Marred Images

I have always understood life to be fuller of various shades of gray and have looked askance at people who have everything sorted out in life with all the right scriptures as footnotes. And yet every day my boundaries in this area are being challenged and enlarged with every new experience that I have. The other day, after hearing a colleague talk about a person who didn’t know whether he was a man or a woman, I am even more intrigued about the Pandora’s box that life is and how impossible it is to shut the lid on that box after filing the contents in neat files. And no, the story is not that of some homosexual or lesbian confused about their sexuality and so I am not sure that the typical verses will any more apply. So listen to this story.

Very much like a man who is hoodwinked into getting into a hospital with a promise of a large some money and wakes up from anaesthesia to find a paltry sum of cash in his hands and a scar from where one of his kidneys had been removed, a man was similarly kidnapped and brought into hospital. Under anaesthesia, he was castrated and then with the help of skilled cosmetic surgeons, “converted” into a woman anatomically. Post surgery, he/she was then given hormone injections so that other physical attributes of a woman eventually developed. At an opportune time, then the individual was sold into a brothel where he/she was abused, raped and brutalized repeatedly over time.

This is not a story out of a book, but one that I heard last week from one of my own colleagues, and the person telling the story, a counsellor assigned to work with the person, after she was rescued on an anti trafficking raid in the brothel. The question before the counsellor was this – what was the point of reference for this trafficked person in the counselling sessions to be done – was this person a man or a woman? Anatomically , the advancement of medical science had seen to it that the person was fully a woman in every possible way ; and yet the mental makeup of the person , the person’s emotions, thinking , orientation and inner wiring was all that of a man. The world would only see this person as a woman and relate to her at that level; but in this story of course there is a lot more here that meets the eye.

We read in the Bible that God created man and woman in His image and gave them one or the other of this dual identity. But what of someone whose identity has been so complexly damaged, that the person can no longer even say if he is a man any more or a woman. He could say that he was a woman, because that is what the person looks like, but his heart beat is still largely that of a man. He could say that he was a man because that is how he was created in the first place; but only God looks at the heart and sees that struggle – for the rest of us he looks, dresses and appears like in a woman, and in at least some churches I have been to, if he went and sat in the men’s pews, the person would be promptly shown his place.

It is not every day that I look forward to getting older, but the one thing that I see and recognize with each passing day, is that life leave us with more questions and puzzles and answers. I never went to a Sunday school and have never been able to do memory verses. So I don’t have a scripture verse for every occasion. But perhaps the one thing that I have learnt is that being a Christian is to embrace all of life’s unanswered mysteries with a curious, open and inclusive heart and mind which is open to God…. because perhaps tomorrow and the day after , each day in fact, I will encounter a new story, a new riddle, a new mystery … and none of these very human, very painful, very sensitive stories about people who were made in God’s image but has now got badly marred can be patched up by citing some passages of scripture from here and there….. I don’t know what it means … but it means a lot more than that.

Questions with no Answers

I live a rather peculiar life these days. My wife and daughter who is in her final year of school live in Delhi. I live alone in Mumbai and my elderly mother in Kolkata. All of us have our own concerns and fears and lead peculiarly lonely lives. In another day and age, this might have been considered odd, but times are changing and have always been changing and social norms and mores are changing too.

For instance in Abraham’s time, families were extended households. Abraham and Isaac lived under the same roof with their wives, siblings and a large entourage of other family members and servants. Similarly Jacob lived with his wives and sons and that was the pattern in the times of the patriarchs. As Israel settled into a less nomadic existence, family patterns changed and people began to live as household of individual families. Families were still extended, but their sizes were smaller. Probably by New Testament times, perhaps even extended families were shrinking. We see Joseph and Mary alone travelling to Bethlehem for the census ordered by the Caesar, possibly indicating that there was no one else they had to call as family.

Today, families are changing shape and complexion again. If Abraham and his kind were nomadic people, today’s generation has become nomadic too. Except that today we no longer travel swathes of deserts on camels and living in tents. Today more likely than not , often one member of a family is travelling , often across continents , riding not a camel but a jet plane and keeping in touch with his family through Skype or e mail. What is one to make of these phenomena and should one accept it or condemn it?

Change of course is inevitable and it will happen irrespective of whether we like it or not ; but the only way to aloft and be in some control of change in the domain of family and relationships is to be clear on what the scriptures teach and try and interpret them in sensitive and humane ways.

Let me give some examples. The Bible tells us to honour our parents. This seems easy enough when we are children and live with our parents. Besides often it is a case of “obey or else”..... But as a child becomes an adult and his or her parents grow older and often driven by job or other constraints, live separately, how is love and honour to be expressed in such situations?

Similarly churches hold seminars all the time titled family seminars. But these seminars usually have a lot to teach spouses about to honour each other and love each other. Or they are parenting seminars. Both are important and have their place. But families are more than spouses and their children. As life expectancy goes up, sooner or later one or the other spouse dies. How does the one left behind cope with life and build healthy, supportive relationships? The Bible has a lot to say about widows, but it is a long time if ever I heard any teaching about the place of widows (or widowers) in the community of faith. Or what about the single man or woman? Are relationships meant for them too? Or what kind? What will the church endorse? The Bible tells us to treat the stranger and the alien with the utmost consideration, yet the stranger nearest to us is often the single man or woman in the next pew, whose hand every one shakes but no one invites home.

What about promoting families across ethnic and language divides? When I was a new and young Christian, almost all of my friends were from a particular community. They taught me all about the scriptures, about the Christian life and discipleship, loved me hugely and sincerely. I wouldn’t be anything without their love and care and I can never forget that and hope that I never will. These friends taught me that in Christ all men and women were equal and that Christ had broken down every wall, every barrier. They taught me that it was always wrong to be unequally yoked and marry someone who did not know the lord. I absorbed it all in.

After I finished my studies and started praying about getting married, I looked around in the same community of friends. Yet suddenly I found that not one person was available to me; all wanted to marry people of their language and ethnicity so that life would be simple and adjustment easy and the barriers that I heard Christ had broken in Bible Studies appeared firmer and stronger than prison walls. By the time I woke up to this and realized that I needed to think out of the box if I were to have a family , I was in the Air Force serving in remote places with no social life and no one to meet. By the time eventually I was posted to a city and finally met my wife, many years had gone by. That was a long time ago, and yet I feel saddened to see and find that although so many things are changing around us, people who will be bold enough to marry cross culturally are still few and families which accept them are fewer.

Like everything else, families and relationships are subject to change as the wider society changes. Certain fundamentals do not change of course like loyalty, faithfulness , honour, the obligation to care for one’s family – (and the bible defines family in a very wide sense and not just you, me and the kids); but lots of things do change. A whole industry has grown up around the topic of change because change is not easy and people need help – I need help and some day you will need help. The question is that I have is whether I will find that help and answers in the church walls in the context of the Bible or will I need to find a book at the Crossword Book Store and find my answers there.