Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Has Christmas been hijacked by Santa Claus and his snow cap? And also by plastic? This is a concern raised by a friend who is also a Catholic priest. Watching the Christmas celebrations around me in the last few days in various places – religious as well as secular – I know my friend’s concern is genuine. Christmas has been “Caesarianized,” he says. The spiritual preparation during the Advent season has given way to Santa Claus and his jingle bells. To discount sales in shopping malls. What’s worse, various Christian organisations send out carol teams on floridly decorated open vehicles equipped with high decibel loudspeakers that shatter all the peace while blaring out carols on ‘Peace to people with goodwill.’ It is a Christmas without Jesus. Santa Clauses tower far above the diminutive figure of infant Jesus, if the latter is there at all in the carol teams and other celebrations. Look at any commercial brought out during the season and you will think that Christmas is all abo...

One of the biggest ironies of Buddhism is that Buddha never endorsed the belief in God as done by organised religions but he ended up becoming one such God. Buddha did not advocate for prayer in the sense of appealing to a divine entity for favours or intervention. But his followers of today seem to be giving undue importance to rituals and offerings. Something similar happened to Jesus and his teachings too. Jesus was trying to reform his religion, Judaism, by making it more humane. He wanted to redeem Judaism from its meaningless rituals and displays of devotion . Religion is meaningless and even dangerous unless it touches the believer’s heart and transforms it. Jesus was not interested in the rubrics and the regulations prescribed by the priests of his religion. His primary concern was love and relationships. What good is religion unless it helps you to love your fellow human beings? “If anyone says ‘I love God’ and hates his brother, he is a liar,” Jesus’ beloved disciple Jo...

From the Washington Post Bethlehem, the place of Jesus’ birth, is not celebrating Christmas this time, says the Washington Post . The only scene related to Christmas is Jesus entering the world amid a pile of Gazan rubble. Christmas is a festival of joy, peace, magnanimity – goodness, in general. It is a terrible irony that the very place of Jesus’ birth is marked by the opposite of all what Christmas stands for. What meaning will a Christmas carol like Joy to the World have in Bethlehem today? What would Jesus say about the kind of religions that we have today? Isn’t religion the cause of all the strife in Bethlehem and many other places in the world? The Hamas who attacked Israel were motivated by religion. Israel is a nation founded on the bricks of a particular religion. It is another irony that Jesus was born in that religion. Did Jesus found a new religion? I would hesitate to say ‘Yes’ to that question. His intention was to reform Judaism, his religion, not establish a ...

Christmas was the most joyful season of my childhood though Santa Claus did not play any significant role in it. My childhood was lived out in a village which did not even have electricity until I reached high school. Many people were very poor too. Only a few children completed school education. Parents found it economically wiser to send their children to work in the farms or elsewhere. The parish church’s carol team was large and lively in those days in spite of the misery of human existence. Santa was an inevitable part of the carol team. That was the only Santa in my childhood. That Santa did not ever bring any gifts for anyone. Rather, that Santa took something from every home – Christmas donation for the parish. To this day, every year Santa comes with the church’s carol team. But drastic changes have occurred to the team. Last year there were just three men and the Santa. One man carried the infant Jesus, another carried the account book for entering the donation amounts,...

  “Please, I beg you not to turn us away,” Joseph says to the innkeeper once more. He has been pleading with the innkeeper for some kind of a place where his wife Mary could give birth. Joseph, Mary, innkeeper - they were all kids from the primary school of the parish. Jenny was sitting in the audience watching the Christmas skit presented by the little children. She knew what would come: the innkeeper would shut the door saying rudely that he didn’t have any more rooms left. Especially for a couple that didn’t have anything much to give in return for all the troubles they were going to create with a delivery and what not. Then Joseph and Mary would go to a cowshed and the cows will be far more benign than humans. Cows are great creatures, Jenny learnt recently from her country’s dominant political party. If they give birth to a female calf, they are greater still. That bastard in your belly ! Her mother shouts at her a million times a day referring to the baby she is carry...

Christmas, the festival of jingle bells, plastic pines, polymer stars, carols and donations, is round the corner.  As long as I lived in Delhi, the festival meant little more to me than a plastic Christmas tree and a plastic coated star.  Now that I live in a place that will resonate with carols for a few days, I’m tempted to ask this question: What does Christmas mean to me? Jesus was an enlightened person like the Buddha was.  An evolved brain.  One of the few persons who are born once in a few centuries [ Sambhavami yuge yuge ?] with a mutated brain. Normal human beings are descendants of the ape.  The ape continues to dominate our hearts though we have a slightly better brain which can do more things than the ape like learn the formula of (a+b) 2 .  The heart didn’t evolve much.  It carries all the savagery of the ape.  Jesus, like the Buddha and many others, tried to civilise that heart.  This is what I love most about ...

