Sites and Relics
That Don Bosco’s relics will be displayed and
venerated in Kolkata is gladsome news, indeed. The veneration of relics is no
mere Medievalism; it is as old as humanity. The oldest and authentic relic or
relict (if you so see it) of the Christian era is the tomb of Jesus Christ
himself, since pilgrimages have been converging on it since the very day of
Christ’s Resurrection. What, after all, is the characteristic of the Gospel
accounts of Mary Magdalene’s and the disciples’ hastening to the empty tomb if
not pilgrimage – to the physical witness to the saving suffering and death of
Christ? The cult of relics was developed by the most respected theologians of
Late Antiquity, and represented a serious attempt to explore the human capacity
for the divine. The exhibition of Don Bosco’s relics in India will not only
transport us to the past but also help us understand the problems of the
present. From that point of view a relic is an icon. The meaning of “icon” has
degenerated. It now popularly refers to a pop star or a public figure that has
become a symbol for some popular aspiration. But that is an impoverishment of
what it once meant, and its meaning needs to be retrieved. An icon is a complex
of meaning that cannot be constructed at will, and which makes sense of social
relations, personal identity within the larger world, the appropriate emotional
response to events and happenings. Such icons or patterns of meaning are
reflected in shared rituals – the rituals of death and burial, the marks of
kinship, the regulation of courtship, marriage and sexual activity, the agreed
signs and achievements of respect and honour. An icon opens a window to an
alien frame of reference that interprets the world we inhabit.
Shrines are the wayside stations for sinners
on their pilgrimage to their Father’s house. (Yet another definition of the
Church given by Blessed Pope John XXIII himself). Pilgrimage is an ancient and
universal expression of the religious impulse, helping to keep alive man’s
thirst for God, like the woman at Jacob’s well (that is still there) and like
the haemorrhaging woman’s straining to touch the cloak of Jesus in the sure
hope of healing. Long before people began to map their world scientifically,
they drew up a “sacred geography”. Thus certain places came to be revered as
points of encounter with the divine. In the ancient world, it was usually
temples and holy mountains, groves or rivers. Pilgrims would arrive at a
shrine, tired, fasting and gripped by the hope of an ecstasy. This was helped
by glinting mosaics, glimmering oil lamps, restful tree shades, tinkling bells,
all to make a pilgrim feel that he was in a sacred environment; thus making it
easier to realise that he was in the presence of the divine than when he is in
the marketplace or in the kitchen.
Today’s modern world of rational thinking, massive
techno devices and ritualised protocol must still acknowledge that millions of
pilgrims, Christian and non-Christian, are moving towards sacred sites and
relics for a foretaste of heaven. Unlike a sacrament (an action of Christ) a
relic has no inherent power except to elicit a God-seeker’s sentiments of awe
and anticipation for the real thing, namely, union with God. Blessed Pope John
XXIII, on his visit to the Shroud of Turin, made it known that even if the
Shroud were not the proven burial cloth of Jesus, it definitely was an occasion
for contemplation and prayer.
What a wonderful world where the kiss of an
icon or bone fragment or stone is a statement of a thirst, namely, “I want
God.” Now suffering is transformed into triumph, death is without sting, and
life is still worth living.
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