Raja of Rashkali

In his marvelous, most recent novel the Indian writer, Amitav Ghosh, tells the story of the mid-19^th century Raja Neel Rattan Halder, the zemindar of Rashkali[i].  The fictitious Halders were among the oldest and most noted landed families of Bengal.  Born of a high caste with religious sensitivities, Neel is a paragon of purity and cleanliness.  As a child he was delicate and fragile, characteristics that he retains in his adulthood.  When entertaining Englishmen, Neel would not eat with them, “the rules of the Rashkali household were strict in regard to whom the Raja could eat with, and unclean beef-eaters were not a part of that small circle.”  This is not so much a judgment of the westerners as a statement of fact, and for Neel, the extension of his gracious hospitality need not be an occasion for defiling himself.  He can remain clean in their presence, even as they transgress bounds he would never allow himself to cross.

What Neel has been unable to retain in his adulthood is the wealth of previous generations of his family, which has been siphoning away for years, without his really knowing it.  And eventually Neel finds himself in prison because of his inability to pay his debts, and because it suits the British colonizers who want to make use of the Raja’s land holdings.

In prison, Neel has no choice buy to occupy a filthy cell that is an affront to every pattern, every rule he has tried to live his life by.  Ritual cleanness is a luxury even dearer than actual cleanliness.  But the greatest affront to Neel’s status and identity, the greatest challenge to his cleanness is his cellmate: a stinking, shriveled, convulsing, nameless soul who is an opium addict in serious withdrawal, who lies huddled in a corner of the cell, “so thickly mired in dirt and mud that it was impossible to tell whether the man was naked or clothed.”  “For a man of Neel’s fastidiousness,” Ghosh writes, “it was to cohabit with the incarnate embodiment of his loathings.”

Neel, the Raja of Rashkali, decides that if he is to remain sane, he will have to clean his cell.  But to take up into his hands the broom and the dustpan required to do so, is to come into contact with objects heretofore untouchable to him.  “Closing his eyes, he thrust his hand blindly forward [to grab the broom], and only when the handle was in his grasp did he allow himself to look again: it seemed miraculous then that his surroundings were unchanged.”  And he goes about the process of sweeping, and scouring the floor of his cell.  But there remains, in the corner, the addict in the throes of his withdrawal, covered in his own filth, reeking like a toilet, quivering in his semi-private agony.

Eventually, as time passes and the addict’s convulsions subside, Neel decides that he has no choice but to complete the job of cleaning the cell, and this will mean taking his cellmate into his own hands and cleaning him, too.  So he barters with other prisoners for some slivers of soap and some rags, he convinces the guard to allow him access to water, he finagles a new set of clothes, and he approaches the figure that has huddled in the corner of the cell for days.  The Raja of Rashkali scrubs the filth off the man, cuts his loose clothing off of him, finds someone to shave his head and his beard, both of which are teeming with lice, cleans and de-louses his bedding and washes that last corner of the cell, to which he returns the bedding and the still silent figure of his cellmate.

And this is what Ghosh writes in summarizing this phenomenal event in the life of Raja Neel Rattan Halder of Rashkali:

“To take care of another human being – this was something Neel had never before thought of doing, not even with his own son, let alone a man of his own age, a foreigner.  All he knew of nurture was the tenderness that had been lavished on him by his own care-givers: that they would come to love him was something he had taken for granted – yet knowing his own feelings for them to be in no way equivalent, he had often wondered how that attachment was born.  It occurred to him now to ask himself if this was how it happened: was it possible that the mere fact of using one’s hands and investing one’s attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing whatever to do with the response of the object of one’s care – just as the craftsman’s love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated?”

When I first read that beautiful passage, I knew that it was the Gospel in a different tongue.  I did not realize how well it matched the Gospel reading for today: “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?”

We find it more or less easy to love those who love us already, and it is a fine thing that we should find it as easy as we can.  But Jesus calls us to love those whom we are not inclined to love, to reach out to those for whom affection does not immediately swell in our hearts, to love, even our enemies.  “For if you greet only your brothers and sisters what more are you doing than others?”

I cannot speak for all of you, but speaking for myself, even though I have not a single land holding to my name, generally speaking, I am a Raja in the world, surrounded by things and people that remain essentially untouchable to me.  I could tell you that there is no system of purity rules that I am following, but I would be being a bit dishonest, although the system in our country is not codified and not defended as it has been in India.  Still, much remains untouchable to me.

