INDIA AGAIN - 2

With brothers and sisters in faith, in India

I went to church in Mysore this morning.  English-language service was early, 8:00 am, at St Bartholomew’s Church.  St Bartholomew’s is a member of the Church of South India (CSI), which is the second largest denomination of Christians in India after the Catholic Church with over fourteen thousand congregations across southern India.  The CSI is a result of a merger, in 1947,  of the Church of England (Anglican) in India with several Protestant churches, including Methodist, Presbyterian, Reformed; in the 1990s, some Baptist and Pentecostal churches also joined.  The liturgy as set out in the CSO worship handbook is definitely influenced by its Anglican roots, although the Ira Sankey hymnbook is certainly a reminder of the evangelical Protestant heritage that is also part o of this denomination.

St Bartholomew’s Church was built in the early nineteenth century, and still displays some of the marks of the old British order.  The service itself, and the congregation, had some elements familiar to my North American church experience, but also some uniquely Indian elements as well.

I went with one student from the Mount Allison group, setting off at 7:15 to either catch the bus or hail an autorickshaw.  We had walked only a short distance to the bus stop when we hailed a passing autorickshaw, which turned out to be wonderful beginning to Sunday: the driver is a part-time minister in a local Pentecostal church, a Mysorean who was raised Christian.  With his limited, but good English, we chatted about his church and work as a Christian in Mysore on the way downtown to St Bartholomew’s.  And the price for the ride was fair.

Entering the church, which must seat two to three hundred people, it seemed like a Canadian church with only a few people scattered around, mostly older.  However, over the next fifteen or twenty minutes, the church filled up.  The service itself started about ten minutes after the appointed hour, and still people were arriving: families, middle-aged couples, young men alone and in pairs, seniors.  The congregation was comprised of all ages, and for a North American used to seeing far more women than men in church on a regular basis, surprisingly gender-balanced.  It was certainly different to see a choir made up of women of all ages dressed in magnificently-coloured saris.

Despite the absence of worship order or bulletin, the liturgy was not greatly different from a North American Anglican church, although simplified somewhat.  The evangelical heritage shone through in some of the prayers, which were not written but offered with earnestness and sincerity suggesting, perhaps rightly, that God is more interested in how we are feeling, what we are experiencing, what our joys and challenges are, than in careful formulations of theological precepts.  Overall, the liturgy suggested a people experiencing their faith and their God in worship, rather than reflecting or thinking about God.  And, as in churches back home, there those who seemed to doze a little during the service, those who followed the sermon carefully, making notes on papers produced for that purpose, or underlining key texts in their bibles, those who sang expressively and those who didn’t.

Notable Indian elements were present; several of the women in the congregation were fulfilling Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians to ensure their heads were covered (1 Corinthians 11:2-16) by drawing their scarves or the ends of their saris up over their heads.  The holiness of the chancel and alter were highlighted by carpeting leading to the altar that contained the ancient Indian symbol of sacredness, an equilateral cross with arms bent at ninety-degree angles, or the swastika.  Worshippers were reminded in a small notice at the door to remove their footwear before proceeding to the altar for communion; I waited to make sure I was doing the right thing, as nothing was said in the service, but as people began making their way to the altar rail to receive communion, I noticed that everyone had removed their shoes, most proceeding barefoot and some in socks to the front of the church.     As communion was served, the congregation sang hymn after hymn, and without announcement everyone knew where to find it in the hymnbook, or just sang from memory.  The singing seemed to me to be much more melodic than harmonic, simple but with great feeling.  And unison readings and prayers were barely that, unison, with everyone proceeding at their own pace and with their own expression to the words, so that an Anglican-based printed prayer in the service book somehow became almost a Pentecostal speaking in tongues as everyone offered the common prayer as their own.

The sharing of the peace was subdued, calm and calming, unlike the exuberant greeting of the brothers and sisters in faith that is present in many Canadian churches.  The instructions in the CSI service book also suggest a unique Indianness to the act: “the sharing of the peace is done with a touch of the hand, the sign of namaskara [the hand signals that convey peace with the Indian greeting or valediction at parting, namaste: either the two hands are placed palm together, fingertips extending upwards, with the thumbs drawn back to the chest, or, using a single hand, the hand is laid flat over one’s heart with a slight bow of the head], or a hand clasp.”  In a culture that does not make significant use of bodily contact, this is the Indian version of the holy kiss.

And peace was extended, in the liturgy, in the nineteenth-century English hymns rich in poetry and theology, in the sense that God was to be experienced in singing, prayer and holy communion.  There are other churches in Mysore, but I think I will go back to St Bartholomew’s, even if worship does begin at 8:00 and continue for more than two hours; there, on Sunday morning, God was present for me.