Call to Gather: The historian of religions Wendy O'Flaherty uses the metaphor of looking into a shop window to describe what can happen when we look at the myths and religions of a different culture: "We see the faces of the strange figures posed inside, and superimposed on their faces we see the reflections of our own faces looking at them. The myth we thought was just a window turns out to be a mirror, too."[1]

Readings: A passage from the last will and testament of Jawaharlal Nehru explaining why he wanted a portion of his ashes immersed in the sacred Ganges river in spite of his not being an observant Hindu--

The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India's age--long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. She reminds me of the snow-covered peaks and the deep valleys of the Himalayas, which I have loved so much, and of the rich and vast plains below, where my life and work have been cast. Smiling and dancing in the morning sunlight, and dark and gloomy and full of mystery as the evening shadows fall, a narrow, slow and graceful stream in winter and a vast, roaring thing during the monsoon, broad-bosomed almost as the sea, and with something of the sea's power to destroy, the Ganga has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present and flowing on to the great ocean of the future. And though I have discarded much of the past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of the shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people,...I do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India.[2]

On December 6, 1992, a frenzied mob of Hindu nationalists demolished a nearly five hundred year old mosque in the north Indian city of Ayodhya. Fueled by a grudge that had been nurtured all the centuries the mosque had stood, the mob destroyed the mosque in less than nine hours. The Muslim emperor who built the mosque first desecrated, then tore down a Hindu temple that had existed for centuries before on the same site. The site of the original temple and the mosque that followed is one of the most sacred in all of India for Hindus: it is believed to be the birthplace of Lord Rama, a god highly revered by many Hindus. Rama's birthplace is so sacred that millions of Hindu pilgrims traveled to Ayodhya each year even before the destruction of the mosque in 1992.

The principal inciter of the Ayodhya mosque's destruction was a political leader named L. K. Advani. A Hindu, he grew up in the predominantly Muslim city of Karachi. At the same instant India was freed from British imperialist rule in 1947, the new country was cut in two. Advani's area and other predominantly Muslim areas were partitioned from India to create Pakistan. Advani, then twenty-one years old, joined some ten million people who, finding themselves on the wrong side of the new border, fled their homelands. Advani was lucky enough not to be among the one million of those refugees who perished in the terrible violence and suffering that accompanied this tremendous two-way exodus. Certainly his exile from his homeland must have been on his mind the day the mob tore down the mosque.

The response to the Ayodhya mosque's destruction in 1992 was entirely predictable: a massive wave of violence throughout South Asia that left thousands dead and hundreds of destroyed Hindu temples in Bangladesh and Pakistan. No atrocity ever seems to go unanswered.

An important theological notion in Hinduism is karma, defined by one scholar as "the moral law of cause and effect by which one reaps what one sows."[3] The violence that has long plagued the relationship between Muslims and Hindus on the Indian subcontinent is a striking example of the law of karma. Desecration and violence invite further desecration and violence. These seeds have been sown for a long time in India: Muslim invaders first destroyed Hindu temples in the year 997. And during the centuries of British domination, the British authorities often did their best to nurture the seeds of discord. Dividing their Muslim and Hindu subjects was a primary strategy the British used to keep overall opposition to their imperial rule weak.

The impulses that destroyed the Hindu temple in Ayodhya in the early 1500s and the mosque on the same site in 1992 fortunately do not represent the whole story in India. Other powerful, far more noble impulses are embedded in India's history and religion. India, perhaps more than anywhere in the world has been cursed and blessed with pluralism of incredible depth and variety. Let's start with language: the Indian constitution adopted in 1950 recognizes seventeen major languages. In addition to these seventeen languages, there are eighteen more languages that are each spoken by more than a million Indians. And there are 22,000 distinct dialects. Some of these individual dialects have more speakers than any of the Scandinavian languages! India's geography is as diverse as its languages, with every kind of ecosystem and climate present. When we think of India's weather, most of think of intense heat. Yet India has more snow and ice than any non-polar area on earth. India has dry deserts and the wettest place in the world (which averages 446 inches of rain a year).

And of course, India has religious diversity as well. Not only Hindus and Muslims, but also Sikhs, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jains, Buddhists and Jews, to name a few. One Christian community traces itself back to the Apostle Thomas--the famous Doubting Thomas. Imagine the shock of European Christian missionaries shocked to find a Christian community that went back almost as far as Jesus himself! India is also home to the oldest Jewish community outside of the Middle East.

