than I’d ever been.
In the beginning was a word, I had heard, then I heard
another word that made me listen, made me stand. Who
said it? Not a man, that’s for sure; men were too busy
teaching me their sure and frightened ways of purity.
Who whispered it? Who said it? Who worked that word
of wonder into me? Who freed me? Who believed me?
I still ask for my mother’s prayers, and she for mine. I don’t pretend to know how any of it works, except that there is this place that we get to go where we lay down all of our pain, confusion, and limitation in the presence of a wonderous holiness who, like us, knows pain and loss.
The summer after I had graduated from college my family went to India. My parents, my brother and I did the classic tour of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur and then came home to Kerala in the south. We took a long train ride through Kerala and landed back home in Kottayam, where my mother is from and where I had lived for a few years as a child. It was a beautiful way to come home after a long time away. When we entered her home town, the driver asked to stop at his temple when we were nearby, so we did, and we watched him say his prayers. We too were going to stop at our church to offer our thanksgiving for safe return home.
When we arrived at St Mary’s Syrian Orthodox Cathedral in Manarcadu, my father waited outside with my brother who was sick from the long travel. My mother and I went in together. She went to the front to pray and make an offering from all of us. I walked in and sat on the floor on a coir mat and watched her. I prayed as well. Well, actually, I just threw out my biggest question. How can my life work? How do all the parts fit? If I loved my family and this place so much, how could I be with them as an American, a queer person, a woman who felt called to be a priest?
Then, as clear as day, I heard someone say, ‘Get up and walk.’ I looked around to see who was telling me to move, but there was no one nearby. I looked back at my mother and knew, for no reason I can explain, the answer to my question. I was going to be OK. My emerging self-understanding was not a contradiction but an integration of identities that fit together just fine, in me.
My mother came over and asked what had happened. When I did not reply, she showed me that I was sitting among grave markers laid flat on the floor. She explained that the one I was on was one of her ancestors, a priest in that church. I hadn’t known she had ancestors who were priests in that church.
***
One of the stories of Manarcadu is that in a time of war in Kottayam two sisters fleeing invaders ran to the Manarcadu Devi temple and tried to hide there, but there was only room for one, so one stayed at the temple and the other sister ran to hide in the church, a kilometre away. They were both saved, and so to this day the temple and the church celebrate parts of their festivals together. Some say the goddesses, meaning the Devi of the temple and Mary for the church, are sisters. That works better for Hindus than for Christians, but I like the idea of Mary having a fierce, protective sister and Jesus a Malayali aunt.
I went to visit the temple a few years ago. There is an old-style house with an open courtyard; a snake grove for the auspicious feeding of a cobra; a sacred, healing tree; and a low, small open-sided building to house the Devi statue. The priest I met is also a tech worker in town. I asked him how the temple started. He said, ‘Hundreds of years ago our people came here from Kodungaloor in a time of war. The goddess came with them.’
‘Wait. What? How did they know the goddess came with them?’ I asked.
He said. ‘She came.’
‘Do you mean they carried the statue? Or a symbol? Or was it a feeling?’
‘She came,’ he said, ‘and our ancestors made a small statue and a place to honour her. And after a while the local people also wanted a place to worship her.’
The goddess in Kerala is a powerful creature. She is not a spouse. She is creating, justice-seeking and raging. She is a force of power and she can manifest compassion.
The Syrian church also tells the story of migrating from Kodungaloor and bringing the faith that came to us from Thomas the apostle and their devotion to Mary with them.
***
A few years ago I googled St Mary’s.
On their webpage I found a section in quotes from the diary of a young English missionary stationed in Manarcardu in the 1800s. In the quote the missionary claimed that the infernal chanting to Mary (from my beloved church) was driving him mad, so he went down to the church and preached his very best to get them to stop.
In response, he wrote, the chanting only seemed to grow louder.
Hilarious. I wonder what summer intern got away with posting that on the website?
My people.
Until I read this story I had never thought about how we, as the indigenous Indian community, appeared to those European missionaries and traders who arrived in our locality. I suspect they were expecting to introduce Christianity, only to discover the locals already worshipping in an Orthodox Christian Church. I had never thought about us as influenced or even defined by these encounters, but clearly part of my questioning and confusion on that day came from their understanding of what a Christian is, which for them was Roman Catholic or Protestant, Western European in culture, and probably white and straight appearing.
***
I grew up in Dallas, Texas. I came out to myself when I was seventeen, and immediately remembered the Gospel passage in which Jesus says, ‘If you follow me, you will lose mother, and father, and sibling,’ or something like that, and wondered how he knew what it meant to be a queer Indian Christian kid living in Texas in 1989.
I had heard about being saved from the ways of the world from Baptist friends, but it had never occurred to me that self-knowledge could mean something like this. I had been saved from an illusory sense of myself, into knowing something true and difficult. It felt as if the Gospels that I had heard every Sunday of my life were starting to make sense, but in a way that made me irreconcilable to many kinds of Christianity.
I was fortunate to be raised by Orthodox people and believed deeply that I was made in the image of God. Thank God for that kind of teaching in the church and in my family for a dark-skinned kid growing up in the American South. I remember wondering if there was such a thing as God and how that might be defined while at the same time understanding without question that God’s love for creation, of which I was a part, was inescapable. That wonderful, critical space of intellectual honesty alongside the experience of a life of Christian practice, which for me includes curiosity about what people find sacred and a trusting of myself, has offered a generous and creative space for faith and self-acceptance.
Those missionaries noted Indian Orthodox worship as something that required reformation but recognised the importance or maybe the holiness of the old churches. I remember the feeling of placing my body on the cool
