International Orthodox Christian Articles

There can be few monasteries as strange as Deir es-Sultan, home of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the Old City of Jerusalem. To come across it without warning is an unusual experience. One walks up a flight of steps behind the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, through a gateway in an old stone wall, and suddenly a tiny African village is revealed: a group of low mud huts huddled together from which comes the clatter of cooking pots. From the middle of a courtyard rises a small and elegant dome. Two priests sit idly chatting on a stone bench. It takes a little time to realize that this is the roof of the Holy Sepulchre itself and that the dome is giving light to the chapel of Saint Helena below, one of the most ancient parts of the complex which make up the most sacred of Christian sites in Jerusalem. Around the sides of the courtyard are old and shattered walls and in their interstices grow some of those brave and courageous plants which find lodging in the most inhospitable terrain. The Ethiopian church in Jerusalem itself resembles a plant which in Jerusalem has found poor soil but has continued to grow in defiance of the laws of probability and to survive the hardest of winters and the hottest of summers.

Leading off the courtyard is a small chapel where the monks worship. The chapel is dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel. It is not an impressive structure. A small oblong building, it is capable of seating about 70, with room for a further 40-50 to stand packed together at the times of the great festivals. Below it is another small chapel which also belongs to the Ethiopians, dedicated to “the four living creatures,” in reference to Ezekiel where the prophet beholds four living creatures, one of which has four faces and all of them four wings. The very naming of the chapels is an indication of the deep affinity that the Ethiopian Church feels for the Bible and for Jerusalem.

Another indication of this is given by pictures round the walls of the chapel of St. Michael. They are only about 100 years old, but are in that very distinctive and, to an outsider, exotic style which is peculiarly Ethiopian. The faces of those illustrated are all shown frontally and the eyes in particular stare out with a strange innocence. Their pupils are painted black and are large and lustrous. The largest picture in the chapel shows King Solomon receiving the Queen of Sheba. Around him stand dignitaries while the queen arrives with a large and heavily loaded camel in her train. Among those close to Solomon are two incongruous figures clad in the black costume of Hassidic Jews, a costume which though still to be seen in Jerusalem today, originated in the Europe of the 17th century and would have caused some surprise at the court of Solomon. Who are the Ethiopian Christians who live in this strange environment? Why have they chosen to build on the roof rather than find space in the Holy Sepulchre itself like most of the other ancient Christian churches? The Greeks, the Armenians, the Catholics have secured large portions of the holy site and the Ethiopian Church is only a little less ancient than these. The answer lies in the fact that the Ethiopian Church, though ancient, has always been politically weak, receiving help from Ethiopia itself only at certain periods and in limited measure. Its representatives in Jerusalem were not able to establish a claim to part of the church proper and had to make do with the roof.

According to tradition, the Ethiopians were converted to Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries by monks, some of whom came from Egypt and some from Syria. These first missionaries found the way prepared for them by the fact that there had been ancient contacts between the Holy Land and Ethiopia. The existence of the ancient Jewish community of Ethiopia is another indication of these contacts. So too is the fact that in the Ethiopian Church there are many features which are peculiarly close to the traditions of Judaism and which are not found elsewhere in Christianity. For example, the Ethiopian Church still practices the circumcision of males after eight days; Saturday in the Ethiopian tradition is a second holy day little less important than Sunday; and in the churches of the Ethiopians the Ark of the Lord features largely. Again the tradition of dancing which is important to Ethiopian ritual and liturgy seems to owe its inspiration at least in part to the dance of David before the Ark.

Most famous of these ancient traditions is of course the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon. Though in the Book of Kings itself, Sheba is not specifically equated with the queen of Ethiopia, no Ethiopian Christian doubts that she came from his country. “And when the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions. And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bear spices, and very much gold, and precious stones: and when she was come to Solomon she communed with him of all that was in her heart.” (I Kings 10:13).

The picture that is seen in the Chapel of St. Michael is only one of many tens of thousands of illustrations of the famous visit to be found in Ethiopian churches and homes everywhere. Tradition in the Ethiopian Church has it that Sheba returned home pregnant and that her son Menelik I, the legendary first emperor of Ethiopia, was her son by Solomon. It is said that Menelik travelled to Jerusalem as a young man to learn more of the wisdom of Solomon and take it back to his own country.

