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The Marthomite in Me


--There are some things that are really hard to say but have to be said one way or the other --

The other day, when I attended a Holy Communion service which supposedly followed the CSI order of worship (not really, but bits and pieces), I started to feel an unsual sense of discomfort within me. Now that discomfort did not emerge from the worship being in Malayalam (which I had gotten accustomed to, even though my first language is English). It did not come from the fact that I had to cover my head, because although I did not personally believe in forcing women to cover their heads, I was used to doing so since I knew that the Sunday service was not a time for arguments like these. It was also not because of the liturgical style of worship even though my family and I occasionally go to Free Worship churches back at home (and I would attend the college’s worship during my first year) because I do enjoy the depth of liturgy and the affirmations it hold.

That discomfort came from me being unable to recite and respond to the priest in the way I knew. It came from the willingness to respond but not knowing what to respond. It was the helplessness. When my mind turned to responding in chants of Malayalam that were partly Syriac, all I could hear was easy-to-understand Malayalam responses (which I couldn’t understand) in perfect song-like harmony. I got so used to the liturgy and chanting that was practiced in my church and even knew what they meant most of the time through the English services that coming to recite the simpler form of liturgy made it difficult. It was like I was back to square one – like I was again that 5th grader that struggled to understand her liturgy, that didn’t know what she was responding. The discomfort was only growing.

It’s an odd kind of thing to admit that although I did not agree with everything the church I grew in taught me, it was still the church that I grew up in. It was the comfort zone I had unintentionally built despite all the but-you-know-what-that’s-outdated statements and all the that’s-why-so-many-leave-our-church declarations. And its traces and signs will always be left in me, some out in the open, some hidden. It’s an odd thing to realize that although I’ve been exposed to a number of denominations because of my parents’ job and how I would wait for Sunday school vacations (my parents wouldn’t let me skip Sunday school) to go with my parents to the churches they visit and maybe listen to my father preach, I still have a little bit of everything that has taught, nurtured and influenced me in the Marthoma church. And I still have a lot more to learn and discover on where its teachings will lead me. Like David Hayward  rightly drew in his cartoon below, “You can take the boy out of the Church but you can’t take the church out of the boy”.



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