By Paramjit Bakhshi
In college, as a student of English literature, one was expected to study some of the works of William Shakespeare. Yet, just reading Shakespeare was not enough. To understand the writings of this literary giant, we were advised to read the commentaries of A C Bradley – Shakespeare’s most celebrated critic. It was said that even if Shakespeare himself, were to appear for an exam on his own writings, he would fail miserably, if he did not quote Bradley. One hopes that to understand the message of Jesus Christ- which is essentially what Christianity is- one need not get lost, in the dogma attached to this great religion’s three main divisions: Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
That the message of Christ is powerful is evident, from the fact that roughly one third of the world’s population is Christian. More striking however, is the message’s simplicity. It can be summed up in one word alone. Love. We are directed to love God- “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.”, and humanity- “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Yet these simple commandments demand that we awaken to a kind of loving we are not used to. “To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also” – is not the love that we are brought up to believe in. We are normally encouraged to love good people and to distance ourselves from the bad. Christ cautions us, much against our normal tendency, to “judge not, that ye be not judged”. We are to love everyone equally, much like the Heavenly Father, who “maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” In our loving we are further advised to not even make a distinction, between ourselves and others: “whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”.
In Christianity, love is such an indispensible quality that without it there can be no salvation. “I may be able to speak the language of the human beings and even of angels, but if I have no love my speech is no more than a clanging bell. I may have the gift of inspired preaching, I may have all knowledge and understand all secrets, I may have the faith to move mountains but if I do not have love, I am nothing. I may give away everything I have and even give up my body to be burnt – but if I have no love, this does me no good.”
For those of us who believe in the supremacy of the mind, it pertinent to note that, it is our hearts which Christianity aims to rouse. The heart of Jesus and not our limiting mind is its enduring symbol. “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” It is our innocence and not out our thinking which saves us, “Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.” If the sin of Adam and Eve was, that they ate off the tree knowledge, we too are exiled from paradise, by our insistence on reason and logic. The age of reason might have brought about a technological revolution, but it has also made us live mechanically in a spiritual desert, sans love, compassion and brotherhood. As a result even in the middle of physical comfort, we battle depression, soon to be the second largest illness of our times, and try to fill the void of our loneliness with alcohol or drugs. Our reason may lead us to proclaim with Nietzsche, that “God is dead” or to make statements like, “I am the master of my fate, I am the Captain of my soul”, but the fact remains that the modern, competitive and predominantly cerebral man is responsible for genocide and ecological destruction on a scale that is unprecedented in history. In saving our selves we seem to be destroying ourselves. “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” Indeed Christianity demands an acceptance of values, so radically different from those that rule our daily life that it becomes imperative for us, to pause and genuinely introspect.
To quote Huston Smith, “We are told that we are not to resist evils; we are to turn the other cheek. The world assumes that evil must be battled by every means available. We are told to bless our enemies and bless them that curse us. The world assumes that friends are to be loved and enemies hated. We are told that the sun rises on the just and the unjust alike. The world resents this, feeling that the sun ought to rise only on the just. It is offended that the wicked go unpunished, and would prefer to see them living under perpetual clouds. We are told that the publican and the harlot go into heaven before many who are outwardly righteous, whereas the world assumes that the good people, the respectable people, the people who fulfil the norm and have nothing to be ashamed of, will lead the heavenly procession. We are told that the path and gate that lead to salvation are narrow. The world, wrapped in convention and conformity, assumes that it is safest to follow the crowd. We are told to be as carefree as birds of the air and the lilies of the field. The world assumes that we should take infinite care to build our security. We are told that it is as difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom of heaven as for camels to go through the eye of the needle. The world esteems wealth above all. We are told that the happy people are those who are meek, who weep, and are merciful and pure in heart. The world assumes that it is the rich, the powerful, the wellborn who are happy. There blows through these teachings, Berdyaev has said, a wind of freedom and liberty that frightens the world and makes it want to deflect them by postponement; not yet, not yet! H. G. Wells was evidently right; either there was something mad about this man or our hearts are still too small for what he was trying to say.”
Of course it is our hearts that are too small to accept the teachings of Christ. To truly accept them we need to alter our worldly perception and be reborn in love. “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” It may be easy to be considered a Christian but it is a lifelong endeavour to become one. The intent in, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” is not so much to lead us to a ritualistic baptism but to steer us on to the path of love.
But do we even understand the meaning of love? The problem is that this word has been used so often that it has lost its meaning and its freshness. It is common for us to use it lightly and say things such as, “I love chocolates” or make the usual statement “I love you”. It is imperative therefore, before concluding, to highlight the type of love Christianity talks about. It is certainly not of the narcissistic variety which demands “I need you to love me” and neither is it the erotic love which says “I need to love you.” It is also definitely higher than filial love which states “I love you because I understand you.” The term used to denote this Christian love is the Greek word “agape” and as someone has said agape if it could speak might just say, “I am you in love”. It is this love which purges our loneliness, our sense of duality, isolation and insecurity, all of which are responsible for our pain and our misery. Most miraculously it bridges the perceptual space between “you” and “me” and between us and our Lord.
The writer is a life skills trainer and can be contacted at [email protected]