It was perhaps because they found a knowledge of Jerusalem and Jews already existed in Ethiopia that when the Christian missionaries came to the highlands of Ethiopia they were able to speak to the people more easily. In any event, however it may have been, the Christian faith rapidly spread in Ethiopia and according to St. Jerome, by the end of the fourth century Ethiopians were already making pilgrimages to Jerusalem. In the year 636 ce the Caliph Omar, who had entered Jerusalem as a conqueror, issued a firman which set out the rights of Christians in Jerusalem, among them the rights of the Ethiopian Church.

However, little is known of any contacts between the Ethiopian Church and the Holy Land from this early period until the Middle Ages. The Ethiopians themselves believe that a community survived in Jerusalem and that it was supported by funds donated by pilgrims and by occasional gifts from Ethiopian emperors.

There is also little reason to doubt that even at this early stage those contacts were difficult to maintain. The survival of the Ethiopian Church in its home in Africa itself was not easy. On all sides it was surrounded by hostile forces. While the pagans of the interior of Africa certainly had no use for Christianity, a more tangible threat came from the conversion of the peoples of the Sudan and the Horn of Africa to Islam. The fortunes of the Church and of the state of Ethiopia were closely linked and when successive monarchs assumed the throne and fought against their enemies with vigour all was well, but when, as happened on several occasions, the Moslems gained the upper hand, the future of the Church looked bleak. These fluctuations affected the Ethiopians in Jerusalem and continue to affect them up to the present day. They depend upon contacts with Ethiopia and when those contacts are interrupted their economic and political position declines.

However, the very fact that the Church had to struggle to survive both in Ethiopia and in the Holy Land gave it strength, the strength of faith. Also in its favour was the fact that it was not highly centralized. The Ethiopian Church in Ethiopia itself was led by an abuna, or bishop, sent from Egypt to be its leader. This was an ancient tradition dating right back to the very establishment of the church. The abuna, however, had but limited power. Very often he did not know the language of the country to which he was sent and his relations with the local clergy were poor, especially if he tried to enforce discipline on them. For their part, the Christians of Ethiopia centered their tradition on the ancient monasteries and the holy places they established high up in the mountains. These monasteries were the homes of tradition, of culture and of scholarship. In them lived the saints and holy men who played so large a part in Ethiopian religious life. They practiced austerities in the tradition of the Egyptian Church and its monks, and the places where they lived became centres of pilgrimage. They seem to have somewhat resembled the gurus of India today in that they could attract people regardless of where they lived and indifferent to ecclesiastical hierarchy, simply by the way in which they impressed the faithful.

The fact that the church depended upon the individual sanctity of holy men for much of its strength gave it resilience. It is very likely that in Jerusalem too, the experience of struggle and persecution in Ethiopia itself was put to good use by abbots and monks determined to survive despite the circumstances.

Jerusalem bulked large in the eyes of the Ethiopians. In Ethiopia itself, surrounded as it was on all sides by enemies, they could find no community of values with most of their non-Christian neighbours and seldom sought contact with them; the sole exception was the relations with the Coptic Church of Egypt and even these soured after 1700. It was natural, therefore, that in 1937, when Emperor Haile Selassie, one of whose formal titles was “Lion of Judah,” fled from the invading Italians, he made his way first to Jerusalem where he remained until restored to his throne by the British in 1941. Jerusalem was one of the few windows on the world which the Ethiopians enjoyed throughout the centuries.

The Ethiopian Christians resident in Jerusalem often appear in written accounts by mediaeval pilgrims. Writers such as the Dominican Friar Burcardus de Monte Sion in 1283 refer to the piety of the Ethiopians and to their customs. In 1347, Father Nicolo da Pogibonsy, a Franciscan friar from France, who visited the Holy Land that year describes the Ethiopians praying in a chapel called “St. Mary in Golgotha” in the Holy Sepulchre. It is at this time too that the Ethiopian Church in Jerusalem makes a brief appearance on the wider stage. In the year 1438, an Ethiopian delegation attended the Council of Florence which was designed to recreate the unity of Christianity primarily by getting the Greek Orthodox and Catholic Churches together. The Ethiopians were represented by the abbot of the Church from Jerusalem. His embassy attracted considerable curiosity although there appeared to have been no practical results as a result of his participation.

In the 16th century matters took a turn for the worse. The Ethiopian Kingdom was under attack from Ahmad Gran, the ruler of Harar, a Moslem principality east of Ethiopia, and was almost destroyed. Churches were burned, Christians persecuted and forcibly converted, and the emperor compelled to flee. In these circumstances no one had much time to think about Jerusalem, and the community languished. Through poverty they lost their foothold in the main building of the Holy Sepulchre and were finally forced on to the roof, where they remain to this day.

