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| MESSAGE FROM FATHER LAURENCE, 29 January 2007 |
- Tablet Jan 29 2007
Arunachala
The night of the full moon is an auspicious time to do pradakishna, the circumambulation
around the holy mountain of Arunachala in South India. You are supposed first to bathe, then
walk barefoot, with a pure mind the thirteen kilometres around the 800 meter cone that
embodies the deity Siva. I had not bathed, did not walk barefoot and my mind was not pure. But
the walk, with thousands of real pilgrims, around this, for me, Trinitarian symbol, nonetheless
bestowed real grace. The word pradakishna combines several meanings that explain the
universal motive of sacred walking here in India, the Camino to Compostela or the labyrinths of
medieval cathedrals: it expels sin, fulfils true desires, destroys karma and forwards the work of
liberation.
My fellow walkers seemed to have soles of iron or perhaps to be walking on a cushion of air. An
intensity of purpose that was almost frightening, a sense that they knew for certain what they
were doing, surrounded them whether they were fast walkers of strollers, chatting or silent.
The full moon was bright. As we walked round its immutable stillness the mountain, like God,
revealed in intriguing, seductive ways ever-changing perspectives.
The chiaroscuro light and sound effects along the road dramatize the sacred without conflicting
with the profane. This full fair of life is the striking authority of Indian religious experience in
which the mystical and the sexual – like the lingam and yoni symbols of the genitals in Indian
temples - coexist in ways that Christian missionaries once found perplexing or pornographic.
The human muddle and medley of the sacred walk around Arunachala combines commerce
and prayer, entertainment and worship with a Catholic lack of embarrassment. Tell me why I
shouldn’t be here?, it seems to say if you think it shouldn’t. At these moments I thought of
Clement of Alexandria saying that nothing that is not against nature is against Christ. Hawker
stalls selling food and drink, brightly-lit booths selling religious tapes and holy pictures, minor
shrines for the impulsive puja or ritual, smells of incense and delicious rice wrapped in banana
leaves, many less pleasing smells, devotees of particular gurus offering his teachings,
motorbikes humbly weaving their way through the mighty crowd. There is no prescribed
starting or ending point and nothing seems proscribed. What have you done when you have
done it? Walked around a mountain under a full moon with thousands of religiously impassioned
Hindus and a handful of skeptical westerners trying to look natural. You have been in the
presence of Arunachala and you have paid a visit home.
That presence has absorbed pilgrims and devotees for centuries. The most renowned of
modern times was a seventeen year old middle class Indian boy from Madurai called
Venkataraman, who came to be known globally as Ramana Maharshi. In 1896 , when he first
heard of Arunachala, he was an average student at a Christian school and interested in football.
The very sound of the name began to change him. One day, some months later, for no apparent
reason he was filled with a terror of death. He decided to explore the fear and lay down on the
ground as if dead and there, in a flash, he knew that the I was immortal. He realized the Self and
remained in that state of realization until his death in 1950. Soon after this experience he went
by train to the thousand columned temple of Arunachalaleswara at the foot of Arunacahla. He
sat in the bliss of his realization uncaring of his material needs. In another world he would have
been removed by white coated men and medicated in a closed ward. Here he was cared for and
visited by those who saw the presence that he radiated. The story is like that of St Benedict
who, at Sacro Speco, like him spent years of silence in a cave before becoming the centre of an
ashram. Unlike Benedict Ramana did not leave a Rule - except the simple teaching of self-
enquiry, to keep asking oneself who am I?. But like Benedict his legacy is often dispelled by
what tries to preserve it.
The next day was Ramana’s birthday - visitors and special events, all noisy and merry. The cave
which, like Benedict’s, preserves the atmosphere of the original experience, was, inexplicably,
closed. The brahminical school in the ashram was on holiday and the lithe young students
played volleyball in a superior kind of way. (Ramana, had cut his Brahmin thread as soon as he
came home to Arunachala.) The ashram shop did brisk trade.
How can one institutionalize the experience of God? Yet despite the faults of the institutions that
it generates, something wild and free like the pradakishna, survives to testify to what was once
manifested. And as Rumi once declared: everything revolves around what it loves.
- Much love
Laurence Freeman OSB