The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Every time I enter our church, a small signboard by the side of the door catches my eye: “Remove the shoes from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” As one who believes in essential etiquette on all occasions, I have always removed my shoes before entering any place of worship, but I wonder about the connection between any ‘burning bush’ experience I might have and footwear. I am also stumped when my daughter asks me why Achen insists that women cover their head in church (once he even admonished them). Or why the Sunday school teacher wants children to wear white on certain occasions. What is our idea of holiness, piety and purity?
The metaphors we use unconsciously in the language to depict ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are either “up” and “down” or “white” and “black”. For instance, happy is denoted with an ‘up’ (lifting spirits up) and sad with ‘down’ (down in the dumps). In Christian parlance, being pure is to be “washed as white as snow”. If so, can sin and evil but be black (Yuvajana Sakhyam skits have Satan wearing black)? Hence the preference for white garments for worship and the symbolism of the “long white robes over yonder”. Remember the Sunday school song, “I wish I had a little white box/To put my Jesus in..../I wish I had a little black box/To put the devil in....?
By substituting black with white and vice-versa in his poem ‘White comedy’, Benjamin Zephaniah, who has Caribbean roots, amply illustrates how the colour ‘white’ has been associated with goodness and cleanliness and ‘black’ with evil and dirt. 
“I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic/
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
I slaved as a whitesmith
Near a white spot...
I waz in de white book
As a master of white art,
It waz like white death....”
In the social world, these good-bad and white-black metaphors get translated into saints and sinners, the righteous and the guilty (and even the upper caste and the lower caste). Aren’t we familiar with such talk in everyday Christian life? 
Dr. Richard Beck, professor and experimental psychologist at Abilene Christian University in the United States, describes this theme of socio-moral disgust in his book, Unclean. A popular blogger (www.experimentaltheology.blogspot.in), he describes the psychology of disgust in the personal and social domains using simple imagery and demonstrates how disgust erects boundaries around people. These boundaries are in a sense good to keep away from so-called ‘evil’ influences, but they “shut down mission and dialogue in the church”.
Beck bases his book on the text in Matthew 9 and Matthew 12 where Jesus tells the Pharisees, “I require mercy, not sacrifice.” The Pharisees were visibly upset at Jesus dining with “tax collectors and sinners”. In another instance, Paul says to people in the Corinthian church, “I hear when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you….” The divisions here, scholars say, are about how a certain group of people were treated and how there were different meals set for them.
Beck builds on the work of theologian-scholars Walter Brueggemann and Fernando Belo that within Israel there were two competing visions of uprightness before God—the Levitical or priestly vision and the prophetic or justice vision. One focused on cultic purity (ritual purity) while the other focused on “rehabilitative activity to care for the poor and marginalised”. “The Pharisees attain their purity by excluding ‘tax collectors and sinners’ from their company. Jesus rejects this form of ‘holiness’,” says Beck. Jesus asks the Pharisees to go and learn what it means by the expression in Hosea 6:6 that God desires “mercy, not sacrifice”.
Does the church foster an attitude of ‘sniggering superiority’ over people? I believe to an extent it does. For instance, as Beck says in an interview, “the logic of disgust manifests itself in the feelings of disgust toward people whose perceived sins violate the rules of purity”. This explains, in part, why there is a perceived hierarchy of sin. Our response to some sins like sexual immorality or drunkenness is more rigid than the response to sins like idolatry or greed or theft (even earning money by unfair means). Is not corruption a moral failure? 
So, who is clean, who is unclean? Jesus touched a leprosy patient and healed him (Mark 1: 40-42), healed the woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years (Matthew 9:20), and took a dead damsel by the hand and raised her to life (Mark 5: 41), all of which were said to cause defilement in the Old Testament. He touched the untouchable! This when he called teachers of the law and Pharisees ‘whitewashed tombs’.
“Psychologically speaking, mercy and purity pull us in opposite directions. And behaviorally, as we see in Matthew 9, we have to make a choice: follow Jesus as he crosses the purity boundary or stand with the Pharisees who have opted for quarantine,” says Beck.
He speaks about how the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper can be an enactment of Jesus’ practice of welcoming and eating with tax collectors and sinners. “Well, that idea works for faith traditions that practice open communion,” he says. “For communities practising closed communion the exact opposite is going on—the Eucharist is a location of exclusion, a place where a boundary is drawn between insiders and outsiders.” 
All of this, I agree, is easier said than done. But we need to begin somewhere. “The will to give ourselves to others and ‘welcome’ them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. This will … transcends the moral mapping of the social world into ‘good’ and ‘evil’” (Miroslav Volf). 
The book  Unclean, as a reviewer writes, is bound to startle and dismay many church folk, especially those who like their religion "nice". 

What have you given up for Lent?

