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Rev. Kathleen Ellis
July, 15, 2012
Rev. Ellis is a Unitarian Universalist minister, ordained in 1993, who has served several congregations in the Southwest and Southeast Districts. She served as treasurer of the UU Ministers Association, ministerial settlement representative for the Southwest, and most recently minister of Congregational Life at Live Oak UU Church in northwest Austin for eight years. She is now Good Offices person for the Southwest. (Good Officers advise and advocate for colleagues who experience difficulties in their ministries.)
As Bollywood brings glimpses of India into our consciousness, the overall impression is that India is complex on multiple levels. Beauty competes with squalor; spirituality competes with greed; generosity competes with corruption; elders, children and homeless people compete for scraps of welfare. Compare it all with the United States: We’re not all that different, but issues become invisible for the most part unless we have some philosophical discussion about it. Nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice?
On sabbatical last year she traveled to India on a three-week spiritual pilgrimage. Kathleen’s husband Jon Montgomery is a member of First UU.
Sermon:
When I picked up Anne Lamott’s book Some Assembly Required, I thought, “How nice, a memoir about a mother who reflects on motherhood through the eyes of her son and infant grandson. My sister had sent it to me for my birthday although I am not (yet) a grandmother. The story was engaging. It brought back a lot of wonderful memories of raising two baby boys.
What I didn’t expect was for the author to take me with her on a two-week trip to India that brought back additional wonderful memories of my own trip to India almost 18 months ago. The journey for both of us was a cultural immersion into the complexity of India; it was a spiritual experience beyond easy description or understanding.
Take a dive with me into that spirituality. [Symbols on trucks and tuk tuks; puja; experience at Chidambaram; symbology of the Ganges, at least equivalent to the sacred Mt. Fujisan and more than our own Statue of Liberty]
The depth of spirituality in India coexists with an earthiness that middle class Westerners seldom witness. In India, spirituality competes with greed; beauty competes with squalor; generosity competes with corruption; elders, children, and homeless people of all ages compete for scraps of welfare. In the U.S. those of us in the middle class or above seldom have to see this level of complexity, but it’s here. Mostly it’s hidden on the other side of the tracks or the other side of Interstate 35; sometimes it creeps onto our street corners in the form of panhandlers-our kind of beggars. In India there’s just a lot more of it in plain sight-not just one panhandler, but a crowd of them at every turn.
My colleague the Rev. Leonora Montgomery once said that everyone ought to travel to India at least once. I now pass that advice on to you IF you are comfortable with the unexpected. How many of you have been there?
Even without a trip to India you may have seen India in the movies in recent years, including the widely known Slumdog Millionaire in 2008 and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel this year. Actor Dev Patel stars in both of them. He welcomes a group of British retirees to his dilapidated potential of a hotel. In trying to make a go of the family business he thought he could attract elders to India. He tells his mother, “other countries don’t like old people either.” He figures he can “outsource old age” by bringing old people, unwanted in their own country, to live in India. He’ll start with the English and expand from there.
His promotion worked, though perhaps a “little bit” before the hotel was quite ready. When someone complained he told her, “We have a saying in India: “Everything will be all right in the end. So if it is not all right, it is not yet the end.” There’s nothing like a sense of optimism when things go wrong.
Each of the tourists had a different set of expectations and as a result, very different experiences. One man who was enthralled with India tried to explain his attraction to his complaining wife. He loved “the light, the color, the smiles.” A trip to India is about what you bring to it and yet, it is best if you leave all expectations behind. In the movie, of course, Sonny the hotel manager was right: Everything was all right in the end.
Four years ago, actor Dev Patel had already played the lead in Slumdog Millionaire. Time and again he explains an unexpected outcome with another saying: “It is written.” We can’t be sure that everything will be all right in the end, and we can’t stop trying, but “It is written” conveys to me a sense of fatalism rather than optimism.
We learned over and over that it was inevitable that his character Jamal would eventually rescue and marry the character Latika, played by Freida Pinto. Each of them was also portrayed by a child actor, because it begins in the slum in which they live. Jamal was winning a televised competition in an Indian equivalent of “Who wants to be a millionaire?” He was suspected of cheating, and between games he was tortured to make him talk. However, Jamal’s life experiences had given him most of the answers. Everyone except the show’s sponsors were thrilled with his winnings of $100 million rupees. It was written. By God, by Allah, by Fate? Take your pick!
But why stop with a predictable trinity? Was it written by Moira, Yaweh, Wotan? Phan Ku, Ra, or Zeus? The list surely goes on and on.
Jamal’s back story touches on many of the rougher aspects of India, starting with homeless orphans who live in the landfills. Unscrupulous scavengers of children entice or kidnap dozens of these street kids to give them a place to stay then turn them into beggars or slaves, prostitutes or classical dancers. One source estimated the number at 300,000 child beggars in a population of 1.2 billion people overall. In the begging industry, the children do not get the money, but have to turn it over to the gangsters or maybe their own parents if they have them.
I wanted to know more than Bollywood could tell me, so I turned to Shashi Tharoor, an Indian-American who writes with wit and depth with a critical eye through a prism of love for India and pride in his heritage.
