Christianity and India

"Christians living in Kerala astutely relate the Christ to the Vedic tradition."

Christianity in India is about as old as Christianity itself. In the south, in the Tamil province, especially, the cult of the Christian is especially well developed. In parts of India it easily adopted the Brahminic mode of expression. Syrian Christians living in Kerala engage in casting their horoscopes for example, and astutely relate the life of the Christ to Vedic traditions. In some regard, Christian-ways in these regions are ubiquitous; in turn it gives culture to India.

 The deeply imbedded notion of the Avatar inspires many. Through divining the personality of the Christ, Indians see the Christ as something of a Supreme Being, incarnated, come to earth to save mankind. The idea of wrong, of sin is overlooked. In this type of salvation drama, Christ, the Avatar is most appealing. Sabrania Bharati, a Tamil poet of national prominence and a Shakti devotee wrote:

My Lord expired on the Cross

and ascended in three days.
Beloved Mary Magdalene

 saw this happen.
Friends! Here's the esoteric sense.
The gods will enter us
and guard us from all ills 

if we transcend pride.
 

Mary Magdalene is Love,
Jesus the Soul.
The outer evil destroyed,
the good life sprouts.
She praised the radiance 

in that golden face.
That was the love of Magdalene,

ah, what joy!
If Sense is bound to the Cross of Truth,
and crucified with nail austerity,
Jesus of the strengthened soul 

will rise as the boundless sky

Magdalene is Eternal Feminine,
Jesus Christ is deathless dharma,
Draw we close to the symbol:
look, an inner meaning glows.

The poet does not mean to give a philosophical view here. Instead he is deeply moved to record his experience in poetry, the song of words. Praising the image of the Christ upon the Cross, he attempts to reconcile this image with the sure knowledge of deep suffering, of passion. Why should there be so much suffering? Is the persecutor Pilate to be the ever source of this suffering? What remains now of godliness, of mercy, of holiness? The heart in ascension rises and opens to the eternal, to hope.

How, muses the poet, shall we coax, the Lord of Hosts to enter our consciousness, making us the carriers of the imperishable Dharma? With Mary Magdalene as love incarnate, love then is the entrailing of the gods to combine the human with Jivatman and Supreme, the Paramatman.
Where love is expressed, smallness falls away; there lives instead the Divine, for God is Love, we learn. The Supreme responds to the sincere strivings of the Human being.

Another Indian of great repute, Sri Aurobindo also felt the indescribable pull towards the imagery of  Christ upon the Cross. Affected by the story of The Divine Comedy,  Dante who remarks with simple clarity, 'in His will is our peace,' reflects the view of Aurobindo equally himself.
Aurobindo freely engaged the life and gospels of the Christ in his own writings. For Aurobindo, the Christ represented the ideal, the strivings of the One to completeness, to wholeness. The Avatar, he believed, was significant for man's spiritual progress, for his ultimate ascension. In his epic poem, Savitri, he writes about the Christ as Avatar in a step towards human unity.

All Human Problems are Spiritual

"Then all of them together, crying loudly, moved to the malevolent shore that awaits anyone who has no fear of God." -- Inferno, Canto III by Dante

In his belief, born of experience first as a cloistered monk and then as a Jungian therapist, Thomas Moore comes now to realize that "what was really at the root of those unsettled lives was religion... I didn't always realize the extent to which spiritual issues were playing a central role... The obvious spiritual problems had to do with disturbing experiences surrounding religion in childhood." In his book, The Soul's Religion, Moore writes "in these ordinary, troubled lives, spirit and psyche were closely connected. In other cases, spiritual issues were more subtle and required a broadening of the idea of spirituality."

Today, society to the extent that it acknowledges religion at all, sees itself "in relation to an image of a "gentleman God," the grandfather and patriarch." This pushes the feminine into the shadows, hidden beneath the surface of everyday life. Neglected feminine nature in the world is often felt in oppressive and mysterious forces that may make living an everyday life almost impossible. For the feminine energy, like her balance, masculine energy, needs recognition for a balance in daily living. Many today neglect, even deny the feminine nature; they are hostile to its alleged weak frailty. Yet many seek its balance in a professional life that includes care-taking in fields like nursing, elementary school teaching, social work; merely doing this everyday, external work doesn't solve an interior, spiritual lack or need for the feminine energy. There are, Moore notes, countless females who mother and nurture all those they contact almost to death. We often seek to escape them. Allowing the feminine, the marian into daily life as a spiritual role or guide "is an effective way to heal" the lack of a divine mother in a man or woman's life. She takes her proper place as an 'avatar' rather than a lived out female image. Then here she is spirit; she is soul.

"In matters of soul and spirit, things are not always what they might seem." Moore observes, "I have come to understand sexism and violence against women as a spiritual issue, as a failure to appreciate the feminine mysteries" which no amount of nudity, ogling, looking or voyeuristic regard will alleviate. The deepest interior, which cannot be seen, can only be sensed with the soul-heart is at issue. "Today many spiritual passions are disguised in politics, war, money, sex or athletics." Even so, most secular, enlightenment, outlets for spiritual passion are inadequate because they address merely a surface issue, meaning that recognition is viewed only indirectly, often unconsciously, so we don't often even admit they are religious. These modern, secular, indirect forms "siphon off spiritual steam, leaving unsatisfied religious needs."

This loss of recognition of the spiritual, the religious, as an attitude, a way of life, a lifestyle, leads to great degrees of loss, of illness, of alienation in modern life. Some have written of the "sick soul." Many relationships, families and marriages fail "because we now treat them as sociological constructions or psychological arrangements, partnerships, rather than as holy mysteries. As a result we continue to crave religion of the deepest kind, often in disguised form; yet so much of what we try is inadequate, "only increasing the craving and emptiness" of our deepest selves, writes Moore.

In maturity, spiritual growth, like growth in any other area of our life, renders to us a "quest and search." What we discover is a deepening and a broadening of ourself; we are not obliged to a single path, our perceptions deepen, wisdom accrues. We often discover paradoxes at work. How to combine apparent opposites into one coherent whole is our challenge, and our grace. In doing so, we find the gifts of our life.