Retelling Jesus' stories in today's India

Most Rev Thomas Menamparampil, SDB, Archbishop of Guwahati

People love to tell stories. Crowds gather to listen. Men and women, young and old, sit for hours in rapt attention. Vergil’s Aeneid began with the words, “Conticuere omnes, intentique ora tenebant”, which meant ‘All kept silent, and were in rapt attention with wide-open mouths’.  The Arabian Nights used to thrill the audience. The Panchatantra taught. The Jataka Tales instructed. The Ramayana edified. The Mahabharata entertained, philosophized and educated.    They tell us how we have come to be where we are and the way we are. We discover ourselves in the stories we hear, and see how we are related to the rest of the human family, the universe and Beyond. People in ancient times kept telling and retelling the stories  drawing lessons for themselves and  the progeny. Stories convince  minds, they  touch hearts, they lead to commitment.

1. The Great Stories of Humankind
Every Civilization has its own Grand Narratives. The Greeks had their Iliad and Odyssey, the Romans the Aeneid, the Anglo-Saxons Beowulf, the Celts Leabhar Gahbala, and similarly many others. People were familiar with the personalities who are seen as archetypes of virtue as well as vice. They become the characters of the collective unconscious. Not only great nations, but even the humblest community (tribe, ethnic group, caste ) has its own culture, and stories that tell of a glorious past, of a golden era, and of heroes and events, which give them an identity, and of which they are legitimately proud. Some of these traditions (of tribal, clan or caste origin) grow into sophisticated manuals of social behaviour and anthologies of philosophy. As Christians we too have our collection of stories that tell of our origins, the adventures and misadventures of our ancients, reasons for self-confidence and dangers of failure: the Old and New Testaments, the record of martyrs, teachers, thinkers.

2. Didactic Epics
The larger Indian society has been trained to listen to the grand themes described in the Mahabharata and Ramayana. The heroes and heroines in these epics are living figures within our civilizational world for example, Sita, Lakshman, Duryodana, Narada, Dhritarashtra. As we said earlier, sometimes the historic experiences of a particular society are reshaped into a working philosophy of life like the I Ching of Lao Tzu or a social code like the Analects of Confucius. Indian traditional wisdom was captured into books like the Vedas and the Upanishads which made a profound impact on the South Asian civilization. They shape lives, give direction to communities, motivate human endeavour.

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