MOBILE MOTHER’S KOLKATA
Kolkata is the great leveller. Just under
two million people commute daily between the city and their homes in the
villages and suburbs by bus, train, and tempo. Commuting for work, play,
shopping and socializing are aspects of mini-migration. Originally, the first
reaction to this mad rush were pulpit themes of alienation and rootlessness;
but those who were rushing around wondered why, since they had no complaints and
felt equal to everyone else. Why cannot
life, they asked, be one mad rush? After all, the best stories of heroes are
about leaving the ancestral mansion and striding towards an unknown future, and
about adventurous travels and conquests. Abraham leaving Ur of Chaldea, Joseph
led away to greatness in Egypt, Moses leading a fighting (though ever
complaining nation) to the place beyond the Jordan. The theme is almost
invariably about breaking away and seeking one’s fortune in another land, and
most of them are not the fantastic tales of Sinbad or Baron Munchausen. One can
also think of missionaries who have dedicated their lives to peoples far away
from their homelands, and of migrants who have brought fresh blood and new
ideas to the land of their adoption. The founding fathers of any nation were
mobile, and a society becomes static if its members cease to be on the move.
As mobility is intimately linked to
social change, those who are comfortably entrenched in their prestigious status
have reason to fear for their positions of power. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s
slogan “Delhi chalo” was a summons for the march of freedom from Kolkata to the
stronghold of British India. The great march of Martin Luther King, Jr. to
Washington and the Long March of Mao Zedong across China were movements of
liberation. Yahweh himself was not a God of a particular time and locale; he
was no God of the hearth. He accompanied his people on their Exodus, in fact,
initiated it and “went before them;” and it was no weakling that did so but the
God with “a strong arm” (Deut 7, 8).
“The despatialization of the deity moves in tandem with the appearance
of a God active in historical events” (Harvey Cox, The Secular City, N.Y.
p. 49).
Flexibility spells
development and growth, the ability to choose one’s place of work and
environment. Human beings, however, and, especially, the family, need a certain
amount of stability for sustenance of mind and emotions. Mobility has its own
risks.
Jesus’ palm-laden march from Bethpage
took Jerusalem by wild acclamation, a symbol of his lordship of the New
Jerusalem. Jesus had “set up his tent among us” (John 1, 14), not a permanent
building. He was always on the move with “nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8, 20),
going out to face fresh challenges and make new friendships. He was the essence
of freedom. Like Yahweh, the resurrected Christ “now goes ahead of you to Galilee”
(Mt 28, 7) where he would commission his apostles to go in all directions to
proclaim his liberty of soul that knows no fixity to a particular time or
place.
In the mid 40’s, the people of Kolkata
awoke to the phenomenon of a new apostle in their midst; someone who took them
by surprise and with whom every encounter was a refreshment of soul and body.
Frail-looking on the exterior, but, robust with rectitude and mobile
with the Spirit, she led her legions from the vibrant heart of Kolkata to the
wider world of the “poorest of the poor”, as no armies of Alexander or legions
of Rome had ever done, and with no more intent of conquest than that of giving
them God in the form of a healed and healthy humanity. This woman was inserted
into the grand narrative of the God of salvation. There is no nook or cranny
left on this earth that has not received the comforting benediction of this
apostle, who will be known forever as
“MOTHER TERESA OF KOLKATA”
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