By Deepa Majumdar
December, the month that concludes the Gregorian calendar is indeed blessed. Not one, but two Incarnations of God are said to have been born during this month. If tradition has it right, then Christ, the Savior was born more than two millennia ago in December. Revered Holy Mother, Sri Sarada Devi (1853-1920), wife and consort of the Incarnation Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886), was also born in December. The moments of their conception and birth serve perhaps as those auspicious “nows” that sanctify the infinite duratio of Time. The advent of an Incarnation indicates infinite Mercy. It is a sign that the impermanent world we live in is hardly the cold corporeal scurrying of matter envisioned by the material sciences. Rather, this finite, temporal empirical world stands ever suffused with infinite, eternal divine Grace.
Unlike western Christianity, which asserts the possibility of only one Incarnation of God, Hinduism asserts a plurality of Incarnations or Avataras – as many as are required by human history. Thus Christ is said to be the only Son of God, precluding the possibility of any other Incarnations. The power of Christ is said to be enough, so that no further embodied interventions of Grace are needed. This makes perfect sense within the Christian paradigm. Insofar as God allowed His only Son to be crucified as a final penalty for our sins, indeed no other Incarnation is needed. For the full price has already been paid in actuality and potentiality.
Hinduism being a different religious paradigm, sees things differently. Its avowal of a plurality of divine Incarnations and the fact that it acknowledges different degrees of Incarnations (partial or full) is not meant to dilute the power of divine Grace. In the inimitable words of Sri Ramakrishna: “The winds of God’s grace are always blowing, it is for us to raise our sails.” Sri Ramakrishna also tells us that Incarnations can become historically obsolete – that an “old coin” will not work in the present age. This does not take away from the glory of a prior Incarnation, but rather points to human iniquity as something historically unique … Our sins are so horribly seasonal that they cannot be remedied by old medicine.
There are other basic theological differences between the historical legacy of western Christianity and Hinduism, especially with respect to their formulations of salvation. The Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), being profoundly dualistic, maintain a perennial otherness between Creator and creature. In their ideological (not mystical) forms, they would therefore regard as blasphemous this Upanishadic mahavakya (great saying): “That thou art!” For, in their worldview, even the incorruptible human essence remains strictly dualistic with respect to the Divine. Man is unique in the order of creation, for man alone is made in the image of God. Thus man alone is morally culpable, where other creatures are not. Nevertheless, despite his uniqueness, man remains a creature in need of Grace. For a sliver of otherness separates God from man. An image – even this best of all images, an incorporeal icon of the ineffable Divine – can never be the same as the royal Archetype. In Christianity this irremediable otherness between creature and Creature can be bridged only through Christ, who served as the perfect bridge being, for He was more than a mere mediator. He was both Son of God and Son of Man.
By contrast, Vedanta asserts that the Divine being the Absolute substratum underlying all that becomes in the realm of the relative, cannot help but be the universal and unifying essence of all beings. For God alone is Real, creation being a relative reality sustained by the Absolute. As in Christianity, here too human consciousness is special in the order of creation, for man alone can consciously meditate on his innate divine nature. Once again, man alone is morally culpable. But man is not made in the image of God. At the deepest level, man is Divinity itself, as is every other being.
Further differences between western Christianity and Hinduism include their respective notions of the afterlife. Like many ancient religions, Hinduism asserts the related doctrines of reincarnation and the transcendental Law of Karma thus pointing to a vastly different afterlife compared to that promised by Christianity. Finally, the most egregious difference lies perhaps in their notions of salvation, which in Advaita Vedanta consists of a radical nirvanic Self-knowing that exhumes the ego, awakening man to his own innate divine splendor. While Christian saints like St. Catherine of Siena do speak of a degree of union with the Divine, a sliver of dualism lingers. Inasmuch as Christianity exemplifies religious dualism, this is exactly as it should be.
A mystic par excellence, like Sri Ramakrishna, would revel in these delectable differences between these great world religions, celebrating the variety of theological paradigms, quite as a gourmand celebrates a banquet with a diverse menu. For fanatics however, these fundamental differences can become grounds for religious egotism, insularity, intolerance, and worse … war against the religious “other.” But for those poetic souls who yearn for spiritual mysticism and peak human experiences, such differences hardly matter. They draw bridges between different traditions even as they remain rooted in their own.
It is these poetic souls that would recognize affinities among Incarnations in the different world religions. They would discern between a human saint, who reaches sainthood after strenuous effort – and the Incarnation, who is born perfect and arrives for the purpose of human salvation. They would recognize the tremendous redemptive power invested in the Incarnation – the fact that She arrives to serve all of humanity without following worldly hierarchies; that She is usually born in humble homes and most often raised without any formal education; that She usually cannot touch money, even as She abhors squalor and is auspicious in her material needs and self-care; that She is effortlessly chaste and therefore wholly bereft of puritanism; that She is compassionate towards those treated as the sexual pariah of society; and She arrives to fulfill – not to destroy. She therefore overcomes social injustices by her very Presence – without the rancor characteristic of protest movements. Above all these poetic souls would recognize the advent of the Incarnation as a wellspring of Grace that redeems Time itself and the human History that is projected upon Time.
Both Christ and the Holy Mother were powerhouses of healing – whether of the human body or of the soul. Both mingled with the humble, the ordinary, and the social outcaste. Both saw with an equal eye that made no distinction between friend and foe. Both expressed the highest love – a detached compassion that signifies total dispassion. Both extended their compassion to the non-human world of animals and others.
Indeed, December is a blessed month!