Notes from India

Joy is the core and meaning of Catholic life: a blazing supernatural joy, crowning nature as the flame crowns a bonfire. The fuel of a human heart in Heaven will blaze in joy for ever and not be consumed. All the vigils, the fastings, the agonies and mortifications of the saints, lead to this one aim. Before I was received into the Catholic Church, I did not understand this – or if I understood it, the understanding was intellectual only, not a present and actual process involving my whole being.

Our Blessed Lady, the cause of your joy and mine, has led me through darkness for a year now. She calms my violent, childish longings, and teaches me to do whatever has to be done, not by means of some imaginary rule-book (the burden of the Protestant believer) but for love of her charming, wise and joyful self.

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Mirror of justice, pray for me! Your Child is the Sun of justice, but His beams often burn too brightly for my sight, and in the gentle mirror of your face I see them reflected without confusion.

Mother of Perpetual Succour, under that title you came to me when I lay broken among the thorns, simply because I called on your name, and led me to the Holy Catholic Church which is your care and your stronghold.

You washed my filthy hands and heart and taught me the beginning of patience and obedience, as a true Mother, teaching her child the letters of the alphabet.

You made a man of me; yet I am still an infant in your holy arms. You have laughed my sullenness away and shown me the beauties of your everlasting garden. You have never abandoned me for a moment, in spite of my rebellions and treacherous follies.

Throughout the East your children praise you and love you with a devotion beyond measure. Not only to Catholics do you give the protection of your mantle, but to Parsee, Buddhist and Hindu, despising no soul that entreats your care. And to each soul you give a unique and individual love.

For me, who had no sister, you deigned to become a miraculous elder sister, never leaving me solitary, guarding me from the malice of the enemy and my own disordered nature.

Is it strange that you are my joy and my Heaven on earth? How did I live so long without you? Now my soul is at peace, and my life rests in your hands – Mirror of Justice, Cause of our joy.

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Yet joy at times can be achieved only through its absence – that half of Catholic life which the world rejects as too severe.

The Japanese Catholics are the best in the world; and their martyrdoms were the most cruel. One girl hung head downwards for sixteen days over a pit of smoking charcoal, her temple pierced so that the blood could flow, holding her back from the peace of death. What torrents of grace her passion must have released in the souls of her countrymen!

I remember the transparent face of a patient in the T.B. hospital near Choshi, lit up with ascetic joy as the procession of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary passed singing down the corridor – his labouring hands folded on his consumptive chest.

In the peace of the Columban chapel in Tokyo, where those loving and generous Fathers bathed my self-inflicted wounds, an image of Our Lord, a young and beautiful athlete carved by a Japanese artist, hung all-but-glorified above the altar, some drop of that abundance watered my dry soul; and I understood for the first time that the Cross was planted in Eastern territory, and that the Flesh we eat is the flesh of an Eastern man.

We do not have to be saints in order to begin to suffer with Our Lord.

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Perhaps the choice of each moment is in fact a choice between the suffering of the Penitent or the Impenitent Thief. Undoubtedly we are all thieves, and suffer deservedly; but when we welcome the rigour of God’s justice, the horror of isolation leaves us and our pains become purgative.

But I speak too abstractly. In the East the effects of the Fall are less mitigated than in New Zealand, where the rejuvenating power that flows from the Sacrifice of the Mass reaches even those souls who reject its meaning.

Or is that a fallacy? The Mass is not held in by geographical limits. At least the unkemptness of an Eastern city, the filth on the pavement and the veneer of dirt on every wall, the deformed beggars and murmuring touts, the odour of despair that breathes from its rotting shacks, force home the moral that the pagan world is essentially disordered and unhappy, groaning for the bread of the Incarnate Word.

