Sunday is a red letter day for the people of India, and especially of Kerala. A man and a woman from this soil are proclaimed saints.
Preaching to the faithful of Hippo, St. Augustine asked this question on the miracle at Cana of Galilee: “What does the miracle of turning water into wine teach you?” He himself answered the question: It teaches every human being “to see the wonder of God turning water that flows under the vine into wine in the grapes.”
The new saints are two ordinary individuals of the last century. Humans becoming saints is a miracle of God happening among us. Both tell us the story of becoming, the process of saint-making which simply meaning good human beings.
Fr Chavara is known as a socio-cultural protagonist, who created a new epoch, both in society and the Church, especially in the Syrian Church.
Fr Chavara was not a mere social reformer; he was a poet of interiority who met God within the darkness of his soul. He fused the Hindu and Christian streams in his poems.
A poet, according to Aristotle, tells stories of tomorrow which does not exist but is simply a dream of the absent.
The poet becomes a prophet who confuses between what he sees with what he wishes to see. The story that is, is being haunted by stories that could be.
Fr Chavara dreamt of a society and church that benefited from the enlightenment of the West.
Sr. Euprasia was simply a nun who got primary education in the Educatant established by Fr. Chavara. Her life in the world is little known, but her interiority is testified by 74 letters which are precious relics that need interpretation. They tell a story of wrestle with the divine, which is a story of the art of life.
The state of her soul is at war and ensuing suffering, war with devils and their continuous persecutions. As Jacob of the Old Testament she is continuously wounded in the dark night of the wrestle.
It is this nostalgia that urges her to suffer for Him in his brothers and sisters. So the distance to the transcendental Other is the distance to one’s own brother/sister.
Both the blessed are very good examples of the art of life. They are continuously in God-ache which is a rebellion, knowing that rebellion demands freedom, which implies a split within and living a contradiction where war with oneself is waged within relentlessly.
There is a theological potential in everyone. The Diogenes lamp of scepticism was lit for so many. The refusal in the world is rebellion against the hollowness of Sisyphus myth.
Revolution of God is everywhere in everything. It is against oneself and for oneself. It is infinite revolt. Spirit of God involves itself in a revolution, which is continuous and never final, because revolutions of the spirit are unending.
For these revolutions of interiority make men and women prophets of holy simplicity. Life becomes the most explicit renunciation and apology.
A saint reveals the profound instability of the social order and a revelation of possibilities of fundamental reorganization. It is only the divine that can rework the world through paths of holy humanism.
(Author is spokesperson, Syro-Malabar Church)