But even there the Ethiopians were not safe. The more powerful churches which enjoyed active support from the rulers of their faith slowly began to encroach upon the Ethiopian properties. Many such properties which had been noted as belonging to the Ethiopians in earlier times are now no longer in their possession.

The Ethiopians somehow managed to hold out, though there are many references to their poverty and the fact that they depended on charity from the Armenians and others for their survival. Writing in the 19th century, an Anglican missionary, William Jarret, notes that some Ethiopian monks joined the Greek Orthodox Church simply to get food.

One group which was particularly antagonistic to the Ethiopians was, surprisingly, the Coptic Church of Egypt. Though the Coptic and Ethiopian Churches were closely allied in terms of theology and organization, the Copts resented the fact that the Ethiopians had broken away from them in the 18th century. When the fortunes of the Ethiopians were at a very low ebb in the early 19th century, the Copts began to harass them.

The ownership of the rooftop monastery of Deir es-Sultan was challenged by the Copts who claimed that it belonged to them. In the year 1838 when plague struck Jerusalem and all the Ethiopian monks died, the Copts took over the monastery and, according to the Ethiopians, burned the library containing the documents which validated the Ethiopian claim to Deir es-Sultan.

With their library burnt and their monks dead the Ethiopians might well have been expected to disappear from Jerusalem. They were saved by a curious combination of circumstances. Of course the emperor and Church in Ethiopia wanted to maintain links with Jerusalem and a foothold in the Holy Land but they might not have been able to do so had it not been for the fact that their aspirations were supported by the British. The Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, Bishop Gobat, had served as a missionary in Ethiopia and had an ambition to convert the Ethiopian Church to Anglicanism, an idea which seems somewhat surprising today. As a mass of correspondence between the British consul and the Foreign Office in London attests, he extended support to the Ethiopians and fought for their rights.

The bitter fight between the Ethiopian Church and the Coptic Church has continued to the present day. When, with British support, the Ethiopians were able to recover the Deir es-Sultan monastery, the keys to the place were left in the hands of the Copts. Confusion and dispute over who owned what went on without interruption. As late as the 1960s, the Jordanian government attempted to intervene in the dispute after there had been a serious fracas over the use of part of the building. Today there is an as yet unresolved case before the Israeli High Court.

The Ethiopians have, of course, no doubt as to their rights and have produced a series of documents on the subject, the latest of which was presented to the Israeli delegation to the Israeli-Egyptian Normalization Talks at the Ethiopian Church in Jerusalem in September, 1986.

In the latter half of the 19th century, the position of the Church in the Holy Land began to improve. This was largely because in Ethiopia itself a series of strong monarchs had come to power who began to unite the various provinces under one centralized administration. The Emperor Yohanes came to the throne and began to assert himself to improve Ethiopia’s position on a wider stage. He was fortunate that in Jerusalem at that time the leader of the community was one of the few Ethiopian individuals known to history by more than his name. He was Abbawalda Sama’et Walda Yohanes, a man of energy and vigour. In the year 1888, the community bought a plot of land outside the walls of Jerusalem with treasure which Emperor Yohanes had captured from the Turks; some said he had captured three boxes of treasure, some seven, but however much it was, it was enough to buy the land and begin construction of a new monastery and church. This complex is called Debre Gannet which means the “Monastery of Paradise” in Amharic. It is situated off Prophets’ Street in Jerusalem and gave its name to Ethiopia Street on which it stands.

Once the decision to build a new church was taken, the whole position of the Ethiopians began to change for the better. The community grew larger until some 40-50 monks and a smaller number of nuns were in residence by 1900, a number which it has maintained up until today. Many of the nuns were widows of priests (for priests in the Ethiopian church are not celibate) or members of aristocratic families who came to Jerusalem in pious retirement to houses which they built and lived in, and, on their death, donated to the community. The Israel Broadcasting Authority building in Jerusalem is housed in a building belonging to the Ethiopian Church for which rent is paid.

The “new” church - Debre Gannet - is an impressive building built on a circular pattern used in most of the principal churches of Ethiopia. It is entered through a large door and stands in a quiet and secluded courtyard. Once inside, the worshipper is aware of its very considerable height. There is no nave as in most western churches but rather a great circular corridor which surrounds the central Ark and which is made attractive to the worshipper as well as to the seeker after aesthetic pleasure, by the presence of a variety of pictures dating back some hundred years or so, most showing saints of the church.

Debre Gannet now shares with Deir es-Sultan the role of providing a home for the monastic community of Ethiopians in the Holy Land. During the last hundred years they have also acquired properties in Bethany, Jericho and on the river Jordan.

