Carlo Torriani

SWARGA DWAR

The conversion of a catholic missionary

presented by

Card. Simon Pimenta

PIME Publications, PIME Regional House, Eluru - 534 0-07, A.P., India

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE COCONUT

    Since a few days we had started the sifting of paddy. We do it all by hand, without any machine, beating the sheaves of paddy on a long wooden bench and collecting the grains on a large plastic sheet on the ground. The heap was already high half a metre. In the evening, just before stopping the work, with a shovel, I started gathering the dispersed grains. Rummaging among the heap I hurt something solid: it was a coconut. I asked the workers why there was a coconut in the heap of grains. They toll me that before starting the work they had a puja. The thing, must say, annoyed me greatly.

I restrained myself and I hope it didn’t show up. I put again the coconut inside the heap and I started digesting my vexation.

    First I have to admit that my prejudices are hard to die. Usually we see easily the other’s prejudices and we console ourselves thinking that we don’t have those prejudices. But the prejudices come instinctively, out of the control of the reason. It is very difficult to look at us from outside, as biological machines that react as a computer. My prejudice, not yet overcome, was that the puja is an act of superstition. My previous experience with the plumbers at the well, my reflection that breaking a coconut could be an act of thanksgiving, in Christian language an Eucharist, all this did not cancelled my prejudices. My biological computer was still reacting in the old way.

    But I discovered a second component to my vexation. They did a religious function without me: the director and the priest. Mine was a clerical reaction in front of a popular and lay religious manifestation perceived by me as usurpation. Instead of appreciating this spontaneous religious need I was annoyed

Hinduism, the religion of the majority of the Indians, is a religion left in the hand of the people, without dogmas, without hierarchy, without a central authority. Mine was the reaction of a westerner that needs a controlled and centralised religion in front of a religion in the hand of the people.

Reflecting now on this ritual of hiding in the heap of paddy a coconut that has to be broken and partaken, I can see in it a religious commitment to share the gifts of God and particularly the rice, the staple food of Asia. If the breaking and sharing of coconut can be seen as a symbol of Christ on the cross, its use at the beginning of all the important activities of life, can be consider as a mini-eucharist. It is like a constant reminder that we should break and share for the others.

We too Christians have the habit to start our actions with a prayer. Instead of words they use an action, a religious symbolic action.

Let us stop here, because I realise that I am doing something like a Theology of the Coconut and it may be as dangerous as doing Theology of Liberation.