Spirituality on Grandfather Hill

May 21, 2026

Spirituality on Grandfather Hill

Entrance to the shrine complex

Humans have always associated height with the divine. In almost every religious tradition, mountains are rarefied places where the boundary between heaven and earth blurs. Moses encountered his Yahweh on Mount Sinai. Every year some 50 million pilgrims ascend the Sabarimala, a hill in Kerala, to have a darshan of the deity Ayyappa.

To reach a higher perspective, one must leave behind the flat comfort of the lowlands. Your heavy breathing and the strain on your legs are part of the offering to the divine. Moreover, the ascend and its pains help to strip away everyday distractions. Your thoughts slowly focus on the divine that you’re going to encounter soon.

Maggie and I ascended one such hill near Aruvithura in Kerala’s Kottayam district. It was not planned at all. Maggie’s summer vacation was drawing to a close and so we decided to go somewhere, just like that. Vallyachan Mala near Aruvithura happened to be our place yesterday just because we had never been there earlier.

Vallyachan in Malayalam means ‘grandfather.’ The grandfather here is none other than Saint George, the patron of the renowned Aruvithura Forane Church. There is a road that can take your vehicle up to the top of the hill. The climb is quite steep, however. I didn’t want to drive up precisely because I lack the guts as a driver. “Shall we walk up?” I asked Maggie and she readily agreed because that’s how the pilgrimage is supposed to be undertaken: experience the hardship of the ascent which was only a little more than half a kilometre.

The actual pilgrimage season is the Lent, 40 days prior to Easter, a season of abstinence for Christians. Pilgrims join the ritual known as the Way of the Cross. They walk with Jesus as he moved up his Calvary carrying his cross 2000 years ago.

One of my quarrels with Christianity in my youth was its glorification of suffering. I detested the Way of the Cross as well as Christianity’s emphasis on suffering as an integral if not desirable part of life. As I grew older, I understood that life is a protracted pain. But that realisation hasn’t made me religious at all. I still remain a non-believer though I love to visit religious places every now and then. There’s serenity there, the kind that moves you to look at the depths within yourself.

As Maggie sat inside the shrine and prayed earnestly to her God, I sat in a back corner and contemplated the value of pain in religions. Across cultures and centuries, faith has rarely sought to avoid suffering; instead, it seeks to transmute it. When pain is brought into a religious context, it stops being a meaningless tragedy and becomes a powerful vehicle for transformation, empathy, and spiritual breakthrough. Pain is a sacred crucible in religion.

When you participate in a ritual like the Way of the Cross, you are no longer suffering alone; you are suffering with God. I have wished time and again I could experience that profound, visceral kinship with the Divine.

Pain can act as a sudden, brutal shattering of the ego. It can remind us of our fragility and mortality. In that state of brokenness, the defensive walls of the ego collapse, making room for humility and spiritual surrender.

Believe me, I have stood in certain religious places and longed for that sort of humility. And learnt that I am not even fit to stand in such a place!

Here are some pictures from Vallyachan Mala.