Christian Ashram Movement

Feasibility of the Christian Ashram Movement of India

➢ Three assumptions of the announcement on the Christian Ashram Movement of India (the Movement) are important to note: a. The pioneers of the Movement can be traced to ancient times. Their faith, sacrifices and commitment are embedded in our culture. We only give fillip to it in our current social, political and cultural context, and do it with a sense of urgency. b. As a Movement of generations of the past and present and continuing into the future, we are emboldened by the availability of the Internet media to conceive a broad-based Movement across the whole of India. Indian culture is in stress and it is time to take a look at all its nodes and see its emerging interconnected pattern. C. As it is culture-focused and based in the faith of ordinary people as they live, it would make significant difference to the assumptions of ashrams, ancient and modern. The new awareness of the Movement would enable autonomous leaders/coordinators to rally in their own corners. A centralised coordination is unnecessary.
➢ Our prior concern is to raise the general awareness of the crucial issues through several channels to enable a grassroots movement take off.
➢ The People’s Reporter, published from Bombay has been a faithful organ for publishing news about the efforts at the CK Ashram in the past and continues to help the Movement forward. We are most grateful for their participation in our pioneering work.
➢ E-mailing is another channel available. From Yahoo e-mail ID I am switching over to , which appears to be more flexible and dependable. We have 150 contacts in our mailing list and the number can be increased with your efforts.
➢ Blogger Dashboard, Webpage and such are other Internet devices that would help disseminate news of the Movement as they happen in different parts of India. It is prayerfully hoped that young people with facility in these important devices would come forward in managing their operation creatively.
➢ A Blog has been created with the title: Christian Ashram Movement. You may reach and participate in the ongoing conversation with your own comments, news and critique.
➢ There is a need for a periodical for substantial presentation of the focus but varied expressions of the Movement. We have had this in mind for a long time. An esteemed colleague, Dr. Vasant Kumar Bawa, a creative thinker, writer, and a layman extraordinaire has given much thought to Christian ashrams and the lack of perspective on Christianity in India on the part of the organised church, of the Protestant variety. Ashram Mitra, a periodical he published for sometime for the purpose of raising critical issues before Christians and the Church in India, is now available with his consent to be revived for the purpose of the Movement. The mechanics of when and how this can be absorbed as our organ and the personnel to professionally manage the publication have to be worked out. Please advise.
➢ For a grassroots’ movement to develop and sustain itself, merely reaching English readers will never do. All national languages of India must become its veins and arteries. Your suggestions and contacts for this purpose are urgently needed. The announcement of the Movement must be translated and published in all national languages. Need volunteers to take charge, to initiate, to mobilize, etc. etc. Please share this information on this breakthrough initiative. Your prayers and thoughtful participation are needed.
Sundaramani