And yet I know that lying in the corner (of my block, my neighborhood, my city, my nation) there is a shivering, filthy, quivering, convulsing soul, or more, whose misery I can hardly measure.  I do not know his name, or where he comes from.  I do not know how many of him there are in the world.  I only know that I am not inclined to love that slight and stinking bit of humanity.  I am not inclined to wash him off.  I am not inclined to care nearly so much about his cleanliness as I am about my own cleanness, especially since I do not expect that much gratitude will be shown for whatever I do.

But I am reminded that I am a creature of God’s own making, and that God’s love for me is in no way diminished by the fact of it being more or less unreciprocated.  And I hear Jesus asking, “If you love those who love you, what reward do you have?  What more are you doing than others?”

Eventually in the story, Neel awakes one day to find his cellmate awake and near him, resting his arm on Neel’s shoulder, and he has only one thing to tell Neel, he tells him his name.

This city is full of quivering souls who have been consigned to lives of dirty, low expectations.  It is convenient that for the most part I do not know their names.  How long will it be, I wonder, before we Rajas are willing to use our own hands and invest our attention in someone other than ourselves?  How long before we learn to love those who do not yet love us?  How long to reach out to all that frightens us and threatens us, to our enemies, and to discover, when we open our eyes, that in our case, the world has changed.  And it is good. 

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

20 February 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

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[i] Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008

Nothing to Say

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe….  For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.  (1 Cor. 1: 21, 25)

The avant-garde composer John Cage once famously said, “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.”  Today, this kind of self-contradictory nonsense doesn’t seem like the domain of progressive musicians or artists, it seems, to many, like the domain of the church, who many suspect has nothing to say, but has been saying it loudly, nonetheless, for two millennia.  Or, more poignantly, perhaps those who can either forgive the church, or at least be dismissive of her, attribute this attitude to God: that he has nothing to say, and he is saying it.   This would explain nicely the disconcerting silence so many people find at the other end of their prayers.

Perhaps Cage knew this feeling, too.  He once described a conversation he had with his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg:

“After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’

To some, this, too, sounds like a description of religious life, a life of prayer, a life of going to church, Sunday after Sunday: beating our heads against a profoundly unyielding wall.

I regularly encounter people who, with the best intentions, want to engage me on the topic of religion, or of God (these are, of course, not the same thing).  Such encounters with sympathetically minded people usually present me with an opportunity to unfold the wisdom of God in a well-crafted short answer.  And you would think, that since I am supposed to talk about religion and about God for a living I would have such pithy presentations on the wisdom of God and of his church at the ready to be deployed in elevators, at bars, or dinner parties.  But I have very few of such packets of powdered chicken soup for the soul waiting to be reconstituted in my day-to-day encounters.  And sometimes this is a disappointment to me, and no doubt to the sympathetic soul on the other side of the conversation.  I suppose it ends up seeming as though I have nothing to say and I am saying it.

It is not convenient to proclaim Christ crucified.  If the message of the Cross is foolishness to much of the world, it is not always crystal-clear to those of us who believe, either.  Nor is it immediately self-evident that Jesus’ teaching that it is the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those hungry for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, or those who are persecuted who are blessed.  If this is God’s wisdom then no wonder many would rather dream of becoming a partner at Goldman Sachs.

It is hard to be a believer if you are reluctant to embrace the foolishness of God.  His foolishness began in the beginning, when he created this magnificent universe, and a garden with a man and a woman in it, and told them to enjoy Paradise, with the exception of one famous tree.  (This, of course, is not how it actually happened, it is just our foolish way of describing God’s foolishness.)  It certainly looks like foolishness to have chosen an old man and an old woman to be the patriarch and matriarch of your chosen people, who, by the way, do not yet exist.  It looks like foolishness to allow those people, once they have come into being, to be enslaved.  It looks like foolishness to choose as their leader an incompetent speaker, who happens also to be a murderer.  Shall I go on to describe the foolishness of God?  Do you want to talk about David, his great king, who was also a fool of epic proportions?

And those examples come only from Act One.  We have not the time to chart the foolishness that unfolds in Act Two, beginning with a poor Jewish girl and leading quickly to a manger and eventually to the grand foolishness of Calvary.

And in the midst of it, this foolish teaching:

Blessed are the poor in spirit;

blessed are those who mourn;

blessed are the meek;

blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness;

blessed are the merciful;

blessed are the pure in heart;

blessed are the peacemakers;

blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

blessed are you when people revile you.

What foolishness!

I sometimes wish that there were a sort of pocket guide to all this foolishness: a secret manual that they would give you in seminary, a kind of key to turn in the lock, or lens to look through and see how it all makes sense, to see God’s wisdom for what it is, to hear that God has something to say and he is saying it loud and clear!  I see on the shelves of the bookstores many attempts to convert the foolishness of God into the wisdom of this world, all more or less good for you than chicken soup, I guess.  But none wiser than the foolishness of God.

