Several months ago while visiting a small Buddhist temple in a small village in the northern state of Kedah, I wondered what it would mean for Christians in East Asia to imitate what the Fathers did with their pre-Christian sages (Plato, Aristotle, etc.)—consider their heritage in the light of the Christian tradition and, where necessary and useful, employ these frames of thought to present the Gospel in familiar yet fresh terms. In these parts of the world, of course, the pre-Christian sages would not be those of the Greek philosophical tradition but rather those of the great civilizations of India and China: the Hindu masters, the Buddha, Lao Zi, Confucius, Bodhidharma…

While this idea might seem obvious to many, it was a kind of breakthrough for me. The primary reason for this, I think, is that, as a convert to Christianity, I have always—until quite recently—approached non-Christian traditions with an eye for juxtaposition and contrast rather than synthesis. My preoccupation as such was to defend the uniqueness of the Gospel, of the salvific work of Jesus Christ. A little over a year ago, I wrote two posts on Buddhism in which I did precisely this. (Those are here and here.)

Moving back to Malaysia has certainly affected the way I think about these non-Christian traditions. Religious pluralism is a staple of Malaysian life, and teaching introductory courses in religions has also helped me appreciate the insights of Indian and Chinese religions in new ways. For some time now, for example, I’d believed that the suspicion toward matter and the material world in the Indian religious systems—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism—rendered them absolutely incompatible with a Judeo-Christian view of the world in which all creation is declared to be “very good”. Furthermore, the Indian religions also demonstrated a rather tenacious allegiance to the doctrine of rebirth, which I thought to be quite irreconcilable with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

While standing at the back of this Buddhist temple in that small village, I watched my cousin and her family (my kind hosts for this journey) make prostrations before the statue of the Buddha. They offered incense and for a few minutes prayed quietly. What they said or what they asked for, I do not know. I do know, however, that witnessing this made me wonder if in the past I had not been too quick to contrast two things I barely understood—the Gospel and the Buddha’s dharma.

Thinking more about this, I realized that one could level against Plato similar charges that I had against Siddharta Gautama. Plato’s view of matter isn’t exactly flattering, for one, and his ideas about pre-existence and the succession of worlds aren’t quite form-fitted to the normative Judeo-Christian worldview either. But if the Fathers still found Plato worth salvaging, could not an Asian Christian say the same of the Buddha and so many other sages of the East? Likewise for the remarkably diverse and flexible collection of beliefs we commonly call “Hinduism.”

A few weeks ago I found myself engrossed in the profound yet sensible dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna in The Bhagavad Gita. I’ve been struck lately by the simple, razor-like observations of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. As for the Tao Te Ching and Confucius, I cannot even begin to how much I’ve come to discover my Chinese heritage in these streams. So, if the Fathers had their own homegrown pre-Christian sages, perhaps I could ask for a few of my own.

Photo credit: Malaysiakini.com

I am safe but disheartened, to say the least, over the attacks on Malaysian churches today.  Metro Tabernacle (Assemblies of God) in the nation’s capitol suffered the worst damages of the three, and at least two other churches in the Klang Valley were also fire-bombed–Assumption Catholic Church and Life Chapel, both of which are located in Petaling Jaya. Thankfully, no casualties have been reported. Excerpt from the Asia Sentinel article:

Youths on motorcycles firebombed an Assemblies of God church in Kuala Lumpur last night, gutting its administrative offices, and threw a Molotov cocktail at a Catholic church in the Petaling Jaya suburb as tensions continue to rise  over a decision by a High Court justice that the Catholic Church could use the word “Allah” to represent the Christian god in the Malay version of its news publication, The Herald.

Police later reported that two more churches were attacked as well although at one the Molotov cocktail failed to ignite.

The article in full can be found here. The BBC report is here.

This evening, after receiving several phone calls and text messages from friends and relatives concerned about my safety—there were news of riots in places I would pass through on my back from work—, I thought about how the Syriac office announces: “peace be to the Church in which dwell the sons of peace.”

We who follow Christ must choose to be men and women of peace even when others choose violence. Time to put my non-violence spiel into practice.

Of course, I ask for your prayers for Christians in Malaysia. A season to bear witness, I think.

Happy New Year everyone!

Since the last few days have been rather hectic, I haven’t had much of a chance to think of the year that’s gone by. But perhaps that is better. I tend to be one of those people perpetually stuck in polishing the rear-view mirror.

