ASH WEDNESDAY

The importance of religious rituals is getting diminished these days. What is happening is a reaction to overritualization of religion.

Religion by nature is both personal and communitarian. Religion must have a personal meaning to the devoted. To those who believe in rituals and to those who do not, religion as such must be meaningful. Rituals make sense when community is celebrating together their faith. The expressions of faith need to be compressed into set forms. Such a set form and formal expressions of faith are called rituals.

Religion can and must have meaning to individuals and communities without insistence on rituals especially those which border on gimmicks.

Ash Wednesday for example is the starting day of the lenten observance of the people who believe in the way of Christ. Starting with the imposition of ashes on the forehead of a christian of religious type to the number 40 in the number of days of abstinence from intoxicating drinks and non-vegitarian food are symbols of rituals. Since they are visible symbols, they are also for exhibition. The Christian once a year applies a bit of loose ash to his or her forehead and says to the world, "Look, I am a faithful Christian. I am on fast today". This in itself is an unchristian declaration, because Jesus Christ wants his disciples to fast in secret. He wants his disciples to wash their face and apply oil to their hair and look normal in front of the public. Jesus reasons out with his friends saying that the heavenly father sees what is done in secret and will reward those humble people in being honest to God and not to the public with a view to gain their attention.

What could happen to those who hate rituals but believe in God who gave them their faith is that they could throw away the baby with the bathwater.

There could arise many by-products to rituals like Fast and Abstinence. Take for example the Spanish-Protugese custom of carnivals. Whichever country these two countries had colonized after the whole globe was divided between them by the Pope for evangelization, carnivals took root in those countries. When Fast and Abstinence was insisted upon by the church, the pleasure loving people said to themselves, Ok, now that we have to forego our pleasures, we should go all out on the day prior to starting the ritual of fasting. Thus they invented carnival on Tuesday preceding Ash Wednesday. Carnival day was a day of pleasure in full measure and devil took the reign of the world over from the Church. Goa in our own country was once a territory governed by the Portugese. Inspite of the protestations of the Church, Carnival happens year after year in Goa. What is more, the girls who bared all and gyrated before a lustful crowd on the day of the carnival, and the men who indulged in the carnal pleasures in public view came to churches on Ash Wednesday in penitent dress and asked to have the ashes imposed on their forehead.

Ash Wednesday as a community celebration could mean that the community was repentant of its own weaknesses and failures in living a holy life is now ready to show that they truly intend to live a life worthy of a Christian. Carnival is a deliberate declaration that come what may pleasure is our way of life, we merely give into the practises of the Church.

Which engineer on earth can design a machine that would work 24 hours a day and 365 days and nights for years to come without resting. Every machine including human body will break down if it is not treated to a good night's rest and a weekly holiday. So too, continuous eating could damage one's health. Dangers of overeating are too many to mention. A day's abstinence from food could do great wonders to the human body.

It is good to rest and that is why the primary lesson of Genesis the preamble of the Bible is about rest: God took rest and gave an example to his creation to rest.

As regards non-vegitarian meals, it is proved beyond doubt that vegitarians live a healthier life style. A diabetic has testified to me that until he changed his food habits his blood sugar could not be controlled. He drank, he says, a gallon of water every day and walked a couple of miles in the morning and ate vegetarian meals. Lo and behold, his blood sugar came to be normal. Many more instances could be quoted.

Abstinence may have creeped into the Lenten practices of the Christians through the backdoor. It might have happened in this fashion: During the mideval times the poor people were surfs and the Abbeys and Bishoprics were the Landlords. One of the things they did was to cultivate fish farms. Labour was cheap and plenty and the Abbeys had vast landholdings. Fish multiplied and there were few takers of fish in the cold climate of Europe which at that time held the monopoly of Roman Christianity. The Abbeys devised a way to make people buy fish from their ponds: they found a religious meaning to eating fish. They said that Christ died on a Friday and therefore, Friday ought to be a day for abstinence from meat. However, non-consumption of meat should not put your energy requirement into peril. Therefore, instead of meat eat fish on Friday. In my childhood, all the Christian calendars had a design of fish on the Fridays. I wonder if the command of the Abbots or Bishops to their flock to each fish had come down to the fifties and sixties of the last century!

Christianity is not an European religion. In fact since Europe did not have the spirit of Christ, Christianity vanished from the face of the Western World. Believe it or not a number of seekers are now making their way to the eastern countries for "nirvana" of one sort or another. Some may find it in yoga another in transcentental meditation another in zen and yet another Hare Krishna movement. However one thing is certain: they are all finding Christianity burdensome and obselete and intolerant. I mean that type of Christianity they had been brought up with.

Christianity is middle Eastern. Though I don't like the term East and West applied to a globe just as much as I don't like preference for the right from the left, I use it for want of another term. Orient or the East had always been associated with mysticism and vegetarianism. The only reference to eating meat found in the Bible is where Peter was asked in a dream to eat whatever that was presented to him. He was actually challenged to eat contrary to the Jewish eating "kosher" food or the custom of avoiding "unclean" food. Christ never spoke of eating meat. Christianity thinks these days with their leadership that eating meat must characterise their religion.

One the other hand it is impossible to be a practitioner of yoga with meat either in the stomach or in the mind.

Every Ash Wednesday brings to my mind certain events connected with it. Let me quote one such event. Once I was waiting with a bulky Priest of the diocese of Delhi at an airport terminal. If I remember well his name was Joseph Thomas. It happened in the 70s. It was Ash Wednesday. The priest in question smoked like a chimney. He offered a cigarette to an officer of the airport authority. The Officer politely declined to accept it and said "Father, it is Lent. I have given up smoking for the season. Besides, I observe fast and abstinence today". The priest blushed. He smiled and tried to compose himself from the shock. The Teacher of Christian faith received a good lesson in faith from a layman.

The point I am trying to drive at is that abstinence need not be only from meat. It could be from smoking, liquor, uncharitable use of the tongue and so on many ways.

To tell a poor man not to eat meat on Friday is the most shameless joke the Catholic Church had been telling centuries after century. In my younger days, I could think of eating meat only on certain rare sundays when my father brought it home. He could not afford meat. Poor and the lower middle class are the people who really observe this abstience law, because, jokes apart, they just cannot afford. If my father had brought home meat on Friday, would we just toss the meat out of the window?! The habit of storing dead meat in refridgerators is a Western concept. For an Easterner, the mother earth fed him or her daily from her boundy.