Back to John Cage, who told this story:

“There was an international conference of philosophers in Hawaii on the subject of reality.  For three days, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki said nothing.  Finally the chairman turned to him and asked, ‘Dr. Suzuki, would you say this table around which we are sitting is real?’  Suzuki raised his head and said, ‘Yes.’  The chairman asked him in what sense Suzuki thought the table was real.  Suzuki said, ‘In every sense.’”

Such is the wisdom of this world: we can as easily become confused about the existence of a table as we can about the existence of God.  We know, for instance that money can’t buy happiness, but we have no intention of giving up trying to do so.  We love to suggest that the pen is mightier than the sword, but we will never spend more on pens than we do on swords. And we listen to people all day long who have nothing to say, but they don’t know it, and they keep on saying it anyway, and we keep on listening.

At least John Cage knew had had nothing to say before he said it.  I, myself, have never been very interested in Cage’s music, never found it engaging, never wanted to sit through 4 minutes and 33 seconds of ambient noise and nothing else at his suggestion, so I suppose it suits me well that he has nothing to say.

I am old enough to have been required to memorize a few things in my schooling.  Did you have to memorize this:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

creeps in this petty pace from day to day

to the last syllable of recorded time,

and all our yesterdays have lighted fools

the way to dusty death.  Out, out brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

that struts and frets his hour upon the stage

and then is heard no more: it is a tale

told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

signifying nothing.  (Macbeth, Act 5, Sc 5)

Poor Macbeth.  If life boils down to nothing, then why say nothing so eloquently?  Why beat your head against the wall, even if you do it in iambic pentameter?

You and I gather at a table week by week; for some of us, day by day.  You are largely silent as I natter on, saying what I will, whether or not I have something to say.  I suppose from time to time you must wonder if I do.  But let me ask you, what do you think about the table at which we gather?  Is it real?  What do you think about the bread and the wine we put there?  What do you think about the words I say, to which you add your ‘Amens’?  Is it tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?  Is it so much foolishness, as it seems to more and more of the world to be?

Let me give you some more of John Cage.  This is what he said:

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful … is why do I think it’s not beautiful?  And very shortly you discover that there’s no reason.  If we can conquer that dislike, or begin to like what we did dislike, then the world is more open.”

I have never liked John Cage’s music, never been much willing to even call it ‘music’ because it has seemed so foolish to me, compared to, say, the brilliant wisdom of a Bach fugue.  I have always thought that it is not beautiful.  I have been all too ready to agree that he has nothing to say, and it has just bothered me that he keeps saying it.  Perhaps you know people who make you feel this way.  But I would like the world to be more open.  And I think Cage may be right, that if we can conquer dislike (that is born of nothing really, no reason), if we can begin to like what we did dislike, then the world does seem more open.  Then the world does begin to seem like a place where the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted may truly be blessed.

And in a world that is willing to bleed and die for nothing but tribe, or class, or power, or oil, or money, or whatever other reasons we have invoked to justify the rivers of blood that flow through human history – if this reasoning is what passes for wisdom, then I would prefer to trust in the foolishness of God who sent his Son to bleed and die for me and for you, even though it is not always clear what that means, not always clear why that particular narrative of bloodshed is so beautiful.

When it seems to me as though God has nothing to say, when it seems as though faith, believing, holding fast to the hope of the Gospel may be an obstacle, like a wall through which I cannot pass, as it sometimes does seem to me, because of the foolishness of it all.  Then I hope I may be willing to devote my life to beating my head against this wall.  Because in something like 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, I think I can hear on the other side of that wall something that sounds like a Word that God has for me, something God has to say, though he has for so long seemed to say nothing at all.  And I ask myself, as I prepare to beat my head against that wall one more time, What does the Lord require of me but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with my God?

And that is something worth saying.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

30 January 2011

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

In memoriam: Bruce Nichols

Some time in the mid 1760s a Christian missionary named Samuel Kirkland began to live and preach among the Oneida tribe of Native Americans in upstate New York.  By many accounts Kirkland became close friends with the Oneida chief, Skenandoah.  It was, in part, this friendship that eventually convinced the Oneida to side with the colonist rebels in the Revolutionary War, and Skenandoah was said to have become a friend of George Washington’s, among others.  After the war, however, the Oneida were displaced from their land, and ultimately granted 6 million acres, effectively creating the first Indian reservation.  Legend attributes an epitaph to Skenandoah who is said to have lived to be over 100: “I am an aged hemlock; the winds of an hundred winters have whistled through my branches.  I am dead at the top.  The generation to which I belonged have run away and left me.”