The fortunes of the Church would thus appear to have improved, but there are still difficulties. Many of these have been caused over the last 50 years by political turmoil in Ethiopia itself. In 1936, when the Italians conquered Ethiopia, some of the monks recognized the Italian rule in their country while others refused. The struggle between the two parties resolved in favour of the Ethiopian nationalists in 1941 when the Italians were defeated. The monks who had supported the Italians were driven out of the Jerusalem monastery and reduced to utter penury from which they were only relieved by a grudging pension paid by the British mandatory authorities.

The overthrow of the Emperor Haile Selassie by the communists in 1973 was another cause for turmoil. Some monks who were loyal to the imperial regime were no longer able to remain in the monastery while the community itself was augmented by a number of individuals, not all of them monks, who had left Ethiopia for political reasons. Today the community of monks and nuns has been augmented by a sizable group of lay people. There was a variety of internal conflicts which arose as a direct result of antagonism between those who had felt at home only with the government of the Emperor and with the traditional social order and those who were prepared to compromise with change. In this the community in Jerusalem only reflected the wider concerns of the Church in Ethiopia itself. The recent defeat of the communist regime in Ethiopia and the establishment of an Ethiopian embassy in Israel have, however, improved matters so far as the community in Jerusalem is concerned.

For more than 1500 years, the Church of Ethiopia has survived in Jerusalem. Its survival has not, in the last resort, been dependent on politics, but on the faith of individual monks and it is to the lives of these monks that we should look for the vindication of the Church’s presence in Jerusalem.

The Ethiopian monks of today, whether in Jerusalem or in Ethiopia itself, are supported by revenues from church lands and properties and gifts of the faithful. The monks are far from rich. They are attracted to Jerusalem not by a hope for material gain or comfort, but by faith.

It has been a feature of the Ethiopian Church in Jerusalem that its members, who are Amharic-speaking, seldom became fluent in the tongues of the country in which they live. Even today many monks speak neither Arabic nor Hebrew, nor indeed any other language, and are entirely dependent for their contact with the outside world on those of the community who do. Most of them are men of simple piety brought to Jerusalem by the belief that it is the most holy of Holy Places. The life they lead is highly structured. Meals are eaten in common and their whole life revolves around prayer services and great feasts. The monks take part in services held twice a day between four and six a.m. and between four and five p.m. On the days immediately preceding Easter as well as the Feast of Our Lady, in August, the morning service lasts from two to six a.m. On other saints’ days, the qudase, or Mass, is celebrated.

The services involve long periods of standing and it is for this reason that a feature of the church is the long sticks with carved chin rests which the monks use for support. Similar sticks, incidentally, are used by shepherds in Ethiopia as they watch their flocks.

On the occasion of the important feasts, dancing and making music with traditional instruments play a very large part. By far the most important are the series of celebrations surrounding Easter. In 1502, a German pilgrim Bernhard von Breidenbach, wrote “with zeal do the people gather for the celebration of Mass. Especially on the Feasts, and then both men and women begin to rejoice and to dance, to clap their hands and to form circles, here six or seven, there nine or ten, and sometimes they keep singing like that all the night, particularly on the night of the Resurrection of our Lord, where they do not stop singing till dawn and sometimes they do this so fervently that they become completely exhausted.”

Perhaps the most memorable of the Easter activities is Palm Sunday. For this celebration of the entry of Christ to Jerusalem, not only monks but all the lay members of the 300 or so Ethiopian community in Jerusalem gather in the courtyard of Deir es-Sultan. All over Jerusalem other Christians are also celebrating Palm Sunday but none do so in a more heartfelt way than the Ethiopians, who act out the events of Easter week in a style all their own.

The service begins at midnight in the Chapel of St. Michael in Deir es-Sultan, and lasts until eight a.m. Of this, six hours is a special commemorative service and the remaining two celebrate the Mass. It is not only monks who have stomach for so long a service. At the back of the church stand women, in traditional cotton dresses and shawls of white. The faces of the congregation are remarkable for their concentration. At about half-past eight at the end of the service, everybody leaves the chapel and comes out on the roof looking cheerful and not in the least tired. The archbishop and his fellow priests go into a large tent nearby where they prepare themselves for the solemn procession.

