A Shift in Consciousness: new way of looking at life

 

 We ask today, what is the destiny of the human believers? What if many drift from their faith practice? What if people do not follow their past paths? What will the future following of a particular religious path involve in? It is going to be a metanoia - a conversion of conscience - than moral or life reform.  It is about a complete shift in consciousness, a new way of looking at life. A renewed and reprogrammed ‘memory’ in the making. The pandemic lesson is gut-wrenching: denying one’s past style of life and take up a new course all together. It is a death to the past processed practices in religious terms. A new power to ‘crucify’ one’s set-ego and blind faith.  This paradigm move is going to be the foundation of the religious, or better still, a spiritual life in the future.

It is not difficult to anticipate the religious fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic. The impact of religiosity will be felt in the coming years. For the conservative believers, the fallout may well be controlled, but its impact on general religious practices will be felt. Just as the post-Covid contraction of black fungus poses a threat, there will be telling impact on the practicing believers of diverse faith. A prolonged pandemic experience over the past two years of living ‘unnatural lives’ will certainly have strong impact on the believers.  

As the pandemic persists, it is likely that dissatisfaction with ritualistic religious practices will diminish, although a stronger yearning for truth will grow about God, religion and its implication. People’s response to the post-pandemic religiosity will be different. Spiritually, the natural desire for a strong humanity and divinity (as an all-encompassing force) will grow. People’s physical participation in community rituals will change too, probably more towards a quasi-religious practices. These are still assumptions based, on past socio-religious behavior. The present challenges posed by the pandemic, threatens all presumptions and beliefs of the past practices and traditions. The future response possibly will be new patterns of spiritual behavior, more connected to the existing reality, than the past belief-systems expressed mostly through rituals.

The religious narratives has become bare and impoverished in the face of the pandemic experience. It has become arid and static. Today, it has to have a sense of an ethic and meaning that opens up new possibilities. The very Covid crisis has become a religious-ethical crisis. We are not given even the time to mourn the dead or perform the last rite. Religiosity has lost the power of memory. Covid, has proved that the religious crisis is a crisis of culture. Religion as an ideological system has lost its philosophical roots. Today, as ever, the nature is always evolving. In the present ecological age, religions cannot treat nature as a commodity. Reason and faith must be treated equally within religion, based on ‘truth-telling’. The illiteracy of reason within religion is a dangerous thing.  

 

According to Shiv Visvanathan, an academic associated with Compost Heap, a network pursuing alternative imaginations, truth in religion needs to be told in a new language, with a sense of the epic and ethics (Crisis reimagined, The Telegraph, 21.05.21). Certainty and continuity are the hallmarks of any religion based on progressive reasoning with care. Religious truth is to be told with the power of metaphors and the ‘sacramentals’. Religious narratives are a kind of storytelling, - of communicating God’s events in history in metaphors and parables, with their broader meanings. As epidemics of the past had mythic power and people naturally invoked the sacred, the Covid experience too, needs to raise a response to the sacred and the divine. A sacred sense within secularism through social service – as St. Teresa of Kolkata would do - is what is required.

 

When religious language becomes too clerical, the common people during this pandemic crisis desperately seek the power of prayer and healing. Religion that is so much social, cannot afford to lose a sense of society that is suffering. Rituals should not destroy the social reality. At this moment of creation we humans are called to adapt to it, find a new language and act of ethics (not belief system) in order to evolve as new humanity within this evolving creation.

BANDEL BASILICA: A PILGRIMAGE CENTRE FORCED TO REINVENT ITSELF

 

The second phase pandemic since April 2021, once again, prevents pilgrims from visiting this Marian shrine of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary and that of the miraculous statue of Our Lady of Happy Voyage at Bandel. Though Bandel Church remains closed to the pilgrims and visitors, it had opened its door allowing Christian families from parishes and other dioceses to visit the Church since January 2021. Due to the present Covid-19 pandemic situation, it has been closed once again for all outsiders.

Following the lockdown (March 2020), after the outbreak of COVID-19, pilgrims have not yet begun to return en masse to this great shrines. Many parish pilgrimage initiatives have come to a sudden halt. Some groups have cancelled or postponed their pilgrimage schedule.  The ongoing pandemic makes it difficult to organize even family pilgrimage. And this is not likely to change for a while.  With some exceptions, 2020 has been a blank year, and 2021 also seems to be so.  While many pilgrims are disappointed, there is also the loss of revenue for the shrine.

Many letters from the faithful informed the shrine that this uncertain situation have augmented their disappointment.  There has been terrible loss of income for the shrine as well. Unfortunately, unlike the government aided Madrasas, the Christian pilgrimage centres are not helped out with government subsidies. While paying the salaries to the 50 staff members, it will be difficult to recover the money spent on the shrine’s maintenance. The services that employed staff are forced to resort to, due to the lockdown, cannot be reduced to part-time either.

