My 'Religious' Development

I have now spent almost seven years in the University of Cambridge, a locale which is (allegedly) post-industrial, post-Christian, post-liberal, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and post-modern. Whenever I am asked within its environs the most portentous question as to whether 'I am religious', I usually reply that I am agnostic, and this for two reasons. Firstly, because, as it will become clear in the course of this post, there is a certain sense in which I really am agnostic, though my agnosticism is best captured in the prayer, 'Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief.' Secondly, however, I find myself today at the constantly moving point of intersection between four great traditions, Roman Catholicism, Vedantic Hinduism and its various offshoots, Western Marxism and its different transpositions, and atheistic French existentialism; and it is consequently immensely difficult to summarise my 'religion' with a definite word, label, turn of phrase, or term. What follows is a sort of Progress Report which will trace my religious 'development' from my early childhood to the present day, that is, April 24, 2005. (I place the word 'development' in italics; this is because some of my readers, both atheistic and religious, will feel that I have regressed rather than developed.)

Until around six years ago, the formidable question of 'God's existence' never bothered me; what did intensely trouble me (as it continues to do today) is the pervasiveness of suffering in this world. When I was in Class I, my grandfather met with a sudden death; and though I was never quite close to him, I was deeply affected by the consequent suffering that my mother and my aunts went through. As I moved into classes II and III, I slowly found myself being haunted by a strange sense that things around me were not as solid or as durable as they seemed to me, and when in Class IV I read about Gautama Buddha's struggles with the question of suffering and how to move beyond it, this uncanny feeling that the world lacks an inner solidity began to grow deeper in me. I began to bury myself more and more into books, wishing to find respite from this sombre feeling of impermanence that Buddhism injected into me like a doctor's medicine. Sometime in Class VIII, a Brother in my Roman Catholic school gave me a small book, 'Lives of Catholic Saints', where for the first time I read about a man who would change my life forever, St Francis of Assissi. There I read about how St Francis took the the text in the New Testament, 'If you wish to be perfect, go and sell everything and follow Me', in the most literal sense, and sold absolutely everything that he possessed and went out, leaving home and family, to serve the poor. What struck me powerfully at that time was St Francis' childlike 'fundamentalism', the utter sincerity and purity of heart with which he accepted these words and lived in accordance with them, and also the fact that there were millions of Franciscans all over the world who were living according to the Rule of St Francis, with no bank accounts for themselves, no 'private property', no wealth, no land, no privileges, and no personal possessions.

Around this time, my mother died a sudden death too, and the sense of impermanence returned to haunt me; and I began to realise even more deeply than before how radically contingent our human existence is and how profoundly fragile human goodness is. At the same time, the words that had once moved St Francis so dramatically began to take a deeper root in me, and I began to ask myself why I could not follow in his footsteps too. Nevertheless, I temporarily pushed these questions into the background, and began to study for a degree in Physics. Looking back, I realise that it was an extremely useful education, for Physics made me aware for the first time of the importance of searching for the truth, and of wanting to know what was true and what was false. Consequently, I began to seriously ask the question, 'Does God exist?', and read more and more books on this topic, an exploration that gradually introduced me to the somewhat disparate worlds of Hinduism, Marxism and French Existentialism. Slowly, I began to feel torn apart by, on the one hand, my desire to seek the truth and my wish, on the other hand, to 'give up the world' and follow St Francis straightaway. I began to ask myself more and more questions of this sort : What if following St Francis is not the truth? If the God of St Francis does not exist and turns out to be a figment of my imagination, should I still go ahead and follow him? What, then, is the truth? But why do I even 'need' the truth before selling everything that I have and serving the poor? Is not serving the poor itself all the truth that I shall ever need to know? How then shall I know what the truth is? Is Marxism the truth? Should I then become a Marxist? But are these meaningful questions at all? What if 'truth' is simply a linguistic illusion, and I am miserably wasting my time asking such questions? How then should I live my life, which direction should I take, and what should I hope for?

To cut a long story short, I moved away from physics towards philosophy/theology when I realised that the contradiction within me was becoming too powerful. Not that I thought that philosophy was some sort of a royal road to solving my dilemmas; I knew even then that philosophy is more an adventure in knowing what the right questions are than in finding ready-made solutions to these. In the course of my seven years of a Cambridge education, I have been seeking to develop a 'religious' framework and attempting the painful task of seeking some amount of coherence in the (sometimes drastically opposed) world-views which I have trained myself to inhabit.