The following lines were written in Calcutta, as a verse letter to my wife, and take their title from the Howrah Bridge, that massive symbol of modern technology:

Taller than the stair of Qutub Minar
These iron beams oppress the eagle’s town;
Bare heels will dint them slowly.
And swollen Gunga’s muscles move
Beneath with freight of garbage,
Oar and sail, the loot of many lives.
In the unsleeping night my thoughts
Are millet falling from an iron pan,
While you, my dear, in Delhi lying down
Enter the same room by another door.
The rupee god has trampled here;
The poor desire a Marxist cage.
Dragon seed, the huddled bundles lying
In doorways have perhaps one chilli,
A handful of ground maize.
King Famine rules. Tout and owl-eyed whore
Whose talons pluck and stain the sleeve,
Angels of judgment, husk the soul
Till pity, pity only stays.

Out of my wounds they have made stars;
Each is an eye that looks on you. (CP 194)

The last two lines are taken from a ballad of Goa, that Portuguese and Catholic enclave in India. There St Francis Xavier and Our Lady of Fatima are supreme; indeed, St Francis holds honorary rank as an army officer (apage 374 captain, I think it is) and quickly punished one Governor who docked his pay.

The Goans desire to preserve their independence and identity in a Hindu environment. The Government of India, on the other hand, resents the existence of Portuguese authority on Indian soil, and has conducted a cold war to ‘liberate’ Goa.

The spirituality of Hindu culture is largely an ideal, not a fact. Yet the Hindus have their own dedicated men. The statue of Gandhi, an emaciated yet triumphant wayfarer, unveiled recently by Nehru in Calcutta, is a symbol of shared suffering and the spiritual renewal engendered by it.

Let us not assume, though, that the creative intuitions of Gandhi sprang solely from meditation on the Vedas. In his mind the Hindu ascetic detachment combined with the Christian ethic of close relationship and identification with the suffering of others. It was he who gave to the Untouchables the name of Harijans – ‘People of God’.

One incident among many of the past two months has burned itself into my memory. On a pavement by the river, near the Howrah Bridge, among the fruit stalls, a man lay on his back – a leper, with arms extended, and one foot, gangrenous perhaps, swathed in a gigantic bandage. I dropped a couple of coins beside his fingerless palm. Though one cannot give to every beggar (it would mean bankruptcy in a week), lepers and the blind have a special right to the charity of the undiseased. Yet I confess, to my discredit, that I yielded to a certain revulsion.

As I turned away from him, a policeman spoke to me, smart in his khaki uniform and carrying the bamboo staff of his profession. ‘Why do you give him money now?’ he asked, with an ironical smile. ‘It is the last time.’

And looking back at the leper – his wild, fierce head thrown back, unmarred by the disease, his abdomen rising and falling almost imperceptibly, while flies clustered unhindered on his eyes and nostrils – I realised that the policeman was more observant than I. The leper was making his last and only exit from the streets of Calcutta. In another country he would have died secluded in a white bed – but unless he were tended by nuns, could he have been certain of a personal and loving care?

In New Zealand we evade the fact of human pain, more perhaps than people do in India. Pain is hidden below the surface of our lives. The lunatic asylums and the jails, those monasteries of suffering, receive our unloved brothers and sisters. But here Christ was coming down from his Cross on the pavement beside the fruit markets; and no one was there to receive His Body except myself and the policeman.

And the only true alternative to his fatalistic irony would have been for me to sit down beside the leper and take his head on my knees and wipe his face with a handkerchief; and afterwards to have washed his body and prepared it for burial. Who am I to speak of brotherhood when that is the one thing Ipage 375 could by no means bring myself to do?

Yet I would pray to Our Lady and St Francis Xavier, as the policeman could not. And I trust that St Francis, so business-like in his trim robes and halo in the Church of St Thomas the Apostle near my hotel – where birds swoop above the Host from their roosts on the pillars – has already taken the leper to his bearded breast.

He who could silence armies with a word will not be robbed easily of a single Indian soul. And Our Lady, as we know, has power as well as beauty beyond measure.

1958 (183)