There they begin their prayers chanting “I rejoiced when they said unto thee Let us go unto the House of the Lord’. Our feet shall stand within thy gates; Jerusalem is builded as a city.” At the end of the service palm branches are brought to the archbishop who blesses them and distributes them to the congregation and to the monks. The whole crowd walks in procession round the courtyard. For outsiders, part of the interest in these celebrations is in the exoticism: the elaborate ecclesiastical garments of the priests and especially the archbishop and his senior colleagues; the decorated and tasseled umbrellas in velvet and gold which are held over the heads of notables, the music itself and the presence among the crowd of a few itinerant musicians playing on small stringed instruments and singing spontaneous hymns of praise to the crowd. For the monks the ceremony has a different meaning - it is the high point of the year, the ultimate celebration of their faith.

When they are not taking part in feasts or fasts (there are a great number of fasts in the Ethiopian rite), the monks and nuns make use of their time for their own spiritual practice. Private prayers are a very important part of the monastic life of the Ethiopian church. Their characteristic method is the repetition of certain sacred texts. The Psalms of David are particularly appreciated, as is the Gospel of St. John.

However, the Ethiopian monks must also contribute to the communal life of the monastery. They are bound by a rule which is perhaps less strict than that of some Western monks but still demands of them celibacy, the avoidance of sin, and obedience to the abbot. They are also expected to look after themselves insofar as they must garden, clean and paint their houses and share in the life of the community. However, they do not live in communal dwellings as do monks in the Catholic tradition. They are also given considerable latitude in their choice of activities. Some have taken up painting and woodcarving while others prefer to spend their time in study; one or two have withdrawn from the world and become solitary hermits. The most famous of these, who died in the early eighties, was a monk who did not speak for 30 years but who, if appealed to by an individual, would give his guidance in writing. This man, who acquired a reputation for sanctity, was buried as a saint.

As for the lay community of devout individuals and, on occasion, political exiles, it is more closely involved with society outside the monasteries than are the monks and nuns. Members of the Ethiopian community work as nursing sisters in hospitals and the young people study in the Anglican School, an international school in Jerusalem, or in regular Israeli schools.

In recent years, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem from Ethiopia has attracted more and more people. In 1993, some 450 pilgrims flew to Jerusalem at Easter. Looking after them provides a source of income for the local community. However, the community as a whole is still a poor one and has a constant struggle to preserve its identity. A small school maintained with care and affection provides instruction in Amharic and in the traditions of the Ethiopian community and Church in Ethiopia but it only functions at weekends.

The arrival of some 30,000 Jews from Ethiopia during the last few years has, to some extent, served to diminish the sense of isolation of the Ethiopian Christian community but it has not much affected its day-to-day life. The monks of the Ethiopian Church live, as it were, on an island where their lives change very slowly - an island to which they have been drawn through faith and where they have found a degree of contentment. Asked why he had come to Jerusalem, one elderly monk at first seemed to fail to grasp the question. Then he burst out “because it is Jerusalem” - an answer he felt quite sufficient, as indeed it is.

By:

Robin Twite (2003)

Understanding that there is lately a move to bifurcate between the spiritual and temporal administrative affairs of the Parish and the Church, I would like to shed some of my thoughts on this topic that I am familiar with for years, at least in a microscopic form. Jesus, our role model and His apostles have shown us a clear-cut policy of how one has to deal with what is due to God and what is due to Caesar. Despite the Son of Man was a pauper, not having any money, wealth or a place to hide His head, He set apart a portion of what He received from His faithful followers for the sake of helping the destitute and the downtrodden ones. The omniscient Saviour knew well in advance the way how His financial manager Judas had been manipulating the charity fund. In spite of having crystal knowledge of his derailed mind, Jesus, instead of changing his portfolio, warned him that he was pursuing a policy that befits him to be identified with the powers of darkness. “Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil? Jn.6: 70; 12: 5-6; 13: 18; Mt.26: 24-25. Despite all such grievous and heart-breaking warnings, he weaved his own destiny to receive the blood money of 30 silver coins that pushed him to his destiny, in spite Jesus had spelled out the true nature of his mission in His Sermon on the Mount, Mt.6: 19-24. Few of them are explained clearly below for our perception.

Wealth

“Do not lay up yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves breaks in and steal,….For where your treasure is, there your heart be also. The eye is the lamp of the body…but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness…If the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness….No one can serve two masters;…you cannot serve God and Mammon”. The dichotomy meaning of ‘eye’ is very significant here. The external eye that has a focus of wealth and money certainly can darken the inner eye of the heart that emit light to every cell of our body, the light which washes our body from darkness. This light of the inner eye is the sparkle from the Holy Spirit who indwells in us. When our dark inner eye that disseminates darkness all over our body, we come to a state of not able to serve the Lord of the Light of Life, but only the Lord of Darkness. Money and wealth that can plunge us into the darkness weaves our share in the land of silence, where gnashing of teeth and biting of worm is the legacy that we benefit out of our glamorous earthly life. “Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions, Lk.12: 15.