Tharoor observes that India is not a welfare state. The government does not provide much help to the teeming multitudes who live in poverty. But India is a welfare society based primarily on family units. People help each other out-a place to live until they find a job-based on family ties, affiliation to informal castes, or connection to the village or neighborhood. Outside those circles little attention is paid.
Therefore, you will see nice apartments inside buildings that are dirty and unkempt. Tharoor remembers that his mother asked her servant-sweeper to sweep the apartment stairs for extra pay and the woman was incredulous. “Why, Madam, when they are not your stairs?” she replied. The attitude helps explain why you will see beautifully kept homes that are accessible only through filthy public spaces. Personal hygiene exists alongside indifference for public sanitation; sewage systems reek and overflow; and pollution generates staggering levels of respiratory illness.
Even in isolated areas that are environmentally conscious, regulations are routinely ignored. After all, unemployment is a greater political liability than lung cancer. Do you see some irony here? That basic argument-job creation vs. health care–will constitute our own political discourse even beyond the next election. The rationale is different but the effect is similar. In Austin, we have social services, but the recipients are mostly out of sight.
Let me hasten to say that the Indian government is trying to meet the needs; activists and charities are trying to fill the gaps; but sheer numbers overwhelm every system. India has the world’s second largest population, after China. Population growth over the past 25 years has increased more than the entire U.S. population today. Deforestation has degraded land and reduced its agricultural capacity. How, then, might anyone provide enough food, clean water and air, health care, and education, not to mention housing?
No wonder beggars swarm the streets. One billion dollars is spent every year on population control. The most popular form is sterilization. But by the time this option is chosen, people are in their 30s and have already produced more children than is good for them or the country. Kids who survive to grow up are not only a source of labor for the family, but also provide social security for their elders.
Hundreds of charities and activist organizations, both Indian and foreign, labor to save the children and the sick. One local example is The Miracle Foundation that was founded on Mother’s Day just 12 years ago by Austinite Caroline Boudreaux. She couldn’t stand the poverty she had witnessed among Indian orphans and came home to launch The Miracle Foundation, which is headquartered down on 6th Street near West Lynn.
The website says, “The Miracle Foundation is a vibrant and trusted non-profit organization that empowers orphans to reach their full potential-one child at a time.” They support five orphanages in rural areas across India and have transformed the lives of hundreds of children. Safety, nutritious food, and education work the miracles.
Of course they also take donations. “$75 is the cost to cover one child’s medical needs for a year, including all necessary vaccinations, annual medical check-ups, de-worming, and pharmaceutical sundries.” [I was a little put off by the reference to “de-worming,” but I do seem to remember that time one of my sons got pinworms and one brought home head lice. Not so foreign, after all.] Some Miracle volunteers go as Ambassadors to work in India for a week and their hearts melt.
In addition to social services, the Indian government is also trying to address population growth and health concerns through literacy and further education. As some of you might remember from my previous sermon here, millions of children have no school. A high school graduate began a school that we visited in the waste dump. She teaches Hindi, English, the local language, math, and writing to about 70 children 12 and under while her husband advocates for worker rights. The children are beautiful and smart. When the teacher calls on them they will stand up to sing or recite the response. Children did not wear shoes, but outside their huts, adult shoes were lined up beside the door or up on the low roofs. Take off your shoes before you go into your dirt hut.
If you go, be prepared for transformation. Not that you can just order up transformation on some menu, but everything under the sun is right there and in your space. “The light, the colors, the smiles . . .” The spirit of a fiercely spiritual people who live close to the earth. . . .
Yesterday I went to the Miracle Foundation to meet its founder Caroline Boudreaux. Over a cup of coffee I asked about her personal journey. A dozen years ago she and a friend took a trip around the world. One of their stops was in India to meet the friend’s sponsored child for whom she sent monthly support. Despite Caroline’s skepticism, the boy was not just a photograph sent to dozens of people in exchange for money. He was real and he lived in an orphanage.
It happened to be Mother’s Day in the U.S. and Caroline had called her mother to acknowledge their loving connection. At the orphanage she picked up a baby girl, who clung to her like Velcro and buried herself in her chest like babies will do. Caroline sang her a lullaby. She sang her to sleep on Mother’s Day, then went to the dorm to lay her in bed. The beds were all made of wood-no mattresses, no stuffed animals, just wood and easy to clean. Caroline could feel the bones of this baby meet the bones of the wood and was transformed. She knew her calling was to make a difference in these young lives. That’s the birth story of The Miracle Foundation.
Caroline reflected on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You know the pyramid, built on a broad base of safety, water, food, clothing, and shelter-the things everyone needs. At the top of the pyramid are justice and ethics and self-actualization. But she said the top of the pyramid has to bend down to touch the bottom. Not just touch, but reach down and lift. . . .
Are we not all children of God? The ones who can make a difference to one another? Here in this space, week after week, you remind yourselves to “nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice.” I invite you to consider the broadest interpretation: nourish souls, but also bodies and minds; transform lives-your own AND someone else’s; do justice-at home AND somewhere that tugs at your heart. Then your life will overflow.
Namaste
Amen
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