Paroikos

The Better Side of Life

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BELC/CLCI Joint Convention

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Renigunta District Meetings

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Chennai District Meetings

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Well I made the critical although understandable mistake of venturing out from my hidden box this evening. Hunger drove me forth, freedom kept me out. Okay maybe that is a bit embellished, but it sure sounds better than: I went out because I was too lazy to cook and had to walk home through a vast mob of politically charged groupies. Actually I was out most of the day teaching at Thiravalur, and I should say that I had a wonderful experience there teaching a group of first rate pastors who not only were capable of answering most of my questions but were familiar enough with the catechism to quote from it. Upon returning home I contemplated the contents of my icebox. After deep reflection I decided that although they were all virtuous enough in and of themselves there was little I could do towards a proper meal with eggs, frozen chicken breasts and a box of Oreos. By the way if anyone has a recipe that includes those three ingredients and nothing else please send it along I’m sure I’ll make use of it. So I sought to forage among the natives. At first I tried a place down the road from my house called the Tangerine that supposedly serves American style food. It is good but calling it American is like calling Taco Bell Mexican. That place was closed due to some holiday. So it was on to the Italian place, the Bella Ciao.

Now I have to say that long long ago I decided that I am not Italian, I will never fool anyone into thinking that I am Italian, and I am certainly am not going to attempt to pronounce the name of Italian foods especially since the correct pronunciation seldom has anything to do with the correct spelling. Therefore what I ordered was garlic bread and chicken served with a lemon butter sauce, what I got was an Italian meal far more appetizing than that particular description implies. This is probably why people insist on using the Italian names anyway because the English just doesn’t sound as good.

It was after I finished my meal and attempted to get home that I really found myself in the midst of a mess. Living downtown within half a mile not only of a very public and fashionable beach but also within walking distances of the University of Madras and many of the state and city government buildings does have a few draw backs. My driver made it about a third of the way back to my flat when he told me I would have to get out and walk the rest of the way since all the rest of the roads were closed off. There was a huge gathering of people who supported a certain political party. The symbol of which is a fist within a circle grabbing a torch, which has the resemblance in my mind to the iconic 70s? black fist symbol. What exactly they were doing I am not sure. There was this huge mass of people, imagine Hwy 53 in Eau Claire absolutely jam packed with people for at least three miles probably further walking on one side up the road and on the other side down the road. As far as I could tell they did nothing other than walk whichever way they happened to be walking. And it wasn’t as if there was a larger amount of people going in either direction. The crowd heading one way seemed just as big as the crowd heading the other way. They weren’t shouting or chanting anything. They weren’t holding signs. They weren’t rowdy or aggressive. They were simply walking. They weren’t exactly quite but they weren’t any louder than you would expect of a mass of people at a state fair or awaiting the arrival of a Fourth of July parade. They were almost every single one of them dressed in yellow shirts emblazoned with the fist of power, but other than that you would not have known they were there for political reasons at all.

I did speak briefly with a man who came from Pondicherry. Pondichery is a city to the south of Chennai where the French held sway for a long time. This proved to be the undoing of our mutual communication since the man knew French but only a few words in English and I know more Telugu and Tamil (total together about 6 words I think) than I do French. Other than that I simply slipped in amongst them relatively unnoticed and followed the wide and broad way till I found the narrower one leading home. Whence I slipped into my cement abode wondering if I shouldn’t try to mix my chicken and eggs after all, since although the Italian meal was delicious I was already hungry again.

