Resilient Spirit in a Broken Body

To look at the life of Alphonsa without the lens of theology is to look directly into the mystery of human resilience. It forces us to ask: What keeps a spirit intact when the body is utterly broken?

Recently I wrote about my visit along with Maggie to a pilgrimage centre known as Vallyachan Mala. It was lunch time when we descended that hill and we were hungry after all the climbing up and down. Eating from restaurants has become quite challenging these days with the rising prices of everything from food items to cooking gas. More than the cost of a lunch, lack of hygiene is what worries us. Many of the restaurants are shut due to shortage of fuel. The cooks in most restaurants are North Indian migrants whose sense of hygiene is highly suspect.

That’s when I remembered the “canteen” of another pilgrimage centre nearby: Bharananganam. The canteen is an epitome of hygiene, spaciousness, courtesy, and affordability. My last visit there must have been half a dozen years ago. But I was sure the standard would be maintained even now. And it was. Maggie and I had a very simple but satisfying Kerala lunch. The canteen belongs to the Shrine of St Alphonsa which draws hundreds of pilgrims every day.

Though we arrived there right in the middle of a hot day, the place had a few hundred pilgrims in spite of the burning sun overhead. Maggie spent an unusually long time inside the shrine praying. I’m quite sure she prayed for my conversion too. I chose to contemplate on the meaning of the place.

Inside the Shrine that carries the tomb

Alphonsa was a Catholic nun of the Franciscan-Clarist congregation. She died at the young age of 36 just a year before India won Independence. She was never quite healthy all her life. At just three years old, she contracted a severe, highly painful skin condition that plagued her for well over a year. At 13, she suffered severe burns on her feet and legs after falling into a pit of burning chaff. Shortly after beginning her religious training in the 1930s, she began suffering from severe internal haemorrhaging which made even her eyes bleed. Painful, discharging ulcers on legs kept her confined to her bed in the final years of her life. By 1945, a massive tumour had developed and spread through her internal organs. As a consequence, she suffered from violent abdominal convulsions and was vomiting up to 40 times a day, leaving her frozen and exhausted until her death.  

It is said that she never prayed for an end to her suffering but for the strength to endure it. In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI declared her a saint of the Church, reminding us that history can be shaped by private endurance too. History books usually celebrate the loud, the powerful, the conquerors, and the politically influential. People like Alphonsa teach us a different history altogether.

Alphonsa teaches us the aesthetics of fortitude, so to say. The serenity she maintained despite her excruciating pain and the cheerfulness she managed to retain till the end made me think of her superhuman triumph over the agonising human reality.

There is a museum near the shrine which tells us the story of her life through pictures. If you observe those pictures, you may be struck by the irony in the devotional portraits of the saint that are available all over today. These portraits present a cosmetically beautified version of the saint, airbrushing the raw, unglamorous reality of her chronic illness with a flawless divine aura.

At the Entrace to the Shrine

One of the many images of the saint