One of the best poems about Christmas that I’ve read is T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi .  My short story, The First Christmas , was largely inspired by this poem. “The world went on with its usual activities of finding food, conquering lands, vanquishing other people, mating and reproducing, killing and plundering, building and destroying.”  The narrator of the story, one of the three magi, says that.  Caspar, the narrator, was on a quest because he could find no meaning in a life that revolved around eating, conquering, mating, and so on.  “If human life is the progress from being a bold, free and above all creative child to cowardice, dependence and creativity that ends in procreation in a span of about 60 or 70 years and then succumbing to death as a child in the garb of an old creature, then, my beloved, I have nothing to be proud of being born a man.”  Thus says the narrator of a Malayalam novel ( Manushyanu Oru Amukham -  A Preface to ...

The season of Advent has begun for Christians who will be celebrating the birth of Jesus 25 days from now.  These 25 days are supposed to be a season of abstinence from certain foods and drinks so that the believer prepares himself spiritually for Christmas.  Religion has no significance unless it makes one a better person and the practices like abstinence are meant to help one in the process of self-renewal.  But can a set of practices or some rituals make anyone a better person?  They can help.  But Jesus was explicit in saying that religion is not a matter of rituals or regulations.  Religion is an attitude of love and compassion. The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the best in the Bible.  A wayfarer was beaten up by thieves, stolen of all his possessions including his clothes, and was left “half dead” on the roadside.  A priest came along but went away doing nothing to help the dying man.  Then can a Levite.  A Lev...

Fiction Father Joseph was an eccentric priest, according to his parishioners.  His best friend was Thomas, an atheist.  People loved him, nevertheless, because he cared for them with the tenderness of a shepherd who knew every one of his sheep by name.  Yet another Christmas came and the very active parishioners were in the church building the crib.  “Is it because Jesus taught us to care more for the lost sheep that you love Thomas so much?”  Chandy asked Father Joseph while they were working on the crib. “Whoever said that Doctor Thomas was lost?” wondered Father Joseph.  Thomas the atheist was a doctor who gave free treatment to patients who could not afford to pay consultation fees.  People used his services but hated him merely for being an atheist. “He’s an atheist,” said Chandy. “Why should atheists be counted as lost?” countered Father Joseph.  “Many of the atheists are far better human beings than orthodox Christ...

Painting by Pietro Perugino (1446-1524) Fiction I had seen greed of all sorts.  My ancestors had told me about the various kings and conquerors who crossed the mountains and the seas out of greed for land and its riches, for power and wealth, or for sheer adventure.  The usual varieties of princely greed failed to enchant me.  My parents were disappointed in me as I did not grow up as a prince was supposed to.  “Caspar will be no good,” I heard my father tell my mother once, “he gazes at the sky more than is good for a prince.” My greed was for knowledge.  I wanted to know everything that lay beyond the horizon.  I wanted to know what the stars knew.  I became a star gazer.  It was thus that I noticed a unique star in the sky.  Was it a dream or an illusion?  I was not sure.  Sometimes I could not distinguish illusion from reality. The star invited me to leave the cosy comfort of the palace and explore the world ...

The Buddha, Jesus and Mahatma Gandhi are three persons whom I found myself admiring as I grew older though not proportionately wiser.  I don’t share their great qualities, feeble as I am.  In fact, I may find myself towards the middle of the spectrum if we construct such a continuum of human qualities and personality traits as the one envisaged by philosopher Spinoza.  Is what another philosopher, Nietzsche, said of himself true for me too: “What I am not, that for me is God and virtue” [in Thus Spoke Zarathustra ]? If I apply Spinoza’s classification, these three luminaries whom I have grown to admire belong to the category of people who regarded love as the primary virtue, considered all people to be equally precious, and resisted evil by returning good.  Spinoza argued that people like Jesus and Buddha constructed an ethical system that stressed feminine virtues.  At the other end of that spectrum are people like Machiavelli and Nietzsche [and mo...

This is the crib made at Premdaan, a Mother Teresa home at Bhatti, New Delhi Wish you a Merry Christmas