It has occurred to me, though, that Torn Notebook has in the past year and a half or so suffered from lack of regular attention and a requisite coherence. So, my resolution for this blog in 2010 is to write regularly along the following lines:

• The Bible and the Fathers. The concrete demands of my present life make it difficult for me to devote as much attention to Scripture and the Fathers as I used to, but my hope is that committing to writing about these subjects will motivate me to keep on a steady diet of reflection on these texts.
• Ecumenical concerns. The earlier days of this blog were dedicated to issues of unity between the East and the West, for at that point I was a Byzantine Catholic who found himself caught in the divide. Since my reception into the Orthodox Church that tension has relieved a little though much of it remains and seems to have taken new forms. After entering Orthodoxy in late 2008 I pulled back on writing on matters ecumenical because I felt that I had lost the right to practice self-criticism as a Catholic for I was no longer one, and at the same time had not yet earned the right to do so as an Orthodox, being an infant in this communion. The key to ecumenical discourse has always been for me freedom to engage in self-criticism and self-examination by each communion. As in personal prayer, we are free only to name and confess our own sins, not those of others. I’m still not sure what kind of reflection I’m capable of ecumenically speaking, but I promise to try.
• Pilgrimage. Well, no, probably not of the literal kind, but since a writer can only write out of himself I hope that this blog can continue to be a space in which I can share some personal aspects of my discipleship. Whether this will be therapeutic for me or beneficial for anyone else I cannot say, but since I have some sense that writing is a part of my vocation in the Church I’ll give this a whirl.

So there you go. I’ll keep the emphasis on the first two threads, though. As a reader, I’ve found that when blogs are clearer with respect to their themes and concerns I have an easier time deciding if I want to continue reading them. I hope I’ve done and will do the same for you.

Shalom to you all on this day of new beginnings.

He needed not only to believe in God’s love for him, but he needed to believe, in some mysterious way, that he loved God.

Nancy Klein Maguire, An Infinity of Little Hours

These days I am reading and enjoying An Infinity of Little Hours, which tells the stories of 5 novices as they step into the heart of the Carthusian life at the Parkminster Charterhouse in Sussex, England. The sentence above comes from Maguire’s description of one of the novices.

The need to believe that we love God—I’ve been wondering how much it has driven and continues to drive my discipleship. For me, it is not something I can doubt because I know that it is really there, true, present, alive. But I also think that it is of the Old Adam and therefore something that needs to die, be consumed by the fire of grace. Kyrie eleison.

By way of my friend Nate on Facebook, here are excerpts from Stephen Prothero’s recent WSJ piece on the phenomenon of religious drifting in America, “A Hint of This, A Pinch of That.” With my emphasis and some thoughts below.

A new Pew study, released last week, shows that Americans are swingers as well as switchers, flirting with religious beliefs and practices other than their own without officially changing their religious affiliation. Catholic leaders have long denounced “Cafeteria Catholics” for going down the line and picking and choosing the Catholic beliefs and practices they choose to uphold. According to this new study, Americans as a group are now bellying up to what my Boston University colleague John Berthrong has referred to as the “divine deli.”

Not counting travel, or special events such as weddings and funerals, more than one-third of Americans attend worship services at more than one place, and nearly a quarter attend services held by another religion. Much of this religious infidelity happens in the family, or within the extended family—Lutherans attending Baptist services or Baptists attending Catholic Mass. But among black Protestants 8% attend services at synagogues, and 5% of this same group go to mosques. Meanwhile, large numbers of American Christians affirm beliefs that their theologians have long denounced as heretical: 23% believe in astrology, 22% in reincarnation and 21% in yoga as a spiritual practice.

…

The great religions have long pursued different goals through different means: Christians sought salvation through faith or works (or some combination thereof), while Buddhists sought nirvana through meditation or chanting. So a century ago jumping from a Catholic Mass to an evangelical revival to a Buddhist retreat would have felt like leaping across vast chasms. But contemporary Americans know almost nothing about their own religious traditions and even less about the traditions of others. Most Americans cannot name any of the Four Gospels, and an overwhelming majority admit to being wholly ignorant of Islam. So we shuffle from one to the other with little sense of what is being lost (or gained) in the process.

As a scholar of religion, I am supposed to simply observe all this without rendering any judgment, but I can’t help feeling that something precious is being lost here, perhaps something as fundamental as a sense of the sacred. Harvard philosopher George Santayana once observed that “American life is a powerful solvent,” capable of neutralizing new ideas into banal clichés. I worry that this solvent is now melting down the sharp edges of the world’s religions, bending them toward purposes other than their own.

