Religion of Romance

A page from my book, English Poetry

A few months before the coronavirus started holding mankind hostage, I attended a wedding some 80 km from my home. When I was about to leave for home after the dinner, the host who was a close relative of mine asked me, “Can you take Father X with you. His seminary is on the way to your home. Just drop him there on your way.”

“Is he the priest who delivered the sermon today?” I asked. Yes, my host said. I’d be glad to take him, I said. I loved his sermon.

The sermon is a part of the usual Catholic religious ritual called Mass. It is nothing more than a plebeian elaboration on a biblical passage delivered by a priest for the mediocre believer. I have listened to hundreds of wedding sermons all of which were slight variations on the qualities of ideal Christian couples.

But Fr X’s sermon caught my attention. The comatose romantic in me was resurrected right away as he started with the example of the honeymoon of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The innocence of the first couple that was not yet corrupted by the Serpent was the theme of the sermon. Eden is a synonym of innocence, a refusal to be tempted by the Serpent, a transparency that draws the other like an irresistible magnet, a love that bonds you to the other as well as the whole nature around you…

I became Adam in God’s Eden while listening to the sermon. I visualised the Angel Oaks and the Rainbow Eucalyptuses on the rolling hillocks of Eden, the musk roses and the white lilies on the banks of sparkling streams, and the tigers and the gazelles that walked on my either side. Our either side, rather. What was Eden for Adam without his Eve?

Maggie [who had chosen to leave the front seat for the priest] told me as soon as she  saw Father X approaching our car, “Lower the volume of the music. The songs are too romantic for a priest.” Sheer coincidence, my car stereo was then playing a Malayalam song about a female bird that awaited its mate with longing on a hillside from the valley of which rose the aroma of burning incense. Incense is burnt in churches too. But birds which long for their mates on a romantic hillside are out of tune with churches. I turned down the volume but the song was still audible enough, like the soothing gurgle of a mountain brook.

Most religious people I know, irrespective of religion, are very loquacious people. They are characteristically nosey too. They want to know everything about you, from the temperature of your bathwater to the menu of your last dinner. So I waited for Father X to shoot his questions as I drove on breathing in the subdued aroma of the incense that rose from the yearning bird’s valley.

Father X was silent, however. Absolutely uncharacteristic of a priest. He had responded to my greeting and that’s all. I decided to break the ice and said, “Your sermon today was exceptional.” I waited for a response. Nothing came. “This is the first time I heard a Catholic priest give such a romantic interpretation of the biblical Eden,” I added.

“Thank you,” he said. He turned the volume knob of my car stereo. I thought it was a hint for me: ‘Just shut up, will you?’ I did shut up. The songs were good. And loud enough now.

Romance flowed in the car and Father X tapped his thigh with his palm to the tune of the song being played. I looked at Maggie in the rear-view mirror and she smiled at me meaningfully.

“If there is one more birth for you and me,” the song went, “will you be my mate again?” Father X tapped his thigh.

Romance runs in the veins of certain people, I know. The priest’s sermon was an evidence of the romance in his heart. I know that I will be a romantic till the last breath of my life.

Romantic like those poets of the early 19^th century: Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth, for example. Most of them died young. Keats quit at the age of 26. Shelley made it to 30. At 36, Byron burnt out. Later Will Durant wrote that the romantics were killed by the intensity of their own dreams.

The romantics hated the real world and lived in the worlds of their own imaginations. They all had their sacred niches, like Nature for Wordsworth, Beauty for Keats, and some imaginary place for Shelley. The romantics withdrew from outer experience and concentrated on some worlds within themselves. Wordsworth’s nature was actually not the nature outside; he transmuted that nature into something else within him. So did Keats with beauty, and Shelley with his special places.

So do I. I imagine an ideal world like my romantic predecessors did and wish to live there. When I have to confront the reality around me and its contrasts with my imagination, I feel sick. I long for Adam’s Eden, my Eden – that is.

Father X too lives in some such Eden, I think. After all, what is religion but a big romance with its ideal Heaven and its exotic angels?

 

My First Book: published in 2001

PS. Wordsworth died at the ripe age of 80.

xZx