Christian Ashram Movement

AN ANNOUNCEMENT

ChristianAshram Movement of India

Louis Sundaramani Simon

a) What is Christian Ashram Movement?
The term ashram flashes the images of a bearded and scantily clad guru, spiritual seeking, meditation, asceticism, wilderness-retreat for silence and solitude, poverty, a band of adoring disciples, a life of prayer, service, volunteerism, among others of mystical nature. Given these features of Buddhist (vihara), Jain (vihara) and Hindu (ashram) traditions, an Indian Christian ashram is not and cannot be a spiritual or cultural oddity in India. The spiritual life that Jesus lived and taught embodies all these aspects so completely and more that no other guru could ever measure up to that level. The great monastic traditions of the Middle East and Europe from the 4th century to this day have attempted to reflect their master’s ways in the lives of communities of monks and nuns, and individual hermits. The Indian and Christian traditions of spiritual seeking are remarkable in their independent and parallel development with much in common. It is not surprising to see that these traditions had most naturally converged and influenced one another from the first century C.E. onwards. The simple but fundamental meaning of ashram (a-shram, a-siramam) is great or strenuous effort. It is spiritually charged effort. We identify ashram as an all-inclusive, fundamental and most enduring spiritual vehicle of Indian culture available to all faiths that are rooted in the Indian soil.
Saint Thomas, the skeptic among Christ’s disciples, was called upon to follow the ways of his master’s life and teachings and to bear witness to the incarnate word of God to all nations (Matt: 28, 18-20). In obedience to his call he appeared in the Indian scene as Guru Thomas two thousand years ago. It was the historical instance of the incarnation (embodiment) of the Holy Spirit of Christ in the formation of Indian culture. The formation of Indian culture thus affected was far more significant than the hitherto acknowledgement of the Thomesian origin of Christianity in Kerala. A re-examination of the Indian religious traditions and scholarship in Tamil literature in the last fifty years have revealed evidences of a wider and significant permeation of Christian thought from 1st to 9th C.E. in Buddhist, Saivite and Vaishnavite doctrines, and in the bakthi movement.
These extraordinary findings of a wider and seminal Christian presence in Indian culture are truly significant for the reconstruction and re-evaluation of the story of Indian culture. It would also add the missing dimension to the story of Christendom itself. With these promptings, further research in ancient literature of other South Indian languages and archaeological studies may bring to light what has been left hidden and ignored. Thus, Christian Indians have the spiritually challenging task of engaging across their denominational leanings to examine their culture as they have never done before. With these promptings, they have a double-edged agenda to pursue: 1) To discover all hidden evidences of the Christian presence in Indian culture; and 2) To correct the imbalance in the understanding of its robust cultural tapestry, as they have been constrained to see only through narrow apertures of race, sectarian, or Vedic slant. Importantly, in view of reckless sectarian attempts to obscure the pluralism of Indian culture, efforts to stimulate an awareness of this problem on the part of ordinary people have to be urgently undertaken.
Ordinary people have mattered most as children of God to Jesus and his ministry. His disciples and throngs of followers were just ordinary people. They have remained central to the ministry of his disciples in India since Guru Thomas. In our time, ordinary people, who had ever remained marginal and subordinate to other dominant segments of their culture are emerging with full potential as subjects for shaping it. The problem of culture for them is not so much their participation in the ordinary life of language, food, clothing, festivals, folklore, and worship-rituals pertaining to their gods, goddesses and mythical objects. It is largely their exclusion from features of higher culture, in particular, those of mystically hushed up thinking that had sanctioned the oppressive social values they were inducted into and bound to live by.
Historically, Christian faith has had engaging affinity to this condition of ordinary people everywhere, as in India. The faithful of course have faltered in their mission. But their mandate to love their neighbor, to work for justice that restores the dignity of being human, and to promote peace toward establishing the Kingdom of God on earth for God’s children has been consistent and insistent. The groundswell of cultural change geared to the fundamental value of human dignity, as laid in the Constitution of India, is now buffeted by people of traditional value-orientation on the one hand, and by the compulsions of the so-called modern life and consumerism, on the other. The din of successes in the economic, industrial, scientific, defense fields and democratic structures of life has been beguiling enough to obscure the gloom of the culture adrift in a crisis of values. Ordinary people are brushed aside in the demeaning cultural habit, as they do not matter in these achievements of privileged classes and the emerging middle class. They are not a faceless mass but historically the most exploited multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious people, always constituting an overwhelming majority, stretching from one end of the country to the other. Not to read them that way is to misread them and to remorselessly continue the vestigial tendencies for oppressive disregard. It is now the turn of the ordinary people to reexamine the values written in the Constitution of India and the customary codes of conduct on the anvil of the value of human dignity. It would represent a movement of great consequence for all to beware in this election period. People of all faiths in India have the duty to uphold the ethics of human dignity as the foundation value of the Fundamental Rights of everyone and not let ordinary people be treated as pawns in the game of politics of the rich and the privileged. For their part, Christian Indians have a clarifying role to play in the clash of values and in the emerging blend of Indian culture for its unity and integrity. It should also result in a contemplative self-examination in humility on their part and a renewal of their faith in identifying with their culture. The process is named ‘the Christian Ashram Movement’. In the process, the knowledge of the incarnated presence of God in their culture would render them more authentic and, therefore, effective instruments of God’s love, hope, justice and peace.

