Last night
I discovered the secret
to peace
in the family.

Until last night, on passing our house, you would hear the din of battle; terrible, disturbing, scary: screams, abuses, cacophony of voices. The sounds of people wanting to kill each other.

Last night it was over. I put an end to it.

I had the whole thing thought out and planned a week earlier. This is what I did.

I looked through my album of old photographs.

In my younger days, I loved to take pictures. I clicked little babies, beautiful women (wife included), beautiful landscapes, birds, flowers, shapes, shadows, designs … everything that caught my fancy. I made enlargements of these and kept them in a big album. Once in a couple of months at least, when I was feeling out of sorts, I would look at them and feel good.

Last evening, I picked out six of these pictures. They were really good pictures, even if it is I who say so. They made me feel very good. I showed them to my wife, who said that they made her feel good too. Next, I took a large sheet of thick hard cardboard, which I had at home. I stuck those pictures on to it. Then, with great care I took the measurements of our television screen and cut the cardboard accordingly. Meticulously, with Fevicol, I fixed the cardboard with pictures over the television screen. And voila! There was peace!

No more screaming from that ill-mannered anchor (I forget his name) on that channel (whose name too I forget, blame it on my age). No more verbal chappals hurled at each other. No more sound of fighting in my home.

Oh I had patience. For a long time. I tried other channels. But then I saw that every other anchor on every other channel was aping that one anchor on that one channel. I tried the movie channels. No use. Again noise. Fighting. Sex. Or else excruciating boredom. No peace. No goodwill towards men.

But now, thanks to cardboard, all that is in the past tense. Our home is no longer the noisy place it was, particularly at prime time. Now all I see on TV are those nice, pleasing photographs that make us smile.

Peace at last.

You would say this was very clever of me. But I must confess. This was not my idea. It came from the Bible. From Jesus himself. So you can do the same. I have no copyright on it. Ask Jesus. He said, “If your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.” Well, I didn’t gouge that eye and throw it away. I just gave it a nice eye-patch.

That, you may say is too flippant a metaphor for something very seriously wrong with society: Negativity.

People more serious minded than yours truly are saying that there’s too much of it in the world today. Negativity. We tend to look at everything through soot-tinted glasses. So we see devils everywhere. In government. In schools. In our homes. In the Church. Among doctors, lawyers, politicians, police, priests, even family. Negativity everywhere. It shows up in the form of suspicion, dissatisfaction, jealousy, excessive ambition and a whole long list from the devil’s menu card. It ends up in chronic depression, stress, suicides and murder.

We are told to be positive. As if it is as simple as turning left or right at a crossing. Never see your glass as being half-empty, they say. See it as half full. Positivism, see? But what if the glass is more than half-empty – if it is three-quarters empty? Well, it is still one-quarter full! Something that the thirsty crow was clever enough to know. Remember what he did when he saw that 60 ml of Scotch, right down at the bottom of the glass? He asked for a lot of ice. 60 ml on the rocks is good for any beak to reach.

There we go, being flippant again! Right?

But that’s my answer to the devils that surround us. Be flippant. Pass them off as a joke. Laugh them away. Jokes are sermons that are easy to take. They are swords that tickle instead of wound. Laughing gas, not tear gas. The creative eraser of all things negative.

So, now you know.

For a start, go and get your thick hard cardboard and those nice pictures. Head straight for your television screen.

Peace be unto you.



Written for the Agnel Ashram Magazine.


Ivan Arthur

Email: ivan.arthur@ gmail.com

Make a Joyful Noise

An inconsequential conversation between the writer and his friend.

Writer: Christ had His desert experience; the yogi has is Himalayan retreat, the cloistered nun her monastery; but you and I, where do we go for our portion of silence?

Friend: The heart. Go down deep into your heart. There you will find Silence.

W: Says you?

F: Says sage, mystic, priest and parlour preacher.

W: Oh yes. We have heard that one before. Journey to the centre of the heart and all that. Have you ever tried it yourself?

F: Yes and I’ve got lost on the way. Perhaps the Himalayas, the cloistered convent and the desert would be easier destinations than that little place under your shirt pocket.

W: You may be right, my friend.

F: And Silence, just in case you find it there is not an easy thing to handle. Witness the silence of Christ’s desert. Only the Son of Man could have handled it the way He did. For you may hear in that silence of your heart the amplified tremolos of fear, the groans of guilt and envy, the roar of ambition, wailings of self-pity, the urgent clanging of deadlines to be met …. And other jarring noises. Not silence. A tinnitus of the spirit. The heart is a noisy place.

W: I looked at Silence as the womb of Thought; of ideas, reflection, contemplation and prayer. Particularly prayer.

F: You don’t need silence to pray. Do you?

W: Don’t you? Have you tried speaking in a pub? Loud music. Much babble. You see lips moving in pantomime. You cannot hear a word being spoken.

F: So, you’re saying that God cannot hear you in a crowd?

W: Rather, you cannot hear God amid all that noise.