What does my 'religion' look like? Here is a summary, if alarming, description : It is a 'religion' that emanates from the great Franciscan judgement, 'If you wish to be perfect, go and sell everything and follow Me', flows outwards picking up the rich tributaries of Vedantic Hinduism, Marxism and Existentialism, tributaries which do not quite merge into the mainstream but retain in some sense their distinctive identities. I am aware, of course, that this 'religion' will not go down with well with the 'orthodox' members of any of these above groups : Roman Catholics will (possibly) condemn me of heresy, Hindus (probably) of fraternizing with an institution that has sent out countless numbers of much-hated missionaries to India, Marxists (possibly) of pandering to 'religious' hopes, and Existentialists (probably) of being inauthentic. Let me therefore add some more detail to this broad picture.

First, why do I not sell everything that I possess and go out to serve the poor? The answer to this question is direct, raw, frank, and brutal : It is because I cannot overcome my seemingly insatiable thirst to read more and more books, to know the truth about who we are and what we here for. But precisely for this reason, I am acutely aware at certain times how heavily the great judgement of the New Testament hangs over me like a dark cloud on my horizon, reminding me that I have failed to follow St Francis, that I am wasting my time over unanswerable questions while billions of the poor are starving to death in some part of the world. I am under no illusions that compared to the single medical prescription of a doctor to a woman in deep pain, the loving touch of a hospital nurse to a recuperating patient, or the uncomplaining hardwork of a social worker for the poor in the villages, my Ph.D. thesis is as worthless as a heap of dust for it shall remove no pain, it shall reduce nobody's hunger and it shall alleviate suffering in no way at all. The foundational belief of the Franciscan Order, which is that one's love of God must have immediate and vital implications for all dimensions of human existence, social, economic, 'intellectual', cultural, political and 'spiritual', is the most enduring contribution of this Order to humanity.

In what sense does Vedantic Hinduism live in me? It is through its message of Advaita or non-duality, which I interpret to mean that even in the midst of our cultural, religious, and linguistic differences, quite often irreducible, the possibilities of mutual understanding are not completely cut-off. This is not, incidentally, to be confused with the glib message that 'we are all the same after all', for there is a fundamental sense in which we are not the same : there are some who will wake up tomorrow morning to have no bread and butter on their plates whereas some of us will get to eat caviar and drink Evian.

And this brings me to Marxist theory. The most fashionable way to attack Marxism these days is to point out that it led to Stalinism, thereby implying that there is a sort of logically necessary inevitability that propels a post-capitalist society towards the horrific excesses of a Josef Stalin. I remain unconvinced, however, that Marxism can be written off in this flippant manner, and I believe that the humanitarian vision of the early Marx pained by the gross injustices of an industrialised economy, will hang as a perennial sign of contradiction over all of us. In their passionate concern for and involvement with social justice, St Francis and Karl Marx, for all their fundamental divergences over the 'nature of reality', can come together as comrade-in-arms, even if their ultimate ends are radically different.

And finally Existentialism, especially that of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. So far I have been talking about the inter-personal or social dimension of human existence; however, one must not forget that it is quite often the Individual who speaks out against various forms of totalitarian oppression, that it is the Individual who reminds those who are cosily sheltered within the comfort-zones of Religion, Family, Society and other forms of totalities that there are still people at the margins whose lives are driven by chronic pain, suffering and agony.

Ultimately, then, this is my 'religion' : a 'religion' that seeks to know what the truth is about our human existence that is lived within the horizon of its joys, its hopes, its smiles, its reconciliations, its redemptions, its rainbows, its loves, its glories, its beauties, its charms, its wonders, its creativities, its darknesses, its horrors, its pains, its alienations, its enslavements, its agonies, its tragedies, and its instabilities. It is a religion that is driven (among other things) by this fundamental impulse : Human beings by nature wish to know the Truth of how to end their Suffering.

My 'religion' is not one that I would 'preach' or 'recommend' to anyone, for there is a certain sense in which it is much better to be either a militant atheist who thinks that atheism is a self-evident truth or a devoutly religious person who is never wracked by doubt. For these people, there is the sense that they have finally reached some sort of a safe haven while for me there is only the perpetuity of mobility, the instability of doubt, the anxiety of having missed the truth, and the constancy of a flowing-outwards. Consequently, I do not know where I shall find myself ten years from today : perhaps I shall become a militant atheist, a casual agnostic, a bemused onlooker, a devout Catholic, a pious Muslim, or a more deeply-rooted Hindu. I can only say that the 'religious' journey so far has been at once tormenting and deeply fulfilling, and I can only hope that the future holds out the same for me.

In conclusion, I find myself coming back to what my illustrious predecessor at Trinity College, that redoubtable atheist Bertrand Russell, once wrote :

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of [hu]mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair ... Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.