Hinduism itself has so much diversity within it that it can hardly be called a religion. Indeed, the word "Hinduism" did not exist until Westerners came and felt a need to give a label to the diverse indigenous religion of India. There is no single creed or dogma that defines Hinduism. The diversity of Hindu belief and practice is as various as the number of gods and goddesses in the pantheon: somewhere between 330,000 and six million. And to put an exclamation point on Hinduism's diversity, there also are powerful monotheistic and even unitarian strands within this generally polytheistic tradition. Hinduism is so thoroughly diverse that anything that is said about Hinduism can be easily contradicted by some other reality alive within the Hindu tradition. The kind of intolerance so tragically evident in the mosque destruction is foreign to much of the overwhelmingly pluralist Hindu belief, history and tradition.

Many governments through India's long history wisely embraced pluralism. More than 2,200 years ago, for example, the great emperor Ashoka--a Buddhist--established tolerance of religious and linguistic differences as a central pillar of his rule. The greatest Muslim king in the mid-1500s recognized India's religious pluralism and wooed Hindu cooperation. Conscious of this tradition, the framers of independent India's modern Constitution embraced secularism as the official attitude of the state towards religion. The spirit of secularism requires the state not to favor any particular religion; it establishes a wall of separation between state and temple or mosque. All of this is as much a part of the Indian tradition as the temple and mosque destruction at Ayodhya--probably more.

The non-violent approach of Mahatma Gandhi is another powerful impulse within the Indian heritage that runs completely counter to the chauvinism and bigotry of Ayodhya. As we have seen with Gandhi's successors in South Africa and our own country's civil rights movement, there may be no better or deeper answer than non-violent resistance to the karmic cycle of violence and bigotry.

Blindness to the diversity that lies at the heart of India caused the tragedies at Ayodhya--both in the 1500's destruction of the Hindu temple and again in the 1992 destruction of the mosque. India is not Hindu and it is not Muslim. As one Indian puts it, India has always been greater than the sum of its parts.[4] The terrible destruction of the mosque is a departure from the pluralistic history. Yet paradoxically, it represents a continuity with the narrow rejection of pluralism that has periodically plagued India for thousands of years.

All of this points to the most important reason India matters--to us, to our country, to the whole world. I remain convinced that the foremost challenge facing the world today is how to live with the incredible diversity of human beings. From Appleton North High School to Chechnya, from Los Angeles and Rwanda to Jerusalem, living with diversity challenges our species like nothing else. And as I shared last year in my sermon series on the interdependent web, living with bio-diversity--not just with human diversity--challenges us, too. Nowhere on earth is the confounding complexity of the problem and the tantalizing glory of human diversity more evident than in India. Most things about India strike me as a little more intense than elsewhere in the world; the problem of diversity is no exception. India is the hardest place to solve this problem because the diversity is so deep and so intense. And it is the easiest because India has a longer and deeper tradition of respecting and valuing diversity than anywhere else on earth. This paradox is one reason I agree with the British historian E.P. Thompson, who writes that India "is the most important country in the future of the world."[5]

There are numerous other reasons India matters so greatly to the world. India matters because with about a billion people, it is the second most populous nation in the world. And it is poised to overtake China as the most populous country in about twenty years. Fully one-sixth of the world's population lives in India. India matters because of the many, influential concentrations of Indian emigrants scattered all over the world--from Southeast Asia to the Middle East to South Africa, England, Canada and the United States.

India matters because the ancient Indus Valley civilization that forms its bedrock is among the most important and influential of the early civilizations. Anthropologists and archaeologists have learned in recent years that the ancient civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and the Indus Valley were a lot less isolated from one another than we previously believed. As the most centrally located and probably the largest of these four civilizations, the Indus Valley people had a tremendous impact on the world. Historians believe there were likely some fifty million people living in South Asia by the third century before the common era. Our Western parochialism has prevented most of from knowing about the incredible advances made in ancient India--from the astronomer who figured out the earth is round and revolves around the sun a thousand years before Galileo to the physicist who understood gravity a thousand years before Newton. India may well be the oldest continuing civilization, with the connections to its ancient past more alive today in its religion and culture and learning than anywhere else.