The shrine’s management team is trying to continue some sort of activity, for the Christian folk, especially through live-streaming of religious services. While the proposed prayer settings and free virtual pilgrimages can be had, one cannot call them in-presence prayers or pilgrimages. Virtual pilgrimages (e-pilgrimage), are not the same as pilgrimage in real time and space.

Besides, the pilgrims don't have a good grasp of digital tools and videoconferencing.  The priests responsible, use Whatsapp to send pic-text messages as a spiritual aid. Besides such digital initiatives, local pilgrimages (local churches, grottos, religious sites) can be organized. People can walk to isolated places of prayer, following the Covid-19 protocols. Certainly, necessary temporary changes are needed in the coming future, at the expense of the deprivation of major pilgrimages. While desire to visit Bandel for a pilgrimage be as strong as ever, we need to invent a new look at the way we perform pilgrimage and prayers. Now is the time to expand and improve family prayers, prayed together at home in order to ‘rediscover the original freshness of the joy of loving.’

 

Incarnating Christmas

 

Unlike other years, we are forced to face this Christmas differently, without much of feasting with family and friends. There is going to be less visiting, gifting, and even less churchgoing. On the other hand, the pandemic has helped us rediscover the presence of Christ in the insecurity of our world through the fragility and through a ‘surrendering’ faith. The fear of Covid-19, the consequences of the crisis, and the awaited vaccines, are forcing us to rethink the meaning of Christmas. We have been forced to scale-down Christmas. In fact, the pandemic stands as an opportunity to incarnate God's love for others.

 In the heart of Christmas, there is the ‘fragile baby’ in each of us, especially those who are suffering either physically, economically, spiritually, emotionally or socially. Many mourn family and friends lost to the disease. Many are out of jobs and are in financial problems. Schools are closed. In all these, once the main motive of Christmas is understood, we begin to ‘incarnate’ Christmas to its basics. It is not the people flocking for the midnight Christmas Mass. It is not the cake and cookies, neither the clothes nor the cash.

 The Christmas miracle will happen when we are connected with the least in society, when we are stuck together with compassion and care, beyond the regulated ‘structures of Church walls’. The ritualistic prayer-markets need to be replaced with ‘selling’ of empathy-filled-hearts for the Covid-victims. Our Christmas bells and chants will welcome their presence. Equipped with sincere efforts, we will have to decide to spend this Christmas season, staying with the poor, and basically, go to the peripheries, to those who have nowhere to go except the ‘poor stable’. Only then, the visible act of kindness will manifest the invisible God, in Christ.

 We may fast from the Eucharistic Holy Communion, but never deprived of the Good News – the Word becoming flesh for saving the suffering children of God.  This is the heart of Christmas faith that is renewed in the midst of our shattered security and the fragility of our lives. Jesus who consistently suffered from birth to death, helps us ‘incarnate’ our faith-mystery into concrete actions, by listening, interiorizing, and acting on the Good News of salvation. The deeper we incarnate the Word, the more God's infinite love goes beyond reason, and we radiate with joy in alleviating the sufferings of others through a spirit of solidarity and fraternity. We show solidarity with all those who live through a painful experience of COVID-19, and been hit by the economic crisis, all those doctors and nurses who are over-burdened, attending to the affected sick. We need to be responsible for our brothers and sisters who suffer. Let this Christmas be an opportunity to truly incarnate God's love for others.

 How can the parish prepare itself for a more low-key Christmas? Seeing the present as an opportunity each parish will do well to cut cost of celebration and, as some Bishops in their circulars have suggested, to make collections in cash and kinds, to distribute among the poor. The parish priests need to contact the poor people and share the ‘Christmas gift’ in collaboration with the rest. We are called to do something with Christmas.   We need to pair together in synodality to do so, and never say ‘we could do nothing.’ Otherwise, it will be ‘a hell kind of Christmas’ without the Bethlehem Baby. Such concrete actions in context, will help us grasp the profound meaning of this feast. Serving the ‘destabilized destitute’, at this time, can help us incarnate God in flesh. Sure, this year we will celebrate a more attentive sober Christmas. Let the liturgies with its choirs keep a sober festive atmosphere too, whether online or in person. Let the family gatherings be to the minimal. Instead, make this an opportunity to draw on our interiority to serve others in need. This would be a true celebration of God-Incarnate, for everything that is good for others is a celebration of Christmas. Our actions become signs of God's love for humanity, for God come to manifest his concrete love for the whole creation. This God-Incarnate sides with the suffering brothers and sisters. The “Eucharistic centre” of Christmas is the suffering humanity. Christ is with us as God with us, Emmanuel, in people’s poverty and pains. God shares from the ‘house of bread’ (Bethlehem), our own disruption and death. Let us go beyond the religious rules, structures and rituals, and unlock our parish communities to visit the poor, the sick, the migrants, the unemployed and those neglected in society. Let this be a Covid-Christmas  with all those differently disabled by the pandemic.