The Builders of the Church

Knowing such Heavenly message, the apostles also followed a similar lifestyle of penury and frugality after quitting from their skilled fishing work. St.Paul earned his livelihood by carpentry work, while working hard in his Master’s vineyard. “If we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content….For the love of money is the root of all evils; it is through these craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs”, 1.Tim.6: 7-10. St.Peter said, “I have no silver and gold, but I give you what I have…”, Acts.3: 6. They translated such code of ethics in their actions, not only in their preaching. Not only that they forgo all their worldly wealth, family and lifestyle, they became the fishers of men by laying down their precious body and spirit that no living animal would like to part away with. They crossed the boundaries of earth for the evangelization of the gospel truth by spilling their lifeblood as a pawn to animals and bigots. Those who celebrate their birthdays and wedding anniversaries with pomp and decoration and leading a high-tech deluxe life should remember that those pioneers of faith had nothing in this world except Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. This has been the lifestyle of hermits and ascetics who shed their blood during the first three centuries of persecutions by the imperial Roman rulers and other rulers of other lands where the disciples devoted their life time for the Messiah, the root cause for them to break down the fortress of gloom. If our clergy claims that they are the heirs of the apostles; they also ought to have followed a narrow track that is full of trenches, puddles and wild animals.

Apostles’ modus- operandi

“And the 12 summoned the body of the disciples and said,” It is not right we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables....Pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word…”, Acts.6: 1-6. The apostles selected 7 men exclusively for their daily distributions of food and service. There is a difference between serving at Lord’s Table, Altar, and serving at the tables; many people have conceived a wrong notion that giving to charity work is as equivalent to serve the Lord in parish works, despite both are aligned to be together because there is no faith without charity works, but there can have almsgiving without faith for an everyday person.

Serving at the Altar is a Holy Spirit’s special clerical call that entirely requires full dedication and devotion. There is not much room for them to get muddled up with administrative and other works of paraphernalia that includes financial and other social dealings. Clergy’s mission is to serve food for the souls, for which they need their full time in a sort of monastic way of life; frugality, detachment and denunciation is the language of that life culture because their field is an ocean that has no bounds and limits. Religious ministry, which embraces both spiritual and physical service, should be the only mission for the clergy that mainly administers the food for the spiritually hungry, not administration and financial dealings that breeds cronyism and animosity. St.Paul even didn’t baptize many into the church, so also Jesus.

Spiritual Commitment and Family Life

The family life is more important than serving the flock because an ideal family life of clergy itself is a witness of the Lord. “If anyone aspires to the office of bishop, he desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, dignified, hospitable, an apt teacher, no drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and no lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in everyway, for if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how can he care for God’s church?, 1.Tim.3: 1-7. “Just as a city set on a hill, let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven”, Mt.5: 16.

This is the case of a presbyter too. “If any man is blameless, the husband of one wife, and his children are believers and not open to the charge of being profligate or insubordinate. “For a bishop, as God’s steward, must be blameless…, Titus.1: 5-9. A priest who earns disrepute due to his dysfunctional family life and transactions bring shame to the Lord and the flock; hence he has to find more time to be with his wife and children for earning good credentials and credibility for the family that also is a part and parcel of his divine mission. A sacramental spiritual life, together with an ideal family and social life for a cleric, including the believers, invites a full-time spiritual exercise that includes meditation, preparations for preaching and counseling. He is responsible for carving out salvation for the flock, as well as to his dependants and for himself and also looking after the spiritual well being of his dear ones. A true cleric is crucified with Christ.

Parish Administration

Wherever the humans congregate, it will be solitude for the dark powers for their mission work that brings a multitude of problems, which manufacture sins on a mass scale, particularly in the religious venues, where the Creator is meant to be worshipped with purity of heart, full vigour and enthusiasm. Just as what Jesus and His apostles had done, there must be a clear-cut distinctive gulf between theocracy and plutocracy that distinguish between the temporal and spiritual fields. As the flesh is weak, the Vicar shouldn’t be allowed to handle the administrative and financial matters at the same time because his divine work field is unending and unseen. Leave the issue of financial affairs to the Parish MC that collect and spend money, for which the full authority should rest upon the MC to run the parish. The Vicar is there to perform and run all the sacramental rites and duties involved in the spiritual arena. The Parish Managing Committee, therefore, should have a laity president to run the Parish, with a restrictive liaison involvement with the clergy at certain point of time where there is a complaint from the members or MC members. It simply means that the MC is the overall overseer of the parish financial and administrative venues. A Vicar in such a predicament will try to become a centre of attraction to the parish and the community by his high spiritual and moral life.