In my growing up years, Lent was all about giving up meat, fish, eggs or dairy products. In other words, I had to forgo some proteins that formed part of my regular diet, some carbohydrates and fats. But it was more like being on a ‘Daniel fast’. I got all the vitamins and minerals that are essential for the functioning of the body from my vegetarian diet.
These days many people decide to give up a favourite food item like chocolate or keep time away from television or movies. Obviously, fasting is more than disciplining your taste buds or taking a break from that ‘chewing gum of the eye’, television.
Ina speech he made on his visit to India in October 2010, Archbishop Rowan Williams said: “Real fasting, says God to the prophet [Isaiah 58:6-7], is breaking the bonds of injustice and sharing your resources. And it is fasting because it means denying yourself something – not denying yourself material things alone, as in the usual sort of religious fasting, but denying yourself the pleasures of thinking of yourself as an isolated being with no real relations with those around; denying yourself the fantasy that you can organise the world to suit yourself; denying yourself the luxury of not noticing the suffering of your neighbour.”
When it comes to caring for the environment do we act as isolated beings? Is not Lent about redefining our consumption patterns too? Here is a list of five things that we can learn to live without, beginning this Lent.

1. Plastic bags
According to the Worldwatch Institute, in 2002, factories around the world churned out roughly 4-5 trillion plastic bags - from large trash bags to thick shopping bags to thin grocery bags. You can imagine what it must be a decade later.
It is said plastic bags can take up to 1,000 years to break down. But as we see around us, some plastic don’t even reach the landfill. They clog the drains, get into waterways, damage the environment and pose a great threat to a large species of animals.
Of late, there have been initiatives to use biodegradable plastic. Some supermarkets voluntarily encourage shoppers to forgo plastic bags.
Why not carry a canvas or cloth bag to the grocery next time? I know of one instance where a Marthoma church gave jute shopping bags to all its members free.

2. Bottled water

Did you know that much more water is consumed in making PET water bottles than will ever go into them? A study says that producing 1 kilogram of PET plastic(polyethylene terephthalate) requires 17.5 kg of water and results in air emissions of 40 gm of hydrocarbons, 25 gm of sulphur oxides, 18 gm of carbon monoxide, 20 gm of nitrogen oxides, and 2.3 kg of carbon dioxide.
In India, the demand for bottled water is increasing by 50 per cent every year. Besides the environmental cost of producing bottles, this can put a strain on existing water resources.
So, starting this Lent, ditch the plastic bottle.
Running water, too, is a luxury where at least 11 percent of the world's population - roughly around 783 million people - are still without access to safe drinking water, and billions without sanitation facilities. There is no need to let the tap running while brushing your teeth or shaving. Also, try a bucket bath rather than using the shower.

3. Disposable cups and plates
The environmental impact of the ubiquitous paper plates and cups are more than we can ever imagine. Paper plates and cups begin as wood pulp, which are then bleached using chlorine compounds. Chlorine compounds are among the most hazardous industrial chemicals in use.
Besides, paper plates and cups that we use are not recyclable. Most manufacturers coat paper plates with materials that make them less biodegradable. That means all of them will go to landfills.
Sometimes Styrofoam disposables are referred to as paper plates, but they are made from non-renewable petrochemical products.
Try palm leaf plates for a change.
Add to this list of avoidables things like disposable pens, razors and nappies.

4. Air-conditioners
What price are we paying for cooled air? “In the past half-century, a number of big, energy-guzzling technologies have really changed our lives: automobiles,computers, television, jet aircraft. All that time, air-conditioning has been humming away in the background, like a character actor you see in a whole bunch of movies. It's never the star, but it always seems to be there moving the plot along. When I looked at the doubling in the amount of electricity used for air-conditioning homes in this country [U.S.] just since the mid-90s, I thought, we really need to address this, because it is a big contributor to greenhouse-gas release and it's going to increase the likelihood that we're going to have longer, more intense heat waves and hotter summers in the future, and we're going to have to be running the air-conditioning even more,” says Stan Cox, the author of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer).
Air conditioning is a huge reason why power consumption is breaking records. In other words, we use a large part of our electricity to cool ourselves. And, “tofuel our own air conditioning, we're destroying nature's,” says Cox.
Why not try the humble fan?

5. Private transport
Here are other chilling facts. For every kilometre driven by private vehicle, people consume two to three times as much fuel as they would by public transit. And, it takes 18 litres of water to produce just one litre of petrol or diesel.
A2002 study by the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute noted that "private vehicles emit about 95 per cent more carbon monoxide, 92 per cent more volatile organic compounds and about twice as much carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide than public vehicles for every passenger mile travelled".
Annual vehicle sales in India are projected to increase to 5 million by 2015 and more than 9 million by 2020. By 2050, the country is expected to top the world in car volumes with approximately 611 million vehicles on the nation's roads. The environmental impact of this is too large to be ignored.
Walk, ride a cycle or take public transportation whenever possible. If you have a car, give a ride to your neighbours too.