Dear All
I am just putting the final touches to my chapter on Consecrated Life after our wonderful conference in Bangalore at the beginning of the month. I have already shared the beginning of the chapter and here are some extracts from the end and my discussion of the Christian and Hindu/Indian views of the 'end of life' - old age and renunciation.
All good wishes
Peter
In
his earlier essay of 1924, The Fourfold
Way of India, written when he was in his early sixties, Tagore makes a
strong contrast between the Western and Eastern approaches to life. ‘In Europe’,
he writes:
We
see only two divisions of man’s worldly life – the period of training and that
of work. It is like prolonging a straight line till, wearied, you drop off your
brush. (p.498)
For,
as he points out, ‘work is a process and cannot really be the end of anything’
and yet ‘Europe has omitted to put before man any definite goal in which its
work may find its natural termination an gain its rest’. India, on the other
hand, ‘has not advised us to come to a sudden stop while work is in full swing’
(p.499). And this is where the account
of the third and fourth stages of life differs so markedly from the dominant
narrative currently apparent in the West – that we prepare ourselves for work
(schools and universities being the places to acquire the necessary skills for
a life of work), we work (the most important part of our life) and then (if we
are lucky) we ‘retire’, or as Tagore puts it ‘drop off our brush’ to fill the
final years watching day-time TV or visiting the grandchildren. By contrast
what he presents us in the third and fourth stages of life is the deliberate
and calculated move to renunciation which is enshrined in the Indian tradition…
As
we have seen, even in Tagore’s own writing on the four-fold stages of life there
exists a tension and contradiction often reflecting his own mood and attitude
to his own life at the time of writing. When he got around to writing about the
phases in the late Religion of Man,
being nearly seventy, he felt able to give due weight to each of the phases and
their importance in individual development. Yet, as a young man, writing in
1892 in his early thirties and a decade after the Sudder Street revelation we
began this chapter with, he makes an interesting remark referring to the final
stage of renunciation – the sannyasi:
If
by nature I were a sanyasi, then I would have spent my life pondering life’s
transcience, and no day would have gone by without a solemn rite to the glory
of God. But I am not, and my mind is preoccupied instead by the beauty that
disappears from my life each day; I feel I do not appreciate it properly. [1]
And
a year later:
There
are two aspects to India: the householder and the sanyasi. The first refuses to
leave his home hearth, the second is utterly homeless. Inside me both aspects
are to be found. [2]
And
I think it is in this ‘creative unity’ that Tagore expressed in his life we
find the ‘coincidence of opposites’ that I think could best characterize the ‘Christian
sannyāsin’.
The
latter phase of life has increasingly become in the West a conflict and
struggle with Death as we slump in the sofa after a life of hard work. Hermann
Hesse, the Swiss poet, saw the art of life as the art of befriending death and
as Tagore famously put it, Death is simply the lowering of the lamps as the
dawn approaches…
Where
I think writers like Tagore are valuable is that they remind us that this final
stage moves beyond the purely psychological. For as the outer forms die we move
into a new place. A poetic place beyond the psychological and even the
theological. As Pope Francis says, a new child is born as we are called out of
the caves of our comfort zones (p.45). In the Indian tradition the Sannyāsin
‘owns no place and no person and has
to be by definition a solitary wanderer’ (Thottakara p.561). The Christian, in
contrast, by virtue of their consecration to Christ, remains in service to the
world even though they do not identify with the world’s goals and aims.[3] As
Perumpallikunnel points out (Mystical
Experience, p.680) the Indian sannyāsa
is one of renunciation without restriction, the emphasis is on the individual
relationship with God mediated by the guru and we find there is little emphasis
on the communitarian prayer such as the Eucharist as found in the Christian
tradition. Yet, in spite of the differences it is possible to see both Indian sannyāsa
and Christian consecrated life as two aspects of the final encounter and
relationship with the ultimate goal of human life – our encounter with the
limit of human mortality and the embrace of Sister Death. Thottakara calls it
‘the Yoga mind’ that integrates apparently bi-polar realities and he mentions
Fr Francis Vineeth CMI, founder of the Vidyavanam ashram near Bangalore, as an
example of a modern sadhu ‘who tries to awaken the religious-spiritual
consciousness of the sadhakas and develop in them a soul culture that is deeply
rooted in the age old principles of Indian spirituality and in the immensely
rich Christian spiritual traditions without at the same time negating the
positive values of matter, body and this world’ (p.558). At heart what Indian sannyāsa
and Christian consecrated life have in
common is that for both renunciation, whether of the world or the ego, must be
connected with love and surrender to the creator.[4] In
this way both Indian and Christian traditions embrace on the threshold of the
infinite.
‘Child, don’t you know who calls you lovingly?
Why this fear?
Death is just another name for what you call life,
Not an alien at all.
Why, come then and embrace her!
Come and Hold Her Hand!’
(R. Tagore, Endless
Death)[5]
[1]
Letter to his nephew, 15th June 1892 from Shelidah, reprinted in Glimpses of Bengal: Selected Letters by
Rabindranath Tagore, ed K. Dutta and A. Robinson, London: Macmillan, 1991.
[3]
Although as Thottakara notes in recent years both Buddhists, Hindus and Jains
have taken to more communitarian models of
sannyasin imitating in many ways Christian monastic models of service to
the world, the poor and downtrodden (p.562).
[4] It
is interesting that the entry to the final stage of sannyāsa in Indian tradition is accompanied by a renunciation
ceremony. The Christian tradition of consecrated life has no such ‘vow’ or
‘ceremony’ to mark this final phase – perhaps it might be something that could
be developed?
[5]Translated
by K. Dyson in I Won’t Let You Go:
Selected Poems. Glasgow: Bloodaxe, 1991, p.74. ‘When a sannyasin dies, no
funeral rites are performed; there is no mourning’ (Thottakara p.572).