Whatever way the Vicar tries to exemplify as a real shepherd, there could be opportunities for conflicts of interests and personal gratification to play with money and power games. If Judas could be dragged out of the inner circle of Jesus due to money and power gimmicks, who else will have the immunity to refrain from the worldly magnetism of power, money and sex? How many world evangelical empires have crumbled down to dust on accounts of their profligate dealings? Despite there is election for the MC and organizational positions, the despotic tendency of the Vicar at the present set-up, comes to prominence, on accounts of personal interests and selfishness because he will be there for only a limited period of three years. His eye usually is mainly how to run in a cheap popular way and survive there for that short period of time without emitting much smoke and fumes. Only few members of the MC will have certain goals and vision of the future of the parish that can cater spiritually and beneficially to the members on a long time basis.

What usually happens is that the Vicar tries to get the support of a group, usually the youth and women, that doesn’t have much experience and prognosis of spiritual maturity, so that he gains victory over the dissident members to the periphery and make a good harvest of implanting himself safely and solidly. Few senior laity members who are vying for power also get hold of coming to the front by shedding crocodile tears for the youth and women, a copycat culture of the secular typhoon, that is insinuated for charity work and bringing the parish modus-operandi into a pattern of club and cultural life. Money has converted today’s human beings as a mad and paranoid species due to the club life that instills the passions of the flesh to be dominated over the inner instincts; otherwise what is the reason for the misuse of alcohol, hard drugs and ecstasy tablets. Today’s churches and religions tend to serve for mainly the body of man, not for souls. Fanaticism and religious extremisms are the escape routes of inner profligacy that whet the body for any animal masquerades. No hesitation of bringing the parish as a nerve centre of a pagan and street culture because of the lust for power that rules the day. In this deluxe high-tech life, the exoteric that suffocates the esoteric takes prominence in every walk of life.

Deficiencies of today’s religious ministers

Right carpenters for seasoned woodworks. Before the dawn of modern academic theology, the devotees used to sit at the feet of Malpans or Gurus for acquiring knowledge and wisdom that equip them for a higher spiritual attainment. Such monastic discipline that caters a frugal and denunciation life used to regulate their whole life with high potency of spiritual enlightenment. Materialism and modern education swallowed everything that was there once conducive for our spiritual nourishment. One who is only lisping into the young adulthood and inducted into a theological course has not enough insight in sifting between the ideal and pedestrian; implanting the seeds of a hybrid theology that germinate and bloom into his heart flower tend to make him an ordinary religious stereotype.

As a young minister has no knowledge and experience of today’s financial and market economy, high-tech miracles and its fall outs and backlashes and secular apathy for religiosity, his style of running the parish can fragment it into different layers of activists and propagandists. Once when his survival is threatened, he is likely to adopt a policy that appeases the inexperienced and misguided because his deficient spiritual literacy and numeracy and its applications in all fields of life leave him as a rudderless minister who fails miserably as a caterer of inner food. The real threat that befalls on apostolic faith in such occasion is apathy and aversion, bringing in all materialistic, pagan and street culture into the body of Christ. High pompous celebrations and decorations are the outward sign of inward moral and religious turpitude. Autocracy and cronyism, the artificial yardsticks, only can be the saver of such a regime. Even God finds it difficult to control a sophisticated and stereotyped laity that is in sixes and sevens due to materialistic acrobatics. Serving food on all celebrations as ‘nercha’, oblation, is the symptom for attaining salvation. Emotional spirituality that substitutes the devotional one is the only menu that the modern clergy can offer to the chronic spiritual deficiencies of the flock.

Reading and writing

The higher inner ability that comes by the synchronization of body and spirit of man by rigorous training within the age of forty years, according to the theory of Plato’s philosopher king, is a rare commodity of today because artificial ripening before the fruit is allowed to maturity will be a thing that is not useful to society. Wisdom is a product of maturity and age. Practical wisdom comes by being with natural laws and keen observation, whereas piety and religious thirst is an outcome of meditation, denunciation and reading and writing, despite it is usually an inborn impulse. Parumala kochu thirumeni, Puthenkavil kochu Thirumeni, Kuriakose Sahada and many others belong to this species because every universal rule has exception too. Reading is a communication with other souls who are alive and beyond the veil of the grave. To be conversant with the autobiography and biography of Church Fathers and their writings, not the animated mass media inculcation and cheap magazines that thrill the senses, will have an impact upon the life in the early chapters of one’s life.

