The festival of St. George as a reminder to women and men to live fearlessly

Festivals are a time when people come together in hope and prayer interceding to a saint and asking for God’s grace and mercy. But one should also note that people also come to a festival in a flow of tradition and as a performed ritual. It becomes a time when one nudge leads to another and then another and further another. There are many who don’t identify a saint with their present life and there is therefore a disassociation with the saint in some way. This is not to say that all people come to church during a festival not knowing why but that many come without associating the life of the saint with their own!

St. George was a solider born to a Greek father and a Christian mother who lived near Palestine in the 3rd or 4th century C.E. He joined the army and rose up in life very quickly because he was a good soldier. He then became the joint leader of a 1000 strong regiment and was popular among his peers. This was when the Emperor Diocletian brought out an edict that all Christians in the empire should come back to the state religion and that Christianity would not be encouraged by the state. St. George on hearing this changes his stance of being loyal to the state and says that he is loyal first to Christ and then to the state. Till this point of time the state through weapons gave him the security he needed. But he is prepared to shed the weapons in favour of Christ and the protection God offers him. St. George is tortured and then asked to convert from Christianity but he keeps refusing and the torture and the range and scope of the torture also keeps changing. Finally the soldiers and the emperor understand that the only way to make St. George quiet is to behead him, to separate his head from his body because every single cell in his body when alive kept repeating the name Christ. Such is his faith that it is said that after his torture the empress and the chief sorcerer in the empire also join St. George in his martyrdom after accepting Christ.

There are a few things for us to learn from the martyrdom of St. George and from one of the most popular traditions about him. The martyrdom of St. George is a model of disarming ourselves and our enemies. We live in a world where we use arms and ammunition to get our things done. Many countries and media houses create monsters so that they can then destroy the monsters they create and do a victory lap. But St. George is not like that. Instead he rejects arms and violence and preaches Christ because the peace of Christ is beyond the power of any arms and violence. John 14:27 says “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” Further in John 16:33 Christ says “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” As it is said in Romans 12:2 “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” St. George is overcome by a peace he perhaps never had before and that is the peace which gives him courage.

How do we identify that St. George was transformed by the renewal of his mind and his discernment made him fight for peace and shun violence? What does this understanding give us to identify and understand in today’s world? The single powerful symbol for us to identify with is the picture of St. George which we have in most of our churches. This is the picture of a man who looks like a solider and is on a white horse putting a spear at a dragon, with what seems like a woman in the background.

But look closely at this picture on top. The usual story behind the traditional picture (at the bottom) is that a particular city was hounded by a dragon who lay at the only source of water for the city. This was followed by the need of the dragon to eat something. Water was available for the city only if the dragon was fed. Initially the dragon was satisfied with cattle. But after that was exhausted, the people who were selected according to lots were fed to the dragon. One day the daughter of the leader of the city is selected by lot to go before the dragon. The leader is helpless and the young woman is led to the outskirts of the city and left there. This is when St. George who is passing by stops and asks the young woman what the problem is. She asks him to go on as she is scared to even accept and talk about her fear. St. George persists and she is ready to engage her fear and so tells him about the dragon. On hearing this St. George does not move on but helps the woman to disarm her fear. He mellows down the fearful dragon and tells the young woman to put a rope around the neck of the dragon and walk it into the city. By now the young woman is fearless and does just that. Imagine the sight of a crowd who were waiting to hear the sound of the satisfied dragon after having devoured the young woman. Instead they saw her walking into the city, fearlessly with another man on a horse. They immediately believe in God. The transition they have in their lives is quick because such is the sight they see. They, like the woman are not scared anymore.

The festival of St. George is a time to look at and accept our fears, engage our fears and disarm our fears. The woman, like a woman in our society today was scared. She was scared of evil befalling her but she must have also been scared of the soldier who she thought must have come to harm her. But the solider does not do that and instead helps her go through the difficult process of handling her fear. The festival of St. George is the time we get to help each other and to help ourselves to take fear head on but without killing anyone and without harming anyone. Instead we use the peace and love of Christ to completely disarm and diffuse evil and the fear of evil.

St. George offers us an opportunity to accept Christ and transform our lives from what it is now. It is not to pull back to the safety of the city and hear the woman die but to stand for the life of the woman even though we do not know her before. As responsible and religious human beings we can also do just that. We can stand up for one another and use the peace of God to transform ourselves from fearful by standers to fearless people who interact with the person nearby to together create a fearless reaction to a situation. The festival of St. George should invigorate us to do such acts of fearlessness.





(Parts of this was preached as a festival sermon at the St. George Knanaya Church, Domlur, Bengaluru on May 28, 2016.)

St. George the martyr in the aftermath of the Osama killing

All forms of media the world over have had it easy for the past week as they have managed to fill up valuable spaces of print offline and substantial volume of pages online in the days following the killing of Osama bin Laden. As scores of people have hailed the assassination as a closure for 9/11, voices spread over the world have asked for sanity to be followed, over and against celebration and victory parades. But one thing is for sure. Small and big media enterprises, blogs and social networking sites have given Osama the space otherwise reserved for other things, and that too free of cost! What does one have to be to get coverage in the media? Good, bad or ugly?

A small review of various forms of media these days suggest that one needs to be bad or ugly, in reality or in perception, to be given space. The good no longer matters. No one is interested in that. Churches the world over are going about celebrating the festival of St. George. The officer in full gear is seen slaying the dragon and hundreds of thousands of people sport St. George as their personal slayer in chief.

The account of St. George is that of a soldier who slays the dragon and saves the princess in distress and the people of the community from the deadly enemy. The dragon is seen as a symbol of all that is evil and bad. St. George comes across as a natural saver for people in distress, suffering from evil forces.

