Christianity and India

"Christians living in Kerala astutely relate the Christ to the Vedic tradition."

Christianity in India is about as old as Christianity itself. In the south, in the Tamil province, especially, the cult of the Christian is especially well developed. In parts of India it easily adopted the Brahminic mode of expression. Syrian Christians living in Kerala engage in casting their horoscopes for example, and astutely relate the life of the Christ to Vedic traditions. In some regard, Christian-ways in these regions are ubiquitous; in turn it gives culture to India.

 The deeply imbedded notion of the Avatar inspires many. Through divining the personality of the Christ, Indians see the Christ as something of a Supreme Being, incarnated, come to earth to save mankind. The idea of wrong, of sin is overlooked. In this type of salvation drama, Christ, the Avatar is most appealing. Sabrania Bharati, a Tamil poet of national prominence and a Shakti devotee wrote:

My Lord expired on the Cross

and ascended in three days.
Beloved Mary Magdalene

 saw this happen.
Friends! Here's the esoteric sense.
The gods will enter us
and guard us from all ills 

if we transcend pride.
 

Mary Magdalene is Love,
Jesus the Soul.
The outer evil destroyed,
the good life sprouts.
She praised the radiance 

in that golden face.
That was the love of Magdalene,

ah, what joy!
If Sense is bound to the Cross of Truth,
and crucified with nail austerity,
Jesus of the strengthened soul 

will rise as the boundless sky

Magdalene is Eternal Feminine,
Jesus Christ is deathless dharma,
Draw we close to the symbol:
look, an inner meaning glows.

The poet does not mean to give a philosophical view here. Instead he is deeply moved to record his experience in poetry, the song of words. Praising the image of the Christ upon the Cross, he attempts to reconcile this image with the sure knowledge of deep suffering, of passion. Why should there be so much suffering? Is the persecutor Pilate to be the ever source of this suffering? What remains now of godliness, of mercy, of holiness? The heart in ascension rises and opens to the eternal, to hope.

How, muses the poet, shall we coax, the Lord of Hosts to enter our consciousness, making us the carriers of the imperishable Dharma? With Mary Magdalene as love incarnate, love then is the entrailing of the gods to combine the human with Jivatman and Supreme, the Paramatman.
Where love is expressed, smallness falls away; there lives instead the Divine, for God is Love, we learn. The Supreme responds to the sincere strivings of the Human being.

Another Indian of great repute, Sri Aurobindo also felt the indescribable pull towards the imagery of  Christ upon the Cross. Affected by the story of The Divine Comedy,  Dante who remarks with simple clarity, 'in His will is our peace,' reflects the view of Aurobindo equally himself.
Aurobindo freely engaged the life and gospels of the Christ in his own writings. For Aurobindo, the Christ represented the ideal, the strivings of the One to completeness, to wholeness. The Avatar, he believed, was significant for man's spiritual progress, for his ultimate ascension. In his epic poem, Savitri, he writes about the Christ as Avatar in a step towards human unity.

Centers of Light

 "Joy is prayer--joy is strength--joy is love." --Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Bliss of Identity

All nature is taught in radiant ways to move
All beings are in myself embraced
O fiery boundless heart of joy and love,
How are you beating in a mortal's breast!

It is your rapture flaming through my nerves
and my cells and atoms thrill with You;
My body your vessel is and only serves
As a living wine-cup of Your ecstasy.

I am a center of your golden light
And I its vast and vague circumference;
You are my soul great, luminous and white
And Yours, my mind and will, and glowing sense.

Your spirit's infinite breath I feel in me;
My life is a throb of your eternity.
--Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems
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The Idea of Tantra
When you are alone and in your own place, you are dancing for the god and identifying with it. This whole idea is basic to Tantra: to worship a god, you must become that god. No matter what you call the god or think it is, the god you worship is the god you are capable of becoming.
The power of a deity is that it personifies a power that is in Nature and in your nature. When you find that level, then you are in play. That is the work of art in general, because art is really worship.
--Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living

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Does God Exist?
Perceptible and yet not perceptible; invisible and yet powerful, real like the energy--charged air, wind, storm, as important for life as the air we breathe: this is how in ancient times people imagined the Spirit, and God's "invisible" workings... Spirit as understood in the Bible, means--as opposed to flesh, the force or power moving from God.
An "invisible" force that is effective, powerful, creative, or destructive for life in judgement, in creation, in history, in Israel and later in the [Christian] Church. It comes upon one powerfully or gently, stirring up love, ecstasy, often producing extraordinary phenomenon, active in great minds of courage, of Moses, warriors, singers, prophets and prophetesses.

The Spirit is not--as the word itself might suggest--the spirit of mankind. This is the Spirit of God, who in the [oneness] Holy Spirit is the light of all creation and the world. He is not any sort of magic, supernatural aura, or magical being of an animistic kind.
The Spirit is the One, the God himself. He is God close to mankind and the world... comprehending, bestowing, but not bestowable, free, not controllable; he is life giving love, power and force. A wind blowing through all of Creation by divine will, but not by any force."
He comes where he is willed and stays afar from where he is not, in a sort of Divine wisdom, the Spirit waits to be called.
--Hans Kung, Does God Exist?