Concerning the political parties in India - Which one in specific was out in the streets tonight, I do not remember. I know the symbol and would probably recognize a picture of the man at its head since there are certainly pictures of him around the city. Also Kumar, our driver, told me the name of both the party and the candidate last week, but I cannot recall it now. The vast majority of political parties seem to be named specifically so that they can be reduce to three letters, such as the BJP or the INC or the NCP etc. The most famous and probably the most widely support of the Indian political parties is called Indian National Congress, but is often referred to simply as Congress. This means an American has to be careful in explaining our government to Indians since if you mention congress they assume you are talking about a political party rather than one branch of the government. Congress (the Indian political party) dates back even before the time of Nehru and Gandhi who were both major forces in Congress and was basically established for the sake of winning Independence from the British Empire. It was therefore a party made up of people of vastly different political and religious beliefs held together by the single common goal of gaining Indian Independence. It was assumed by many that after independence was won Congress would fall apart into political parties consisting of equally minded constituents. But it never did, creating in India in essence what would have happened if the members of the Continental Congress had maintained a united front despite vastly different political ideologies. Although there have been some splits over the years. Recently I believe a group left because of the Nuclear Deal with the United States. However this party still remains the most dominant political party in India at least with regard to amount of votes received on the national level.

Probably the second biggest political party in India is the BJP often referred to as the Peoples Party roughly translated the letters BJP stands for India’s People Union. From the little I now about this party they stand for some good things as far as India is concerned, they are a very nationalistic party, but their real problem at least from my point of view is their close association with the RSS. The RSS is generally all about restoring India to only Hinduism and have been suspected in many violent acts, including Gandhi’s assignation. Beyond these two parties there are three other national parties.

On a state level, the politics quickly breakdown to an unbelievable amount of parties. The general prevailing idea seems to be if you want to run for government start your own party. Wikipedia list a total of 45 Indian political parties on a state level, and I think that is rather a conservative number. The party rally I walked through today was for a state level party, lead by a former Bollywood actor, which as it turns out is a fairly common theme in India. Or course I’m not going to criticize them for this particular characteristic since one of our greatest presidents was a former actor, and from everything I have read Arnold certainly seems to be a doing a good job of it over there in California. Maybe we out to follow India’s lead and get more actors elected to public office. How about Will Smith? David Duchovny? Tea Leoni? There you go David and Tea could run on the same ticket, then we get not only the first female VP but also the first Husband-Wife team. It would save on what the tax payers have to pay for the president’s health insurance anyway.

-Matt

After church today before we went to eat, Koenig had to stop at the book store again. He is making it into a weekly ritual which is not good for my pocket book. On my own I try to do my best to avoid the book store. This week I managed to keep it down to only a few books, mainly because after I had picked up a few a flatly refused to even look at the shelves anymore. One of the books I managed to restrain from buying even after perusing it was a book titled “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. An author I first met in “Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” which is your classic growing up in small town America, playing hide and seek on the streets, and running around in underpants pretending to be a superhero book. I don’t remember for sure where that book takes place whether or not it was actually in a “small town” but it certainly gives you the same nostalgia for an America that barely existed and yet seems to have become the symbolic perfection of everything that is “America.”

In this book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” I just read a few paragraphs that were speaking about fossils. Here Bryson makes a remark to the effect that the fossil record is really messed up. He writes to the effect that fossils keep appearing where they shouldn’t and not appearing where they should. He gives the example of some animal that apparently appears all over the world, EXCEPT South America. Why should any animal appear on absolutely every continent including Antarctica, but not in South America? My thought was I wonder if the Lord isn’t just messing with us a little.

I had a similar thought when reading through “A Brief History of Time.” There Stephen Hawking is talking about the great unifying theory in Physics. That is an explanation for the way that all things act that would tie together the four forces of the Universe and explain it all. Or you could also call it the one great cause, the reason that everything acts the way it does. In discussing this he mentions four distinct possibilities: 1 – There is such a unifying cause and we are going to find it 2- There is no such unifying cause and the four forces simply are the way they are 3 – There is such a unifying cause but we are not capable of finding it 4 – There are an endless number of causes each underlying the last. It was this last one that caught my attention. The basic idea here is that no matter how deeply into space or atoms we look there will always be something deeper. For example if one asks: What is matter made of? We find the answer is atoms. But then what are atoms made of? Electrons, protons, neutrons. Those in turn are made up of other smaller particles, and those of smaller, and those of smaller, etc. Hawking hypothesizes that maybe the forces of the universe are the same way. If we were to find something underlying the four forces, we would find something under that, and something under that, and so on. Thus in the end we would be chasing an endlessly receding answer, like the donkey with the carrot strapped to its head, or the cat that chases it tail. Of course like the donkey we would never know what we were doing. We would always think just one more layer this time we will find it. We would be like that guy in Greek mythology who spends eternity pushing the rock up the hill only to have it fall down again just before he reaches the summit.