The present theological students are the products of either religious extremisms and banal writings of crossbreed theological hyperboles of pagan nature. Theology has become a science now, not a medium of spiritual high rises any more. As our modern clerics don’t get a chance to be in communion with any of these qualitative mental and social or secular qualifications of higher values, due to their induction into the control of the flock at an early stage in life, they are likely to be drifted away to any direction to any wind that anchor their small canoe to any bank, adding more head weight which harness the community that they are leading. This is only an observation that should help the hierarchy for taking a U turn and examine our strengths and weaknesses, not for shooting at the messenger who is only a fragile mechanism of flesh and blood. Classical studies and literatures are inevitable recipes for our spiritual and inner development because most of what we have produced under the glimmer of electric light and heat has proven to be is of mundane and materialistic. We have choked our souls for over feeding our bodies that find its anchorage in ephemeral and banal impulses.

Exoteric versus esoteric

That which is terrestrial is always against celestial. In order to compensate the celestial, people nowadays switch to fake and fancy spiritual dynamites. Every Perunal festivity now a days is in the model of opening and closing ceremony of the Olympics games, the outward show that kills the essence of spirituality. Electrical decorations that carve out the saints’ and Jesus’ image upon the church, graveyard and other buildings are the signs of a showcase spirituality. Our religious ministers who like to harvest fame and money blindly support the groups that make use of such simulations for their glamour and glory. Choir group, the match-making place, is an unwanted appendage that performs orchestra for enhancing their own magnetic personality. Candles or censors, portraits and icons that are only symbolic expressions have become excesses of our paraphernalia which have been substituted for our repenting tears. We don’t have the glow of our inner eyes to realize that self-worship, such as birthday and wedding day prayers and celebrations and heretical fasting and festivals, is suicidal. The cosmetic theological veterans who indoctrinate their teenage students with fanaticism of materialistic nature take the budding generations as their toys that dance to their tune and remote-controlling. Though the war against the exoteric against esoteric has been there from the very beginning, the electricity age that killed the inner eye and its light has driven out the grieving Spirit from us, leading the way for the infernal forces to do gymnastics of their darkness in our system that infect all sort of maladies and lethal diseases.

Sound Systems

The serene and tranquil countryside is polluted with thunderous sound of electrical sound system that neither allow one to sleep during day or night nor think profusely for the cleansing of the inner sound system that run man who is formed from cosmic and coherent sound. We were not allowed to film or record our worship, but now it has become an industry even for the clerics to sell the liturgy in tapes and CDs, thereby annihilating the sanctity of our worship that once used to soothe and wash our body systems and natural environments of rural lifestyles. Sound pollution is a disastrous phenomenon that can pervert and distort our whole being because the Word, sound, became man. “Silence is the best speaker”. Even if the influence of pop culture and secular stereotypes are a threat to the main stream churches and becoming a carbon copy of the charismatic avalanche is not the remedy to stop the flow of believers into other pop churches and cults. Mixing the heterogeneous with homogeneous and making an impure amalgam is not an ideal set-up in any religious venues. The carnivorous anarchy in the main stream churches is a sound harvest for the charismatic denominations, the place of sound and fury signifying nothing. The basic element of man is sound and colour; sound and pollution is suicidal.

The clergy that don’t have a clue of the esoteric knowledge misinterpret the word of God and thrive by the net profit of it in an irreligious way. This is how the blind lead the blind. Both inside and outside of man is important here and hereafter. Allow the clergy to undergo rigorous training up to the age of 40, or at least 35 under the Gurus of the first order, and then throw them into the vineyard of clerical works. As the trend is in an adverse direction, the late move to separate between the work of the clergy and the laity, spiritual and temporal, in each parish and church as a whole is a healthy change; despite there could be problems in any sphere due to animal magnetism, particularly when the social and moral anarchy rule in this doomsday culture.

When there are disputes in the MC presided by the laity, there must be enough room for the Vicar to negotiate in ameliorating the situation in an amicable manner. Such a system will only give enough chance for the clergy to devote more time in his spiritual exercises. Meddling with parish administration and money and political spirituality is a volatile and firebrand cocktail that can overturn the real life into a carnival of pandemonium. Don’t think that I am accusing the clergy or laity; as we don’t have time to brood over to the inner instincts, when the adults in the family are all working for daily livelihood, the ultimate casualty come to our spiritual life that affects us and everyone around us.