In the 1950’s when I was growing up, we lived in rural Kaipuzha, right in the heart of Upper Kuttanad. Electricity was only just beginning to be available. So, for most of us, no television, no fridge, no microwave, no music system, no i-pod, no cell phone, not even a landline, no nothing. The present generation must be wondering how we survived. Well, our lives and activities revolved around the local parish church, the school and the paddy fields.
We were taught to respect priests and nuns as God’s representatives on earth. Talking back or showing the slightest sign of disrespect to them would be punished with sound beatings. Bishops were in a higher category as far as subservience and obedience was concerned. Our Bishop, as I was growing up, was Thomas Tharayil, who was my father’s cousin. His visits to the parish were occasions of great joy and celebration. He would alight from his foreign car dressed in a white cassock with red buttons and tied with a red sash and wearing his red skull cap. There was also the large gold cross attached to a very thick gold chain hanging around his neck. We would all kneel before him and kiss his ring as a sign of respect. He would celebrate the solemn mass wearing the mitre (the cap that looks like the crocodile’s mouth) and golden staff in his hand. We would all make sure we took Holy Communion from him only. On his annual official visit, he would distribute prizes to the top catechism student in each class, the first price going to the one who can best memorize the catechism book which was in question answer format. None of us understood what the contents really meant. In fact they were not meant to be understood or questioned, rather they were to be believed and obeyed.
God created you. He is 3 in 1: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The first humans created by Him were Adam and Eve. They were put in a garden and told not to eat the fruit of the apple tree. Satan in the form of a snake tempted Eve and she ate the fruit and then forced Adam to eat the apple. God was very angry and He chased them out of the garden. Because of this disobedience, all descendents of Adam and Eve, with the exception of Jesus and Mary, His mother, are tainted with original sin. Jesus the Son of God, the second in the Holy Trinity, took flesh by the power of the Holy Spirit, had a virgin birth and was crucified on a cross by the Romans and Jews for sedition. On the third day He rose from the dead and moved around visiting his apostles. Forty days later, He ascended bodily into heaven to sit permanently at God the Father’s side. His death saved us all. In memory, we celebrate the holy mass, during which the priest changes bread and wine into the real body and the real blood of Christ which we eat and drink. Before we take communion we should confess our sins and be purified.
Sins are of two types: venial and mortal. Lying to your mother about the cookie that disappeared is a venial sin. Killing someone in cold blood or looking at a girl with lust is regarded as mortal. If you die without confessing a venial sin, you go to purgatory and stay there until some of your relatives and friends acquire sufficient indulgences on your behalf. You may collect indulgences through good works and prayer and in the good old days you could buy them. Anyway, the length of your stay depends on the total number of venial sins against you and how fast your friends and relatives can gather enough indulgences to get you out and send you to heaven. On the other hand if you die without confessing a mortal sin you are sent straight to hell. However, if you are clean of sins, both mortal and venial, you go directly to heaven. In those days, these two places, heaven and hell, were very important in the Catholic Church’s scheme of things.
The tortures of hell and the joys of heaven were explained to us in detail during our catechism classes. Heaven is the place where God sits on a high throne surrounded by his angels. Some of these angels form choirs and continually sing His praises. Others play the harp and the bugle, eternally playing those instruments and keeping God and other saved souls happy with their soothing music. Since they are all spirits, they need not spend time on cooking and eating and brushing teeth in the morning etc. like us humans. If we are good, then after death we go to heaven where we become angels and join the choirs or assigned to play the harp forever. Anyway, this was much better than burning in hell for all eternity! There is a special type of very hot non-extinguishable fire that burns without turning you to cinder.
The end result of all this was that in case we thought we did something wrong, even minor, we would become paranoid and run to the nearest available priest, wait in the queue to confess so that we would be ready for heaven if something tragic were suddenly to happen to us with no time to repent. By all means we had to avoid the fires and snakes of hell.