India matters because of the enormous potential it contains for growth of all kinds in the coming decades. Today about half the people in India are illiterate, yet India has the second largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world. Nearly half the population lives below the poverty line--and that's a line that is "drawn just this side of the funeral pyre," according to one commentator.[6] Imagine what could happen if India's literacy rate and poverty rate became comparable to the United States.

India matters because it has the third or fourth largest standing army in the world and has in recent years had active confrontations with its neighbors Pakistan and China. India matters because it has had nuclear weapons since 1974. Its cold and recently hot war with Pakistan over the disputed, strategic territory of Kashmir presents the world's most likely scenario in which nuclear weapons will be unleashed. India's first underground nuclear test in 1974 literally rocked Pakistan. The recent back and forth nuclear testing by both India and Pakistan figuratively shook the rest of the world, too. There is a nuclear arms race raging in South Asia between two peoples which have fought three wars in the last fifty years. Half a million Indian soldiers are deployed in Kashmir. The recent airline hijacking and India's capitulation to the hijackers' demands only increase the chance of more hijackings and more tension. The law of karma seems to be the operative principle in the explosive India-Pakistan relationship.

Finally--and maybe most importantly--India matters because of the powerful mirror it holds up to the rest of the world. I think it's no coincidence that the metaphor I shared at the start of the service--of the store window becoming a mirror--comes from a scholar of India. Maybe India is such a powerful mirror because its civilization has been around so long. Maybe it's a powerful mirror because so much about India is so very intense. From the rich colors and smells and sounds that greet a visitor in India to the density of its population and the overwhelming complexity of challenges like diversity and poverty, India is ever intense. Maybe India is a powerful mirror for the rest of the world because of the depth of its religious insights for so many millennia. Maybe India is a powerful mirror because, in the words of one Indian writer, it offers "in its mistakes and failings as much in its successes, lessons for all" humanity.[7] Maybe India is a powerful mirror because of all these reasons and many more that I haven't named and in many cases can't even imagine.

Whatever the cause, when people from around the world look into the figurative store window that is India, they are very likely not only to see the strangers in the window but also their own reflection coming back. Perhaps in India more than anywhere else, the window really is a mirror. In the movie A Passage to India, one character remarks that "in India, one comes face to face with oneself." This has been true for countless travelers for thousands of years--whether they have physically traveled there or learned about India from books or other people who have visited or lived in India.

The effect of its encounter with India has been profound on the West. Britain's long experience with India has been especially powerful. Movies such as A Passage to India and Gandhi are part of the British effort to understand its relationship with India and in particular the mirror India held up to the British. I would argue that as with the Mogul invaders before them, India changed the British more than the British changed India. This seems to always be the case with India.

Americans' encounters with India in the 1960s and early 1970s perhaps more than anything else triggered the inward shift of our focus, the deepening of individual spiritual journeys that is still so much a part of American culture and this Fellowship's life. The mirror India held up to America in the 1960s--and maybe most especially the mirror it held up to our many political activists--said, "Stop the frantic busyness. Slow down and look within. Get in touch with your soul. You can only change the world if you are at peace with your inner core." This Fellowship's shift to a more spiritual focus is part of this inward turn and has much to do with India's effect on America. India's scriptural tradition had much the same effect a hundred and fifty years earlier on American Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"Anyone who wants to understand the modern world," wrote a British reporter in 1996, "must make a personal passage to India."[8] I believe this. And I would add: anyone who wants to understand his or her soul, must make a personal passage to India. These next four weeks, I invite you to join me on just such a passage.[9]

Copyright 2000 by Roger B. Bertschausen. All rights reserved.

[1]Wendy Donniger O'Flaherty, Other People's Myths (New York: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 140-141.
[2]Jawaharlal Nehru quoted in Shashi Tharoor India: From Midnight to Millenniumi (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1997), pp. 133-134.
[3]David R. Kinsley, Hinduism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), p. 155.
[4]Tharoor, p. 5.
[5]E.P. Thompson quoted in Thoroor, pp. 3-4.
[6]Tharoor, p. 326.
[7]Tharoor, pp. 15-16.
[8]William Rees-Mogg of the London Times quoted in Tharoor, pp. 359-360.
[9]I am indebted to Tharoor and Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) for much of the factual information about India contained in this sermon.