For romantic reasons I like this last hypothesis of Hawking, even though he himself doesn’t think it is true. It suggests to me the same thing as the fossils that exist where they shouldn’t. Something to the effect that God is messing with us in a manner of speaking. It is like He is saying, “Okay you can spend your life chasing the carrot or you can just listen to me.” It’s like God purposely designed the whole Earth and Universe including where and when certain animal species would live in order to scream, “You can’t find the answer here! Why don’t you just listen to the Lord who has already given you the answer?”

Live From Chennai,

Matthew Ude

Dave’s return and the advent of my winter retreat to colder climates, what would January be without negative weather and ice storms, has spurned a group of visits that are shorter per district but more densely packed together. Next year we are talking about visiting the districts separately so that we can each get two days of teaching in. However in an attempt to visit them all one more time before my November departure we are visiting them together each taking one day. A normal day of teaching is approximately 10:00am – 12:30pm, Lunch Break, 1:30pm – 3:00pm, with the morning tea break thrown in sometime around 11:00 or 11:30. Generally I have been going through Ephesians in the morning and using the afternoon 1 ½ hours for a more dogmatic review of the Church, or Sabbai¹. This way we review many of the same things we are discussing in Ephesians while at the same time allowing a bit of break from the intense mental gymnastics needed for following the height and depth of Paul’s saturated prose.

Yesterday and today the plan was to visit Tiruttani, a new district which we only just started this last April. Dave went on Friday and this morning was my turn. I was already planning on reducing the depth of my teaching in an attempt to finish the first section of Ephesians and of the Sabbai booklet since this would be my last round of visits before my return in February and since I only had a day instead of the normal two days. When I got there I was reminded that it was Saturday and therefore the schedule ² was a little different so that the pastors can get back to their churches and prepare for the coming Sunday. Class was scheduled from 10:00am – 1:00pm with a tea break at 11:30 which is a good hour shorter than normal. This means that I spent most of the morning trying to teach thoroughly but quickly.

In this I succeeded reaching the end of the Ephesians section I wanted to cover about 12:35 with 25 minutes left to go. As it turned out the task went for naught³ since when I reached for my pamphlet on the Sabbai⁴, it was not there. Actually considering my propensity for forgetting it is rather amazing that this is the first time that it has happened. But then considering the distance which we travel to teach these classes I tend to be extra careful when leaving home. As it was I was without it after I had worked so hard to make sure I would have a chance to teach it. I offered to run home and get it if they would wait but they seemed disinclined to take me up on that offer considering that it is a 2 ½ hour drive one way.

In the end we just reviewed the Ephesians selection and talked about some of the things that I had skipped over. I realize that this is a long article to tell you I forgot my lesson plan, but at least you learned the Telugu word for Church.

Thought for the Day - Studying the word of God is like picking beans. If you finish the row quickly with relatively little pain it means you missed most of what was there. I f you laboriously strive to move every inch quickly filling up your pail, it will feel a lot worse at the time but the harvest will be bountiful, and during the winter you will find plenty of fresh frozen beans in your freezer. This of course does not bode well for me since there is no job on earth I despise as much as picking beans, talk about child abuse.

-   Matthew

Down below are a few pictures of the men at Tiruttani and the building where we meet. We meet on the first floor of that building which is both the church and the home of the pastor.