Apostle Paul, based on visions of Jesus, in which he claimed direct revelation by Him, made Jesus divine and preached a morality based on the pre-Christian Greco-Roman culture in which he grew up. Following Paul, and later Augustine, morality was mainly confined to sexual matters. Other sins, regarded as mortal, though at a lower level of gravity, were: not attending Sunday Mass, not confessing during the Lenten season, not taking communion once a year at least, eating meat on Fridays, and being disrespectful of priests and nuns. They were designed to keep the sheep in the pen. With the exception of lust, the deadly sins – gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride - were considered as not really serious sins but rather aberrations. Fraud, cheating, and betrayal – they were in the minor league.
Let me illustrate.
There were two grandfathers in my neighborhood, both closely related. One had two brothers who were priests and the other a son who was a priest. There were also nuns in their families but I am not sure of the exact numbers. One needs to remember that the more priests and nuns a family produces, the more exalted is its standing in Catholic society. Such families were regarded as having ‘superior pedigree’ and hence marriage alliances were eagerly sought from them.
The two grandfathers were regulars at daily mass. One had two of his grandsons kneeling beside him on either side. At the time of the consecration of the bread and wine, both would half-close their eyes, lift their heads upwards and raise their hands heavenward in supplication. Both went and received communion daily. Overall, it was the demonstration of an extremely saintly behavior inside the church.
Outside, however, it was a completely different story. They would not speak to each other. Moreover, each took every chance to malign the other to anyone who cared to listen. Both were very well off financially. They owned large tracts of coconut orchards and paddy fields. It happened that the two of them owned some paddy fields with a common boundary. In the darkness of night one would get his workers to shift the entire length of boundary mud wall, about a foot high, into the other’s field by a couple of feet. Since the soil was dark clayish, it was very soft and moist and easily shifted. The other gentleman, once he realized his loss, would move the mud wall, not to its original position, but further into his enemy’s territory by a good three feet! This back and forth shifting of boundaries amused the locals no end. At one time one of them planted a coconut sapling just on the boundary so that most of the nutrition is taken from the other’s property. Within a few days, the other gentleman did the same just on his side of the boundary so that the two coconut trees grew up like Siamese twins.
One time my father and his friend Mathaisir, who was also my drawing master at school, wanted to broaden and raise the small stretch of village road connecting our houses to the main road. Everyone including the very poor willingly shifted their boundaries bordering on the road and rebuilt them at their own expense. But not these two gentlemen! Their properties jetted out like sore thumbs. In those days it was thought unnecessary to confess selfish acts of this nature since there was nothing impure about them.
Of course murder, unlike these days when bands of contract killers roam the country, was very rare. I remember it was such a spectacle when someone was discovered stabbed to death on a narrow path we used as shortcut to school. We would never walk there alone, and if one happened to be alone, he would make a dash for it, making sure to jump over the spot where the man lay murdered, lest the victim’s evil spirit that was hovering around would possess him!
Our good behavior was, without doubt, the result not so much of looking forward to joining the choirs of angels in heaven but rather of fear of hellish fire and brimstone. Fear was an all pervading feeling then – fear of parents at home, fear of teachers in school, fear of church authorities, fear of hell hereafter, fear of God; in fact there was hardly anything we did not fear. This fear of nearly everything kept us in line. At school we were beaten black and blue for the smallest offence and we suffered in silence unlike today’s youngsters who would jump before a train and kill themselves because their demand for ‘chili chicken’ is denied or they failed their exams; suicides, like murder, were very rare and far between.
During my middle school years, one of my teachers was Thodukayil Pothakuttysir. One day he was teaching us math and the topic was division of a number by a fraction. The technique, as you know, is to multiply the numerator by the reciprocal of the denominator. To demonstrate practically how this is to be done, he led me, one of the smallest in stature, to the front of the class, held me up upside down by my heels and asked the class how I looked. They chorused, “upside down”. “So”, he continued, “do the same to the denominator and multiply the numerator.” My classmates may have forgotten the incident, but I certainly haven’t. And I have never made a mistake in division by a fraction!
[Published in the February 2009 issue of Snehasandesham]
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