Skip to main content

Saints and other Absurdities



The Saint is a short story written by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  In that story, a man named Margarito Duarte always carries around with him a small coffin with a dead body that never decomposes.  It is the body of his daughter who died at the age of seven because of a fever.  He had to disinter the body because a dam that was going to be constructed required the acquisition of the parish cemetery.  All the parishioners disinterred the tombs of their beloved so that the bones could be buried in a new cemetery.  Margarito found the bones of his wife who had died giving birth to their daughter.  But when he opened the tomb of his daughter he was in for a shock.  his daughter’s body had remained intact eleven years after the burial.  His daughter looked alive with her eyes open and sparkling.  Margarito, who had not studied beyond the primary school, believed what the villagers said: “the incorruptibility of the body was an unequivocal sign of sainthood.”  Even the local bishop agreed.

Margarito takes the coffin to Rome.  He makes a supplication to the Pope to declare his daughter a saint.  He waits for an answer from the Vatican.  The Vatican is no less than God especially in answering supplications, especially those concerning sainthood.   Popes come and go.  In fact, Margarito waits 22 years and four Popes from Pius XII onward come and go.  Margarito still waits.  After 22 years of waiting, Margarito says, “I’ve waited so long it can’t be much longer now.”  And Marquez concludes the story with the words, “he (Margarito) had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization.”

Margarito is the real saint, according to Marquez.  He is a saint because of his single-minded devotion to perceived sanctity as well as his faith and hope.  What else is religion?  What else is saintliness?

These were the thoughts that ran through my mind as I read about many godmen in the last few weeks.  Some of the best articles about contemporary godmen and other vampires can be found in the recent issue of the Frontline.  One can always visit godmen’s ashrams and find out more ‘truths’ personally.

What makes Marquez think of Margarito as a saint?

I think of Sisyphus as a saint.  Sisyphus is a Greek mythological character.  He spent his entire life pushing a rock uphill in order to challenge the gods who had punished him with that task of pushing the rock.  He knew that he would never succeed.  The gods would always push the rock downhill just as he reached the summit of the hill.  Yet Sisyphus climbed down the hill without despair and the spirit of daring in order to pick up his rock once again.  That daring with its single-minded devotion as well as the faith in himself (minus any hope, though) makes Sisyphus a saint for me.  Conventional religions will have problems with Sisyphus’ faith in himself rather than the gods as well as his lack of hope. 

Let us take an example from a very conventional religion, Catholicism.  Simeon Stylite (390-459).  He is canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church.  What did he do in his life?  He lived on top of a pillar whose height he kept on increasing as years went by.  Single-minded devotion to God.  He hated women.  He hated even men!  This is what the famous historian, Edward Gibbon writes about the saint:

In this last and lofty station, the Syrian Anachoret resisted the heat of thirty summers, and the cold of as many winters. Habit and exercise instructed him to maintain his dangerous situation without fear or giddiness, and successively to assume the different postures of devotion. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meager skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty-four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account. The progress of an ulcer in his thigh might shorten, but it could not disturb, this celestial life; and the patient Hermit expired, without descending from his column.

What do the sages hope to achieve in their solitary hermitages in the Himalayas?  Single-minded devotion.

Single-minded devotion is saintliness.  That is just what Marquez was trying to convey through the story. 

But devotion to what?  Not to sex or wealth or political/manipulative power. 

Devotion to some absurdity.

Life is absurd, asserted the philosophers of the Absurd like Albert Camus.  Can you fight it with single-minded devotion like Sisyphus?


PS.  I’ll be totally away from blogging for a week as I’m an acolyte of single-minded devotion.  I’ll be away on a certain duty which will hopefully refresh me as much as the rock refreshed Sisyphus.


Comments

  1. Single-minded devotion and focus is indeed saintly.
    Blessed are those who can manage...
    All the best to you to stay away from Blogging for a week...I know it'll be tough!
    But, accomplishing your task should make it worthwhile! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Staying away will be difficult...I know! :)

    Regards
    Sammya

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...

Goodbye, Little Ones

They were born under my care, tiny throbs of life, eyes still shut to the world. They grew up under my constant care. I changed their bed and the sheets regularly making sure they were always warm and comfortable. When one of them didn’t open her eyes after a fortnight of her birth, I rang up my cousin who is a vet and got the appropriate prescription that gave her the light of day in just two days. I watched each one of them stumble through their first steps. Today they were adopted. I personally took them to their new home, a tiny house of a family that belongs to the class that India calls BPL [Below Poverty Line]. I didn’t know them at all until I stopped my car a little away from their small house, at the nearest spot my car could possibly reach. They lived in another village altogether, some 15 km from mine. Sometimes 15 km can make a world of difference. A man who looked as old as me had come to my house in the late afternoon. “I’d like to adopt your kittens,” he said. He...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...