It is a June afternoon in 2014 and I am sitting in an empty
chapel with beautiful stained glass etchings on the campus of the College of
the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
I am frantically looking for a hymn in the Common Prayer book that is usually
found in church pews in Catholic institutions. At this point in time it is
urgent that I find this hymn, as I have nothing else but this hymn in mind; in
fact, my entire mind is a blank but for the lyrics and tune of this hymn:
There are numerous strings in Your lute;
Let me add my own among them.
Then when You smite Your chords,
My heart will break in silence,
And my heart will be one with Your song
Let me give a context to this moment. That summer day is part of a Retreat that I
have come to with a bunch of other academics and colleagues. I teach at a Catholic institution and this is
routine practice almost as common as going to annual staff picnics at more secular
work places. What has happened in this
particular one is my strangely personal interaction with a Trappist/Franciscan
monk who is “leading” our little group for the retreat. I have met him for the
first time that morning. He is part of an order of monks who take vows of
poverty and live off of the labor of their working hands even as they practice meditation
and reflection that is part of the Catholic Christianity he belongs to. A tall gentleman with blue/grey serge gown of
a priest and deeply aquiline features with sharp eyes that pierce through with
intensity and candor, he has clearly gained our attention. He has introduced the retreat and its purpose
in quite broad and secular terms. He has
addressed the roomful of academics pretty cocksure of their own religious and
philosophical bearings (yours truly included), and made a curious request
(almost a challenge?): “You are constantly striving to be perfectionists, and
some of you may well be on your way to getting there. But this afternoon, I want
you to look for your broken self and find it, confront it, live with it in your
own way for the next few hours. Then come back to me. Should you need an
intervention, please find me right here”.
My response is one of pleasant surprise that
there is so much leeway here to bring in our own meditation practices from
different traditions that we, as a group, represent. I mention to him that I may chant my own
hymns and mantras in the process, and his eyes soften in warm appreciation. I
am pretty certain what I will do: a round of meditation beginning with
“adyastotram”; followed by “Vishnu” and “Durga” strotram all of which I have
confidently memorized in the last two decades of my life as a truly practicing
Hindu. I almost laugh at the suggestion
of an “intervention”; certain that this would be redundant in my case, as I
have spent too many years preparing and nurturing a confident, prayerful
self.
I chose to be in an empty chapel because that is where my
childhood school-girl-self found such comfort: the empty chapels of Carmel
convent and Loreto in Durgapur and Middleton Row were witness to my personal
musings and angst as a young person coming to terms with a quick-changing family
and personal life. So, here I was in
this deserted chapel where even my breath seemed to echo through the vaulted
ceiling and back to me. I sat there for
the first few minutes soaking in the damp air and stillness of the silence.
Then, I decided to begin my prepared regimen of chanting. This is when I
noticed that I could not recall the first lines, the second, third, middle,
end, nothing, absolutely nothing of my adyastotram that I have been in the
habit of reciting every day of my life in the recent past. To say that this was
an anomaly and a bitterly disturbing occurrence would be an
understatement. Please note that I did
not have my mobile, my handbag (which would have a copy of the mantra), so
whether I desired or not, I was left with my mind and nothing else. I had
been witness to dementia and alzheimer’s both with a dear friend and my mother,
and always was acutely aware of the loss of control that comes with an
inability to recall. But this was different, because even as I tried to recall
the verses, a completely different set of words and tune, that of the hymn,
came wafting into my mind and literally took over my solitary self, so much so
that I had to find its origins in the hymnal in front of me. Helplessly, I
accepted that my “retreat” into a broken self would have to be mediated through
this hymn which had possessed me for the moment. I hummed it out and the chapel
echoed it back to me. I realized there was nothing really “spooky” about this;
that it was a part of my young self in assembly prayers at school, and somehow,
urged by the ambience of the church, had re-emerged in my psyche. Along with
this realization came the understanding of the reality of my past, its
innocence, its comfort that had been cruelly lost in a sibling’s loss of mental
stability that I had to live with for two decades. So, I did confront my
“broken self” and, in a moment of learned humility realized I clearly needed an
intervention. When I went back to
Monsignor Joseph’s office, he seemed to be expecting me and without any
preamble I found myself narrating my long lost life in India to an American
priest I had met three hours ago that morning. I was emotional, limp with the
relief of narrating my sense of loss and resentment at the world and its
creator, but also honest in laying out places where I ceased to be a
perfectionist and was clear in recognizing a less than ideal self. I had never
felt such relief in his quiet acceptance of all of my passionate rantings.
I don’t know what to make of this incident. I realize that our
belief system is created by an alchemy between our individual psyche and the
socio-religious environment we find ourselves in from childhood. In certain ways, our faith “shores” up or is
used as scaffolding to sustain us through the trauma of real life. Faith in this sense is very much a necessary
construct that crystallizes all that we understand to be noble, uplifting,
sustaining in ourselves and that we like to see as a collective and objectified
principle that we can comprehend and accept. To that extent, the nitty gritty
of rituals and fractious discussions of different religions and their varying
paths became moot in my example above. I
needed to figure out a way to accost my second self that I had carefully hidden
behind a self-confident, all-knowing façade.
As a student of 19th century
thought, I tend to agree with James Frazer who says in his book, The Golden
Bough (1890) that “after all, what we call truth is only the hypothesis which
is found to work best” (212). For me the
hymn that acknowledged my difference yet asserted my right to participate in
some kind of cathartic self-revelation worked best that day, and as it seems
now, in retrospect, for quite a sustainable future, and I remain thankful for
it. And yes, I have come back to my
rituals of Adya and Durga stotram, comforting me through the familiarity of
remembered grace. But, I know, when I need to I can recall one of those strings
of the lute in my own hymn. I have claimed
it as mine.
[ARUNDHATI SANYAL]
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