation’ but how would you have tried to win them over? By making fun of them? By calling out the worst extremes of their tradition? By brow beating them intellectually (the same thing that some imams are doing) with the Scriptures?” And “dialogue is evangelization, showing the best face of Christ and the Church.”
Anyway, once I took a deep breath, my talk went well, and I made a point later of stopping to speak with Fr. Antony in front of everyone in the refectory, very civilly, wishing him peace. I also asked him if he had anything written in English (most of this stuff on this is in Malayalam), mainly because I have a lot of homework to do and his work would be good material. He said no, because there were several other priests doing this work better than him and they had written a lot. Sigh. But I guess all I have to type into Google is “Why Islam is a false religion” and plenty will come up. I can’t imagine the Holy Father or the Dicastery ever ever ever using inflammatory language like that.
It was only later that I realized again that Fr. Anthony’s never touched his topics— “Living in a multi-religious context in India today” and “World Peace multi-religious perspective”. But I was happy that I spoke to both of these, and specifically to our response as monks. I kept thinking of the Trappist monks of Tiburine too, the best example ever of the Third Good in modern times, when the Muslim villagers say to them, “We are the birds, you are the branches.”
And one more thing… during the Q&A I used a line about the US with them I have been using for many years––to be honest it refers to Newt Gringrich saying the “Palestine is an invented country2, but that is only one such example: “A lot of powerful people in my country are saying some very ignorant things about other religions. And the problem is when somebody says something stupid on this end, somebody on the other ends gets killed for it.” I hope Fr. Anthony will not wind up with blood on his hands from his inflammatory remarks yesterday—or anyone.
Oddly enough also (classic over-developed sense of duty), by this time I was the only one of the Western VIPs left: Abbot Primate, Abbot Bernard of AIM, and Sr Lynn of CIB were all gone by then. Most everyone else drifted off slowly in the afternoon and by evening prayer there were only two or three of us left. The last evenings I have been going for an hour of meditation in the Eucharistic chapel in the back of the church where mostly only the pre-postulants, postulants and novices go at 6:30 during “meditation time” before Vespers. Sitting on the floor with nice enough rugs. I’m sad that only these young’s guys go—like at Shantivanam maybe only because they have to go—and only one or two of the elders, but I was really glad to have availed myself of that time with them. The young guys are so sweet. I only knew them from the concert and from hanging around at meals trying to learn their names, but they kept wanting to engage, and one of them wound up accompanying me to the airport at 11:30 PM. Now in Abu Dhabi waiting to board my flight home to Rome.
Let us come to a common word, shall we? God is love and those who abide in love abide in God––and God in them.
