Ajay’s God, Narayanan

Ajay Narayan, with a natural bent ness to God, bent down to pick a penny at the Tim Horton parking lot. And he said, “Henry I always take this money”! First, I didn’t understand. Later when I connected what I saw with what I heard, that made sense to me.

Ajay is a wealthy man. But his wealth is his friends, rather his acquaintances. He greets every man he meets on the road. There are moments when his greeting prolongs to a friendly chat that connects two souls. That’s how, today, he is my friend. But he repeatedly, with great emphasis, affirms that I am his brother.

With me he frequently blurts in Hindi, though I have said so many times that I know no Hindi. Still Ajay, somewhat a short man in physical height, needs to say that in Hindi. Then he would be his own translator! Once Ajay ended challenging the official translator when the latter was wrongly communicating Ajay’s speech to his doctor writing a report for the Workers’ Compensation Board. Such is Ajay’s presence of mind that he extends very naturally to his awareness of God, the source of his very character and personality.

Ajay, his first name derived from the Sanskrit language, means “unconquered”. It is the equivalent of the Western name “Victor”. Ajay, though lacking physical tallness, and unemployed since his work related injury, he is very tall in cheerfulness. And he carries in his heart a victorious spirit, battling courageously even a wealthy contractor and a learned lawyer who have landed him in unnecessary difficulties despite taking great sums of money as fees for the services. These exploiters, he claims, exploit his lack of education and sophisticated English language skills.

His last name “Narayan” – pronounced, nārāyan, also called as “Narayana” – is a reference to the creator God. And in Hindu religion, which is Ajay’s faith, it usually refers to Brahma or Vishnu who dwells in the waters! “Nara”, according to other sources, also means “waters”, an essential resource for life! “Nara” also means “human”, while “ayana” may mean, “the direction, or path”. “Narayan” in Sanskrit also refers to the “primordial human”, the Purusa, the equivalent of the Semitic, Adam!

And it is interesting to note Ajay Narayan manifesting all these lofty meanings of human life in his simple life style of caring for his family, including his elderly widowed mother, and neighbours, particularly those who are hurt by human callousness and in need of extra human compassion, while he, gleefully, enjoys his grandchildren.

He has, in his house, Hindu images and statues, Hindu representations of God, everywhere one turn. They are his precious possessions. As for Ajay these are not mere religious monuments. They are, in some sense, God, or at least incarnation of God in which he gets absorbed. They are really divine. One cannot fail to notice Ajay, as he walks about and turns around in his home, bowing and offering flying kisses to these sculptures, expressing his devotion to God.

It is, perhaps, Ajay’s regular ritualistic immersions into God awareness that has transformed this honest, harmless, humble man to cheer up every human he encounters outside the home, feeding them also when they are hungry and in need of food.

Ajay, my friend, for many of his friends and me, is an undeclared humanist and an un-canonized living saint. He earlier sacrificed his own education and all that security and comfort that came with it in order to feed and clothe his earlier home soon after the death of his father in Fiji.

But neither his devotion nor his many sacrifices make him humourless. The other day when he was driving me through the “drive through” of the Tim Horton, I saw him hurriedly rolling down the car windows. And then he loudly said to the (white) man – colour is important here to see Ajay easily crossing colour, class, caste, and creedal boundaries – picking pennies dropped at the Tim Horton window, “today your pay day, man!” First I thought that must be his friend. But I learnt Ajay has never even seen him before!

With Eyes of the Poor!

There is some discomfort in my heart with much that happens in the contemporary Church with regard to the poor and the nations that are yet to develop. I see a lot of irrelevance in the way we go about. If our concern for the poor has to become relevant there should be a shift towards the perspectives of the poor. “Justice” not “charity” that should be the priority. C.S. Song, a prominent Asian Theologian once said, “compassion that does not oppose injustice is not true compassion; it becomes an accomplice of unjust power” (C.S. Song, Theology from the Womb of Asia, London: SCM Press, 1988. p.156).

Christian concern for the poor must enhance the self-worth of the poor by working towards justice. Feeding, clothing, housing, teaching, counselling, training, loving, and so on that fills our Christian activism must transform the “doer” to accept the recipients of our doing as humans and equals.

The “doing” in our Christian concern for poor must decrease “dependency” and increase “self-reliance”. Christian activism must move towards finding more “permanent” solution, addressing the cause of poverty instead the symptom by constantly challenging false answers, overcoming prejudices, and eventually moving towards one community – no rich, no poor.