F: But listen to this: I once happened to be at a Hare Krishna satsang in one of their temples. There were more than a hundred people present. And a hundred bells of various sizes clanging out their brassy tones that got louder by the mninute until the din reached a deafening pitch.

W: Ah! Deafness. Isn’t that silence?

F: You got it. Suddenly, amid the clangour, I heard nothing. A strange silence, paradoxically engendered and protectively enveloped as it were by all that noise. You don’t believe me.

W: On the contrary. I do. I have seen an elderly bachelor say his rosary in the train every morning on his way to work. He told me that the rhythm of the rails, the loud confusion of a hundred conversations and the general noise in that overcrowded compartment created for him a ‘silence’ he could not find even at home.

F: I do believe that the urbanite learns to find his silences in the very heart of noise. In the rhythmic banging in his factory, the continuous whirr of machines, the urgent sounds of a traffic jam and the dissonance of so many voices …. Useful silences into which he enters to look for ideas, insights, contemplation and prayer.

W: Didn’t the psalmist say, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord”?

F: The Psalms are full of trumpet blast, the sound of timbrel and harp; claps of hands and shouts of joy. Beautiful noise that helped them to pray.

W: But there are other noises, not so beautiful. Those that offend our sensibilities and disturb the peace. What about them?

F: Noise for noise’s sake. Those that ruin our most joyful festivals, making them imitations of war and strife. These can never engender silence. These we should shun.

W: But then, my friend, we are a noisy nation, celebrating every event with volume knobs turned to maximum. We live in a city that rudely wakes us up even before sunrise with din of traffic, the cacophonous chorus of shrill voices and the raucous calls of everyday living.

F: That’s OK. The regular, quotidian noise of your city. The rhythm, if you like, of our existence. Like the rumble of that train. These are the trumpet blasts, the timbrel and harp of today.

W: The rough, hard oyster shell inside which you may find that pearl of great price. Silence.

Appeared in the May issue of Agnel Ashram News

Blackboard

A Prayer for Humility

I want to be your blackboard, Lord

A black piece of blankness,

Nothingness

Inviting Somethingness

Anythingness

From the hearty scribble of that two-year-old

(The promise of tomorrow’s wisdom)

To the scientist’s quod erat demonstrandum

And everything in between

For only in blackness can I see the stars

Only in blankness can I be enlightened

Only in emptiness can I be filled

Only in Shunyata can I be open to grace

And yet

Deliver me from the painted blackness

Of the sainted braggart

Of Simplicity worn on my sleeve

If it has to be mine

Let It be my skin not garment

Preserve me from the priestly cassock

The monastic sackcloth

The godman’s saffron

The mahatma’s put-on nakedness

Stagecraft of the humble show-off

No. Not that, Lord

Nor even the bent meekness of Diffidence

Or Cowardice or Self-regard

Or the careless slovenliness of Sloth

Masquerading as this hard virtue

If those be the chalk marks on this blackboard

Wipe them off, Lord

Wipe them off

Because I am a blackboard, Lord

Not a printed sheet

Or carved granite

Blackboards are devoid of pride

Can be dusted to new blankness

An Eternal Shunyata

The blackboard waits for Vidya

That comes from Vinaya

Only to wipe out the differences

Between high and low

Between him who has and her who has not

A Humility that engenders Learning

And a Learning that makes for true Humility

Write again on this blackboard your beatitudes

And your promise you made then

To the poor in spirit

To those who mourn

To the peacemakers

To the meek

That they shall inherit the earth.

This appeared in the Fr. Agnel Ashram News Magazine of March 2014

The Crib as Spiritual Exercise

 

The Crib as Spiritual Exercise

            Lots of newspaper. Covered with wet mud. Dried. Crumpled. Spread out. And there you have it: the cave that forms an important part of the Christmas crib. All you need now is plenty of dry grass that you go into the fields behind your house to collect. It is the straw on which you place the cows of the stable. And then of course, Joseph and Mary, if you happen to have those figures. Last of all you place your precious Baby Jesus there. Now you are ready for Christmas and for the Crib Competition.

            You stand back and admire your craft. It has recreated, with paper, straw and mud, the most shining moment in Bible History, nay, World History. You look in your mirror and see sculptor, artist and historian, all in one. Very good

            And then, one Christmas, years later, you watch this priest with a scraggly beard directing the young men who have come together to make the parish crib. They have got ready a whole ream of crisp, muddied paper that should form the hills of Bethlehem and the cave for the babe. He tells them to keep all of that aside. He has no need for them. He has other ideas. He has arranged to have a portion of a PWD water pipe brought into the church compound. That, he tells the young men, will be the crib for the year.

            On Christmas Eve, you see it: the water pipe against a painted background of the city. Inside the pipe you see the Holy Family. Yes, you see it: God incarnated in the slums. Craft has made way for the Intellect. History has given way to humanity. The crib is no longer a re-creation. It is a creation, you say. The crib has a message.