Some of you know that after he sold his share of the restaurant and the catering business Bruce turned his hand to writing a libretto for an opera.  The libretto, I discovered from Bruce’s brother David, dealt with Skenandoah and the Oneida people.  I know that Bruce brought his laptop to the hospital and had books there that he was using to research the Oneida as he worked away at the story.

I am not surprised that Bruce was attracted to the story of a people who would ultimately be displaced from their homes; as many of you know, Bruce had a deeply held and abiding concern for refugees.  And I am not surprised that he would be attracted to the story of a Christian missionary who managed to befriend rather than alienate a noble indigenous people.  Bruce knew, of course, that this was not always the case; that the church was not always to be found on the compassionate side of complicated relationships.  He would have been glad to celebrate the friendship between Kirkland and Skenandoah, I think.  And I can’t say for certain which of the two he would have personally identified with more readily, though I suspect it would be Skenandoah.  And I suspect it would have made an absolutely wonderful libretto!

Bruce was a little disappointed in me because of my failure to appreciate opera.  Not long ago he suggested that I at least try attending an HD simulcast from the Met – a suggestion I successfully resisted.  But I realize that Bruce’s love of opera was just one aspect of his larger appreciation of beauty.  He once led a giving campaign here at Saint Mark’s in which he urged us to adopt Mother Teresa’s slogan that we do something beautiful for God.

Bruce loved beauty; he saw God wherever he found beauty, I think, and he believed, I know, that it was both a duty and a delight to offer beauty back to God.  You could see this in so many aspects of his life: he thought you could take what was given to you and make something beautiful: this business, those ingredients, these words, that pile of hops and malt and barley.  You are going to make something out of it; why not make something beautiful.

He tried to make a beautiful marriage with a beautiful woman, but when that didn’t work, he and Beatrice eventually found a way to make a really quite beautiful reconciliation.  In fact, the first time I ever met Beatrice was on a Christmas Eve at midnight mass when I met Bruce at the door with both Beatrice and Jim – all three of them smiling!

Unlike Skenandoah, Bruce did not even get close to a hundred winters in this life.  When he was diagnosed with Leukemia, he said to me that perhaps we should talk about a memorial service.  His chemo had not yet even begun, and I assured him that we would have time in the weeks and months ahead to talk about that, never dreaming how wrong I’d be.

In the hospital Bruce often had friends and family visiting.  His brother David, was as vigilant, loyal, and devoted a brother as any man could want.  Beatrice was often there, massaging Bruce’s feet.  I did not often have time alone with Bruce.

But on one occasion when we were alone he told me about something that had happened the night before.  He’d been awakened by screams from a woman in a room several doors away from his: tortured, anguished screams, he said, that you knew came from someone in agony.  Nurses came to her aid, and maybe doctors, he didn’t know, but he was aware that efforts were being made to help, to give this woman relief, but still she screamed.  Of course there was nothing Bruce could do: he could neither shut the screams out of his ears nor help to bring relief to the woman in pain.  But he suddenly had a thought, he told me, that he should pray for the woman, and so he did.  And when he began to pray, the woman’s screams subsided, and eventually fell silent.

One more time that night, the episode repeated itself: Bruce was awakened by the screams, the medical staff did their work to no avail, and Bruce then offered his prayers for the woman, whose screaming stopped.

As I listened to this somehow beautiful account of a night full of pain, I knew that Bruce wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it – since he is not prone to a superstitious take on religion.  I suggested to him that maybe the gift of his prayers was not entirely intended for the woman’s benefit, maybe the real gift was in the assurance to him that his prayers were heard, and attended to in ways he could never foresee or imagine.

If this is true of Bruce’s prayers, as I am sure that it is, then it is also true of yours and mine.  God hears our prayers.  We think we are praying for one thing, but God knows what is needed, and what will happen, and sometimes he answers our prayers in ways that we cannot foresee and cannot even imagine.  God hears our prayers of grief at the loss of Bruce.  He hears our prayers of worry at what becomes of him, of all of us, after death.  God holds us all in the palm of his hand.  He will not let us become refugees in death; he does not drive us from this life to languish in nothingness or darkness or worse; he does not confine us to the bleak reservation of the grave.

God hears our prayers, and he has answers we cannot imagine in the many mansions of his house.  And if he hears our prayers, if he hears Bruce’s prayers, we can be certain of at least one thing: in one of those rooms there is good beer being served.

Let us now offer our prayers for Bruce, as we commend him to God’s care.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Requiem for J. Bruce Nichols, Jr.

Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

29 January 2011