And this requires, first, a vision of the reality of the poor through the eyes of the poor. Therefore, Virgil Elizondo and Leonardo Boff, two prominent Latin American Liberation theologians, calling this as the Church’s preferential option for the poor, wrote: “When we enter the continent of the poor and try to think through their eyes and from their social position, we discover their strength, their resistance, their courage and their creativity. It then becomes clear that the society within which they live and suffer and from which they are marginalized has to be fundamentally transformed. From the position of the poor the urgency of liberation is beyond doubt.” (This and other quotes below are taken from their “‘Editorial: theology From The Viewpoint Of The Poor’” in Concilium – Option For The Poor: Challenge To The Rich Countries, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Ltd, 1986.)

Second, they argued, in preferential option for the poor, we take up the cause of the poor. For Elizondo and Boff: “The cause of the poor is the cause of life and means of life such as work, bread, clothing, housing and basic education. The cause of the poor is a new society in which the vital questions which concern all citizens without distinction are given priority, in which relations of collaboration and equity prevail over exploitation and domination.”

Thirdly, Elizondo and Boff affirmed that in preferential option for the poor we take up the struggle of the poor. They wrote: “It is the oppressed who bring about liberation. They become aware of their dignity, organize their action, form links with other groups, which, like them, want a different society. The churches should join this struggle, make their specific contribution as religious bodies, reinforce the power of the poor to enable them to press for changes and participate in their implementation.”

Fourthly, they believed that option for the poor means taking up the life of the poor, as they wrote: “The option for the poor is not authentic unless we participate, at least a little, in the life and suffering of the poor…Support for the struggles of the poor frequently means suffering misunderstanding, persecution and even moral and physical injury.”

Fifthly, for Elizondo and Boff, preferential option for the poor, involves an identification of the mechanisms, which produce poverty. “The poverty of the poor is a result of a combination of causes, and first the international capitalist system and the relations of dependence and oppression it establishes between the nations at the center of the system and those at the periphery…The benefits are, on the whole, accumulated by the countries which are already highly developed or by the social classes in the poor countries which exercise social control in association with the multi-national interests of capital. The sacrifices are borne by those who are already poor and exploited. Development and underdevelopment are linked by a causal connection which makes them two sides of the same coin…If the churches and the theologians do not develop a critical attitude towards the socio-economic system within which they live, they run the risk of becoming mere reformists, reproducing the system in slightly improved form, rather than allies of the poor, who are demanding a once-for-all replacement of the existing system by another which makes possible more equality and life for all.”

And finally, they see preferential option of the poor redefining the task of theology for them and others who are committed to the poor, the oppressed, and marginal people in the world. “A theology today which does not place at the center of its concern the poor, justice, freedom and liberation will have difficulty in refuting the accusation of alienation and even cynicism, and will in the end become totally irrelevant…Without the poor the church loses its Lord and theology its evangelical content.”

Catholic Latin American Liberation theologians generally accept Pope John XXIII as the source of this revolutionary concept. For Pope John XXIII even prior to the Vatican II viewed the Church to be “the Church of all, but principally the Church of the poor.” And it is also accepted Pope John Paul II keeps repeating and reaffirming the same when he says: “The option for the poor is my daily concern.”

Thus, we may note, the Christians committed to the concern for the poor and the marginal today have been moving towards a bias towards the poor accepting the broad conceptual leadership provided by the Roman Catholic Church. This is very clearly reflected in the prayer used by the Canadian Christians following the ecumenical lectionary. Hence one of the prayers set aside for fifth Sunday after Pentecost reads: “We thank you, O God, that you favour the poor, the meek, the oppressed, the homeless, and the hungry. Make your compassion contagious that the rich might share with the poor, the strong befriend the weak”. The pastoral stance for the option for the poor is actually a response to a theological realization that God favour’s the poor, an aspect that is a guiding thought to the liberation theologies that takes the cause of the poor with utmost seriousness.

However, those who used the phrase “option for the poor”, particularly the Latin American Liberation Theologians, were aware that this was no small concern but one that involves large shifting for the Church that was not poor and hitherto had the sympathies and appreciation of the rich. These theologians were aware that this phrase was not for a mere announcing to the poor: “God loves you by preference” and do nothing. But closely connected with the words of Jesus to the learned lawyer to whom Jesus related the Parable of the Good Samaritan and said: “Go and do likewise”. In this regard Berryman makes an obvious but important point recognizing in it a call for a “change of heart” for the non-poor, for it is only the non-poor who can opt for the poor.

From this we learn that the challenge before the Christian community in Canada is, as Alfred T. Hennelly, another Jesuit commentator of liberation theology from United States puts it, “not only to accept and embrace this preferential option, but above all to translate this theoretical commitment into a creative and effective action on behalf of the poor majority of humanity”.