But what goes into the background usually is the martyrdom of St. George who chooses death over life, refusing to let go of his beliefs. His strength is not his spear but rather the lack of his spear. Coming after the passion week observation of the crucifixion of Christ, this is a similar account of the master disarming himself for the sake of others. But instead of grasping the sacrifice we are fixated on the destruction of the dragon, which anyway is much more than what we think of.

The media is also fixated on the bad and the ugly. It first goes on to make Osama the number one enemy of the world and then celebrates his death at the hands of Obama and his soldiers. But is Obama (the U.S.) willing to disarm itself like St. George did? Is he (it) willing to die for the sake of humanity? The answer is no. Of course, no offence to Obama I guess. He just happens to be at the head of the self ascertained supreme power, the U.S. at the moment.

One has to struggle to understand why the U.S. first supported someone like Osama, armed him and then hunted him down. It’s just like fattening the cow before killing it. Power and the capability to kill are being celebrated here. It is not the death of Osama. The media goes along. Construct and build someone, kill him/her and then report it. This formula is the single most important driving point of many media houses these days. I wonder whether Osama will be elevated to the position of a saint because of the way he died. One also has to see whether there were internal plots within the Al-Qaeda to do away with Osama because he is better dead than alive to them.

Churches these days go through the same struggle. How much it has to arm itself and who has to be shot down. The picture of a spear less St. George would be unthinkable I guess. The need to construct various Osamas will be pushed through and we will buy it. The spear of St. George rather than the cross he bore will be given more importance. We are as guilty of slaying Osama as the U.S.! Let the sinless one among us throw the first stone!

Thiruvalla Premier League and the festival of St. George

The battle lines have been drawn and the daggers and spears are out. The BCCI is waiting to see what Lalit Modi will do with its show cause notice. Lalit Modi meanwhile is in a huddle with his lawyers and friends, waiting to make the next move. May 11 and following could restart the IPL debate on national television in India. Those who were friends with Modi have now turned foes and new friends have emerged to save his skin. What is the fuss many may ask? Modi has brought entertainment to India and in the process has got thousands of youngsters to get interested in the game and make a living out of it.

I learnt to play cricket in 1985. My introduction into Thiruvalla, a small town in Central Kerala known for its middle east millions, and cricket was a side by side act of fate. The decision of my parents to come to live in Thiruvalla was largely taken to make sure that their three children would get a sniff of the Mallu morals and grow up to be fine individuals. Whether they were successful in this is a totally different matter! The mind of the ten year old boy wandered and stopped at a near by field where young boys were playing a game that was alien to him. His instinct to crash into the cultural setting there made him learn the game. He realised the boys who were from different communities were playing a game with a coconut branch, wonderfully crafted into a cricket bat, or atleast sort of. The ball too was a make shift one made of a small base of a premature coconut seed, covered with newspaper and tied with a thin rope which one got from the recycled ration shop supplies.

Each and every space was a cricket pitch. The backyard, someone's uncultivated paddy field, or a small stretch of road. We would play till someone came and shooed us off our makeshift pitch. We would start when the natural sunlight came on and stop when it went off. Everything was gleaned off what we could find and there was a style in our lack of training. Each one would put a hand over the other shoulder and care nothing about caste permutations and class divisions. Everyone was welcome to play.

The raw cricketer in me turned into the semi professional cricketer after 1991, showing up for team selection for the Pathanamthitta district team, of which Thiruvalla was a part. What little leg spin bowling I knew was put on test and I was expected to be decent with the bat as well. I was picked for the under 19 and under 23 squads and there started my cricket journeys going to Trivandrum and Alleppy to play the district level cricket tournaments. Lets face it. I was not a brilliant cricketer, but I enjoyed being part of a then poor team which went on to ruffle a few feathers here and there. My short cricket career came to an end with a totally different innings of studying to become a priest.

I was in Thiruvalla recently for the St. George festival. It is a vibrant festival celebrated by church members of mainly the Jacobite and Orthodox churches in Kerala. St. George happens to be the patron saint of many countries. His appeal stretches beyond cultures. The picture of the soldier slaying the dragon is what many of us remember from our childhood days. At the time I thought that St. George was a dragon slayer. Today I realise that he is much more than that. For those who suffer injustice, he is a symbol of a fight against such injustice. This makes people feel that he is their protector and that he intercedes for them in times of trouble.

Thiruvalla has changed. My parents and several others would never let their kids out to play cricket. Today I have come to notice that parents drive their children to cricket grounds to attend expensive cricket training camps. Earlier we never had a cricket kit but would rather make do with what we found. Kids had fun. Today 8 year olds have to carry around huge cricket kits which are bigger than them. The look on their face is the look of an office goer. Not at all enthusiastic. Its as if cricket is a job for them.

With all the goings on of the IPL now, St.George makes a triumphal entry for me. Obviously he is not carrying a cricket bat. (It would be quite a picture though!) But he still has something to say. 'Stand for what you believe in no matter what'. Its even worth dying for! Cricket today has lost its innocence. It has become a career and a job. It has become big money. But times like this should make us think that cricket after all is also just a game. But its a game which can teach us lots. Its something that makes us women and men learn that life in India is stuck in caste equations and unjust structures. But that does not mean that we remain in it. We learn that coming together makes us better than staying away. Earlier cricket made us fight these injustices and run from our homes to be with our friends from all communities. Today we are taken to glorified stadiums but have forgotten the true learning that we should have from this great game.

I am not going to come on a horse with a spear, ready to annihilate the wrong doer of the IPL. I am just saying that the IPL has robbed me of my innocence (what little of it that is left!). So I hope that we can all look up to someone like St. George. Someone who will stand up for what is right. I am not looking for the BCCI to punish some scapegoat. I am rather hoping that they see the essence of cricket and hand it down to future generations.