It is possible, of course, that as we jump from one place of worship to another we are learning along the way. But what we are really doing looks more akin to commerce than to education.The store managers in our spiritual marketplace seem a bit too eager to sell us whatever they imagine we want.

At their best, Judaism and Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism call us to rethink the world and then challenge us to remake it—and to remake ourselves. But the truths of one religion often clash with those of others, or contradict each other outright. Even Protestantism has carried inside its various denominations strikingly different visions of the good life, both here and in the hereafter. Absent a chain of memory that ties us to these religions’ ancient truths, these visions are lost, and we are left to our own devices, searching for God with as much confusion as we search, in love, for the next new thing.

As someone who teaches religion in a culturally and religiously diverse nation, I’ve found that my greatest challenge lies in bringing students to appreciate religious distinctiveness so as to resist the secularist tendency to blur them all together under the generic label of “religion” while simultaneously helping them see that disagreement doesn’t always result in bombs. The tide against which I feel myself to be swimming (though not alone) is one which wants to dismiss religion—the clustering of all religions as “religion” serves to simplify this dismissal—as the root of our pain and suffering in the world. And, from my experience, more and more young people in my country are buying that hook, line and sinker.

Secularism has great use for—I would even say needs—”religion,” but not in its original forms. No, “religion” must be diluted and re-packaged into a marketable commodity so that people can continue their quest for a “balanced life,” which of course includes a healthful diet, exercise, family time and a good dose of God/gods/spirits/whatever. Religion becomes another tool for the good life.

But, before religion can serve this noble purpose, its edges must first be taken off. Each religion must first be re-formed and re-directed towards goals other than its own. In the classroom, I am constantly amazed by how easily my students, despite my efforts, seem to blur distinctions between faiths. Not coincidentally, they also tend to see religion (again, in general, not any one in particular) as something “good” and “helpful.” The question of truth hardly ever makes it into the picture.

I think Porthero is right that religious drifting has for its ironic effect confusion. All seeking and no finding. But perhaps this is also the state in which most people prefer to be—a kind of religious cohabitation with the advantage of open-endedness. It has the form of freedom: if I run into something I don’t like, I can always move on. But some day the storm will hit—the heavy rains will fall, the winds blow harsh and the floods come, and what will happen to drifters then?

Tonight at the Christmas liturgy, a deep, inexplicable knowledge that God is indeed present in the world, in the swaddled child of Bethlehem.

“The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.” Christ is born!

Blessed are you, my brethren,
for the Fire of Mercy has come down
utterly destroying your sins
and purifying and sanctifying your bodies.

St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Epiphany 3.10

The Malankara Orthodox calendar commemorates today the martyrdom of St. Thomas the Apostle. A Coptic hagiography can be found here and the reading from the Prologue of Ohrid here. The former has a lesser-known ending, I think.

What I find remember most about this apostle in the Gospels is his rash zeal, with which I can identify and frankly find admirable. When Jesus spoke of facing death in Jerusalem, Thomas’ rally cry to the rest of the Twelve was: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (John 11.16) Even if at Gethsemane his feet could go where his mouth had promised to, the man redeemed himself in India. I pray for the grace to do the same: after multiple betrayals, to make good the confession of faith by dying with my allegiance to Christ intact.

To the blogroll today I added His Peace Upon Us which is dedicated to Christian-Muslim relations. Justin introduced it to me in a comment on a previous post. I hope you take some time to drop by there and read a post or two. Perhaps one of the entries in Dustin’s series on the sons of God? The latest in that is here.

Happy feast day to all!

Today at Qurbana, I was moved by the serene melodies of our Syrian chant and a broken-hearted confidence in the mercy of God evident in the sedra. Despite my recent gripe about church life, I was struck today by the awesome privilege of worship and remembered this: whatever one may say about the Church, it is her life which manifests God’s salvation in the world. I do not save the Church; it is the Church who saves me. Today at the wellspring of her worship I found some kind of healing.

Today, the Lukan genealogy of Jesus (Luke 3.23-28). I’m still wondering what Luke meant by his reference to Adam as “the son of God,” but I’m captivated by Luke Timothy Johnson’s observation that it anticipates and parallels the list of nations present at Pentecost in Acts 2. After he reports the Spirit’s descent on Jesus at His baptism, Luke deploys the genealogy to emphasize the universality of Jesus’ mission by tracing his bloodline to our common father. In his account of Pentecost, the great day when the Spirit commenced descent on the Body of Christ, Luke draws our attention to diversity of the peoples present (Cretans, Arabs, etc.) and thus the universal reach of the Spirit’s action in the last days, bringing multitudes to faith both in the oneness and the multiplicity in language.