b) Distinction of the Christian Ashram Movement:
# In the fundamental meaning of ashram as an intent or strenuous spiritual effort, every Christian practicing one’s faith, sincerely and humbly in one’s heart, home, or neighbourhood would be an ashramite or an ashramite in the making (to rephrase Stanely Jones’ expression, “Christian in the making”).
# As it is meant to be a grassroots’ movement of ordinary faithful across the land, it is not geared to sacred places, spiritual leaders, or denominations, old or new.
# It is Christ-centred, as Sat Guru Incarnate. For those who seek him, it is self-transforming, a real conversion in becoming an ashramite even in living everyday ordinary life.
# Ashramites would be known by their works in imitation of Christ.
# In the nature of ashrams, the Movement would be spontaneous, unorganized, autonomous and left to the initiative of ashramites inspired by its vision.
# Ashramites may adopt any of the practiced features of ashrams since the time of Guru Thomas for confessing the presence of Sat guru Christ (Immanuel) in their lives as “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
# The momentum for confessing their faith in their own cultural forms began with
Guru Thomas. It currently spans hundreds of formally known ashrams and native cultural
practices of the ordinary rural faithful, informally and formally in their congregations, who maintain their native worship forms (sitting on the floor, kneeling, prostrating), primarily sing lyrics composed by song writers and poets in their languages, use musical instruments of traditional vintage to accompany bajan singing, and, architecturally, use worship places generally indistinguishable from their large rural dwellings.
# One inspiring and proven model for the Movement, which has impacted Indian culture for over one hundred years, is the Christhukula Ashram at Tirupattur in Tamil Nadu. It is an integrated design of ashram aesthetics combining most practiced features of ashram traditions, ancient and modern, of Indian art, architecture, literature, lyrical compositions, life of prayer/contemplation, worship forms, and deeply imbibed cultural insights on sharing God’s love in service to the least and the spiritually starved.

C. Broader implications of Indigenous Christian witness in India:
→This Movement is a call for Christian Indians of all denominations, rural and urban, to
develop in unison a vigorous awareness of their culture-infused faith and respond in their own chosen ways.
→ The Movement could mean ecumenism of fellowship (koinonia), of heaving together of an uncommon revival kind, even as they retain their denominational identities. But, mercifully, it would extend beyond to every other cultural segment that wishes to join hands with it in upholding the dignity of every person as God’s child.
→ The dignity of every person so highlighted could inaugurate the renaissance of Indian culture. Instead of being just man-centred (individualism, power, creativity, self-interest and greed), it is Constitutionally and ethically charged dignity-in-relationships in the multi-religious culture.
→ Christian Indians’ rightful claim to their culture entitles them to play their inspired role in shaping its life. The Kingdom of God on earth that Jesus repeatedly spoke of is embracive of whole cultures, whether Judaic, Indian, or other cultures. Their witness to their faith or making the Christian presence known in their culture would be part of the free flow of ideas and insights that account for its uniqueness as a spiritual culture.
→ The Western-centric perception of the Christian faith in India is real and a hurdle for Christian presence. The Movement will help mitigate the perception.

(This piece owes much to others’ experience and ideas. To be meaningful, this needs to be rendered in many Indian languages and published in denominational organs to reach ordinary faithful who matter most . Feel free to initiate and, please, set the Movement going.)


Jan. 13, 2009
Posted by Christian Ashram Movement at 2:15 PM 1 comments
Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Welcome to the christianashram.blogger.com. It is posted in faith and hopes to render Christian presence in India as a faith-based, conscious and concerted movement of Christians across denominations to participate in the life of India currently undergoing tumultuous changes. Whether uprooted, awash, or fretfully shored up, nothing of the fundamentals of its culture could be taken for granted in this onrush. The value of human dignity should remain a firm rock in this turmoil. How it would emerge transformed should be of pressing concern to every thoughtful Indian. Christian Indians cannot stand aside in this crisis of culture. By their faith and circumstance, they could be , rather required to be, the leading edge of this awareness. A general cultural transformation geared to God given human dignity would begin with their own self-transformation in faith and culture.

An announcement of this movement is posted below. It would set the ball rolling. Your comments, additional news relevant to its focus, pictures, graphics, and such are eagerly sought for posting.

Sundaramani.
Posted by Christian Ashram Movement at 6:13 AM 0 comments
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