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Catholics have a reputation for severity, for judgement that comes down heavily. My experience with Father Martin was not at all like that. He was kind. He served my tea and biscuits in a tea set that tinkled and rattled at every touch; he treated me like a grown-up; and he told me a story. Or rather, since Christians are so fond of capital letters, a Story.
And what a story. The first thing that drew me in was disbelief. What? Humanity sins but it's God's Son who pays the price? I tried to imagine (my) Father saying to me, "Piscine, a lion slipped into the llama pen today and killed two llamas. Yesterday another one killed a black buck. Last week two of them ate the camel. The week before it was painted storks and grey herons. And who's to say for sure who snacked on our golden agouti? The situation has become intolerable. Something must be done. I have decided that the only way the lions can atone for their sins is if I feed you to them."
"Yes, Father, that would be the right and logical thing to do. Give me a moment to wash up."
"Hallelujah, my son."
"Hallelujah, Father."
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Haha!!!! This is the funniest sarcasm present in any literature that I have read. I laughed out loud when I read this for the first time I and it gets a good chuckle as I read it again now. A few pages later, this boy becomes a Christian, and, already being a devout Hindu, immediately runs off and thanks his lord Krishna, of the Hindu faith, for putting Jesus of Nazareth on his life's path. I'm about to read the part where he becomes a Muslim too, but my poo ran out of steam.
My Christian mind-set learnt something from here. The boy, Piscine, learns from this Father Martin that the reason God sent his one and only son to die was because he Loved. The kind of love that would cause a loving father to send a son - whom he loves - to die; it was spoken to me, what this kind of love meant, while reading this book. How much must God love us? And the death to which he sent his son, Jesus Christ, must have been so real. It is not as if God sent his son to die, knowing that in the end, all would be ok, that he would simply resurrect his son and thenceforth spend eternity happily with him. It is not like that at all... another part of the book gave me something to think about:
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But divinity should not be blighted by death. It's wrong. The world soul cannot die, even in one contained part of it. It was wrong of this Christian God to let His avatar die. That is tantamount to lettting a part of Himself die. For if the Son is to die, it cannot be fake. If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me that it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tained by it;; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect?
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Love.
That kind of love is love I cannot hope to show, not in a thousand years, not in all eternity.
Another part of the book that had me laughing out loud:
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There are two-toed sloths and there are three-toed sloths, the case being determined by the forepaws of the animals, since all sloths have three claws on their hind paws. I had the great luck one summer of studying the three-toed sloth in situ in the equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly intriguing creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day. Our team tested the sleep habits of five wild three-toed sloths by placing on their heads, in the early evening after they had fallen asleep, bright red plastic dishes filled with water, We found them still in place late the next morning, the water of the dishes swarming with insects. The sloth is at its busiest at sunset, using the word busy here in the most relaxed sense. It moves along the bough of a tree in its characteristic upside-down position at the speed of roughly 400 meters an hour. On the ground it crawls to its next tree at the rate of 250 meters an hour, when motivated, which is 440 times slower than a motivated cheetah. Unmotivated, it covers four to five meters in an hour.
The three-toed sloth is not well informed about the outside world. On a scale of 2 to 10, where 2 represents unusual dullness and 10 extreme acuity, Beebe (1926) gave the sloth's senses of taste, touch, sight and hearing a rating of 2, and its sense of smell a rating of 3. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth in the wild, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it; it will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should look about is uncertain since the sloth sees everything in a Magoo-like blur. As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound. Beebe reported that firing guns next to sleeping or feeding sloths elicited little reaction. And the sloth's slightly better sense of smell should not be overestimated. They are said to be able to sniff and avoid decayed branches, but Bullock (1968) reported that sloths fall to the ground clinging to decayed branches "often".
How does it survive, you might ask.
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Aren't you just dying to know? Go and read the book, the thing I've put in "currently reading" up the top of this post.
Anyway, what I've just done is called plagerism - Yann Martel, sue your heart out.
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| | Posted 10/10/2006 11:09 PM - 17 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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