What do you all make of the reference to Adam as “the son of God”? What do you think is its function at this juncture of his story of Jesus? I welcome whatever you’ve got.

Of this there is no doubt, our age and Protestantism in general may need the monastery again, or wish it were there. ‘The monastery’ is an essential dialectical element in Christianity. We therefore need it out there like a navigation buoy at sea in order to see where we are, even though I myself would not enter it. But if there really is true Christianity in every generation, there must also be individuals who have this need.

Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 275

The term break is finally here, and I have a little over 2 weeks off. A good chunk of that time I hope to use for making-up for lost sleep, proper diet and regular exercise (which I don’t think is technically possible, but let’s pretend). Hopefully I’ll build enough momentum to sustain these good practices when the new cycle of chaos begins in mid-January.

Last week a friend who is a PhD candidate at a theological school invited me to join a Facebook discussion group on the subject of post-colonial theology. My initial foray into the discussion threads revealed an active site and some rather intriguing and constructive conversations. The Post-Colonial Theology Network (PTN) is buzzing with activity and I do want to at least recommend a look-see if you’re the least bit interested in the subject.

The invitation was probably spurred by a conversation in which I told Michael that, since my return to Malaysia, I have found myself becoming more aware of the ways in which our post-colonial context shapes the way we approach reality (familial relations, society, politics, etc.)—and, in particular, the way Malaysian Christians approach Scripture. While I strongly believe that we stand need of another dimension of liberation—liberation from a continuing colonization of the mind—,  I was and remain hesitant about joining PTN for several reasons.

From my experience, groups dedicated to minority perspectives tend to slide into majority-bashing. In the case of things colonial, the object of wrath is the phantasmic white colonialist who continues to hold people’s minds captive by way of “Western culture.” I picked up some of that during my brief survey of the terrain over at PTN and my shields went up. The tendency isn’t always to openly tear down the “evil white man” and his sources of privilege. Rather, the “evil white man” is always there, a brooding presence in the conversation, subtly and implicitly criticized amid exaltations and odes dedicated to minority courage, exegesis and whatnot.

I question also the wisdom of assigning post-colonial theologians (put away your guns, Evagrians) a genre to call their own. What exactly makes theology “post-colonial”, and why should it be put into a distinct category? Does not the creation of a genre as such generate the ironic effect of simultaneously objectifying and patronizing the emerging voices of minority groups? Why can’t they just play with the big boys? Is the creation of post-colonial theology a form of affirmative action? These are my initial questions/reactions, and the possibilities scare me enough to make me keep my distance.

Perhaps all this is merely my knee-jerk reaction to memories of a class entitled “Multicultural Education” in my undergraduate days of yore. For five weeks that summer, I was the wise yellow man in a room full of white people and I could say no wrong. My opinions were “refreshing!” “challenging!” “interestingly different!” blah blah blah. At that time I liked being affirmed for being a minority voice and indulged in the fact that people valued me simply because I was different.

But it gets old. At this point I’d rather be criticized for my stupid ideas rather than be praised for the “unique” perspective from which I offer them. Even if I grew up in a different culture and a different part of the world, I’m not always right, refreshing, or honest. Non-white people can be narrow-minded, simplistic and ethnocentric too, and they need to be taken to task for it—which you can’t do if you’re too busy singing my praises.

As an aside, I should note that, returning to Malaysia from the United States, my “uniqueness” has generated a different defect effect. In my own country these days, I am a freakish American-educated oddity who spent 11 years in the United States doing nob0dy-really-knows-what. Among my peers, my words tend to carry undeserved weight and my opinions an hyperextended life over which I have little control. Why? Largely, I think, because I was educated in the Great West and am presumed, for the most part, to know better (having been yonder and all). But perhaps such is the colonization of the mind. It’s harder to cast off than any oppressor because it is internalized by the conquered, believed as a matter of blind faith.

So perhaps my shying away from PTN is in fact a simple, irrational knee-jerk reaction. A reaction against the possibility of being patronized, objectified and privileged all at the same time. There is yet another threat that I sense in being labeled “post-colonial”: the threat of being dismissed. If what I write or think is dismissed, I would like it to be because my ideas lack merit, not because I’m Malaysian, Western-educated, or both. Until I can see that being a real possibility, I’m sticking to my guns.