Innocent Religion

 

Don't go, there are too many holy people out there!

‘The Saint’ is a short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The central figure is Margarito Duarte whose wife died long ago shortly after giving birth to their only daughter. Eventually the daughter also succumbs to an illness at the tender age of 7. Eleven years after the death of the daughter, the village cemetery is taken over for the construction of a dam. People are asked to move the mortal remains of their buried relatives from the graves. When Margarito Duarte digs up the graves of his wife and daughter, he is in for a surprise. While his wife’s body had turned to dust, the girl’s remained intact. Even the roses buried with her still retained their “fresh-cut” fragrance.

A miracle, obviously. “The incorruptibility of the body was an unequivocal sign of sainthood,” writes Marquez. The rest of the story is about Duarte’s single-minded attempts to get his daughter canonized, declared as a saint, by the Pope. Pope Pius XII was suffering from a bout of hiccups when Duarte wanted to meet him. When the Holy Father recovered, he blessed the tourists in six languages but did not care to meet Duarte from Columbia. Years pass. Pope John XXIII has a beatific smile but refuses to recognise the sanctity of Duarte’s seven-year-old angel who refuses to rot years after death in spite of being carried around in a trunk.

Four Popes come and go and eternal Rome has already begun to show “the first signs of decrepitude.” Duarte’s little saint still remains in a trunk without official recognition. Twenty-two years have passed since the unassuming father started his efforts for the canonisation of his daughter. Those twenty-two years have made the father a saint, Marquez concludes. “He had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization.”

 Duarte was a simple man who had not gone beyond the primary school though personal interest led him to many books and much knowledge. When he struck on what he perceives as sanctity, no one could divert his attention from that. He devotes 22 years so far (and will obviously devote whatever is left of his life) to get official recognition of that sanctity. Simple devotion to sanctity.

You may see it as sheer insanity. But I would like you to contrast it with certain things we do.

We live in a country where certain people are lynched on roadsides because they belong to a particular religion. Do you think that that lynching is a sign of devotion to sanctity?

We live in a world where some people, eminently educated ones, rammed airplanes with passengers into buildings with occupants to please a particular God. Some 3000 people died for no explicable reason. Is that martyrdom of the attackers sanctity?

I live in a state where a college professor had his hand chopped off by some religious people because he had used the name of Muhammad in a question of an examination and somebody who thought every Muhammad was kin of the Prophet decided to display his sanctity by punishing the professor. Sanctity? Worse, that professor’s college management threw him out of job just to please the “offended” religious community. Sanctity?

I live in a world where women have to live without faces in the name of sanctity. Where women have to get certain sensitive parts of their bodies chopped off for sanctity’s sake.

I live in a world where people attack one another in the name of religious sanctity. Kill one another. Rape the women.

I would rather go with Marquez and his Duarte's innocent religion. I love Duarte’s single-minded devotion to his innocuous perception of sanctity.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.