            And so, the next year your crib is a 3-D chalice with a 3-D host above it. Embedded in the host is the Babe. Don’t you see? It is Christmas at every Eucharist. History gives way to Mystery. Tradition is replaced by your small personal theology. The message: He is born every day if you receive him.

            Soon you grow out of all that. Out of History. Out of Intellect. Out of Theology. Out of Creativity. Out of Ideation. Out of delivering messages.  You grow. Into your Self. Into your personal craving for His Coming. Christ is not born in Bethlehem. In one little piece of the universe. His geography is fuzzy. Infinite. Not pinned down to latitude and longitude. Bethlehem is not where Bethlehem is. Bethlehem is where you feel His coming. In your drawing room. In your laughter. In those embraces of loved ones. In your tears. In the bread you break together. Your crib must express it all. It is no longer art or craft or philosophy or sermon. It is your prayer made tangible.

  And when your daughter in the USA tells you of her personal prayer, you say Amen. It is the year of the Presidential election around the time of Christmas. She prays for the first black President. It means something to her. She places the Babe inside a replica of the White House. With Isaiah’s prophecy: “And the government shall be upon his shoulders.”

            Closer home, your other daughter is moving house. She wants the Babe to know her new address. She wants Him to move with her from Amboli to Yaari Road. Her crib this time is a mover’s truck. Her own personal prayer.             

            And I? And you? And all of us who want to fabricate this personal prayer this Christmas. What are we going to do this year? Will the crib be our family album that includes in its pages Jesus, Mary and Joseph as our close relatives? Our very own prayer for harmony and understanding? Is there a wedding in your family? Will then your crib be an invitation card to the Holy Family? And today, amid the din of slander and mischief of the media and the splatter of blood on our television screens, what is our crib-prayer going to be? Can it be your very own newspaper, “Glad tidings” that looks for good news to give your friends? Your prayer for a better world.

 

The Crib as Spiritual Exercise

            Lots of newspaper. Covered with wet mud. Dried. Crumpled. Spread out. And there you have it: the cave that forms an important part of the Christmas crib. All you need now is plenty of dry grass that you go into the fields behind your house to collect. It is the straw on which you place the cows of the stable. And then of course, Joseph and Mary, if you happen to have those figures. Last of all you place your precious Baby Jesus there. Now you are ready for Christmas and for the Crib Competition.

            You stand back and admire your craft. It has recreated, with paper, straw and mud, the most shining moment in Bible History, nay, World History. You look in your mirror and see sculptor, artist and historian, all in one. Very good

            And then, one Christmas, years later, you watch this priest with a scraggly beard directing the young men who have come together to make the parish crib. They have got ready a whole ream of crisp, muddied paper that should form the hills of Bethlehem and the cave for the babe. He tells them to keep all of that aside. He has no need for them. He has other ideas. He has arranged to have a portion of a PWD water pipe brought into the church compound. That, he tells the young men, will be the crib for the year.

            On Christmas Eve, you see it: the water pipe against a painted background of the city. Inside the pipe you see the Holy Family. Yes, you see it: God incarnated in the slums. Craft has made way for the Intellect. History has given way to humanity. The crib is no longer a re-creation. It is a creation, you say. The crib has a message.

            And so, the next year your crib is a 3-D chalice with a 3-D host above it. Embedded in the host is the Babe. Don’t you see? It is Christmas at every Eucharist. History gives way to Mystery. Tradition is replaced by your small personal theology. The message: He is born every day if you receive him.

            Soon you grow out of all that. Out of History. Out of Intellect. Out of Theology. Out of Creativity. Out of Ideation. Out of delivering messages.  You grow. Into your Self. Into your personal craving for His Coming. Christ is not born in Bethlehem. In one little piece of the universe. His geography is fuzzy. Infinite. Not pinned down to latitude and longitude. Bethlehem is not where Bethlehem is. Bethlehem is where you feel His coming. In your drawing room. In your laughter. In those embraces of loved ones. In your tears. In the bread you break together. Your crib must express it all. It is no longer art or craft or philosophy or sermon. It is your prayer made tangible.

  And when your daughter in the USA tells you of her personal prayer, you say Amen. It is the year of the Presidential election around the time of Christmas. She prays for the first black President. It means something to her. She places the Babe inside a replica of the White House. With Isaiah’s prophecy: “And the government shall be upon his shoulders.”

            Closer home, your other daughter is moving house. She wants the Babe to know her new address. She wants Him to move with her from Amboli to Yaari Road. Her crib this time is a mover’s truck. Her own personal prayer.              

            And I? And you? And all of us who want to fabricate this personal prayer this Christmas. What are we going to do this year? Will the crib be our family album that includes in its pages Jesus, Mary and Joseph as our close relatives? Our very own prayer for harmony and understanding? Is there a wedding in your family? Will then your crib be an invitation card to the Holy Family? And today, amid the din of slander and mischief of the media and the splatter of blood on our television screens, what is our crib-prayer going to be? Can it be your very own newspaper, “Glad tidings” that looks for good news to give your friends? Your prayer for a better world.

This appeared in the December 2013 issue of the  Fr. Agnel Magazine