A glimpse of Jesus and Francis in him. (g f xavier)

Who will be the ambassador of the Catholic Church in the future Kerala?

Even before her death in 1996, Mother Teresa was widely known as a "living saint" in India.  No one in Kerala will agitate if Bobby Jose capuchin is a depicted as the next living saint in Kerala. More than his words, more than his admonitions, more than his comforting style, he attempted to live the way of life he was called into. He is not a miracle worker and a magician but who is based on the very reality of human existence. He is a spiritual master and in Indian terms ‘Guru’. More than imaginations he valued life on earth. The people described as saints in The Bible were however still very much human. They were called, they were holy, and they were extremely dedicated (both in terms of attitude, and in the sense of being set apart), but they were still real people, far from perfect. Saints never stopped being normal people - fishermen, farmers, doctors, teachers, carpenters. The "little people" of the congregations were as much saints as the most famous and prominent ones such as Peter and Paul.

So, in this sense, he is a holy man very much in the line of Bible. He is just proving that the sainthood begins at the birth of a person, or the responsibility to live as a saint begins with the birth. A saint is not born when he dies and canonized by authorities. God has already scripted him into his book of the legends for the people in next centuries to ponder on the meaning of life. With his way of life he belongs to the rare Species of Francis of Assisi, Bonaventure, Felix of Cantalice, Giles of Assisi, Maximillian Kolbe, Clare of Assisi, Joseph of Cupertino, etc… He is the future torch bearer of the catholic life, saintly life. He is defining with his own life the other meaning of Catholicism, the other meaning of ‘life’. His words are the true sign of the Divine presence within us.

In a time when the Kerala church approaches everything diplomatically and politically to hold on its influence among the folk, he chose to be a silent observer sculpting himself to be a question mark, by his simple way of challenging himself to live Christ Jesus. He has grown beyond rites, churches, denominations, castes, sects and religions. He is a holy person ‘vox Populi’. (Beginning with the early Christian martyrs in the first century, holy persons were chosen by popular acclaim. Legends of their lives were spread through word of mouth. Their stories evolved into some wonderfully fantastic tales, probably arising from our intellectual, moral, and spiritual need for heroes. They fed the hungry, clothed the naked, healed the sick, and defended the defenseless).

To all my friends who read these from different parts of the world speak with him and you will feel strong in inner guidance. If you sense darkness inside your heart, look at him and sense the light of God. Feel how your wounds melt in Christ. Begin a journey of love. If the 2.9% Christians in India are known to the whole world through Mother Teresa of Kolkata, in the future the Kerala Catholics will be known through Bobby Jose capuchin. He is the next Padre Pio. He lives Christ in the way of Francis of Assisi. God molded himself as the living saint.

"Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunder peals, crying, "Hallelujah! For The Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give Him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure" - for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, "Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb." And he said to me, "These are true words of God." (Revelation 19:6-9 RSV)

(This is written in appreciation to his spirituality and way of life. I have not attempted to criticize his philosophy and literature. More than his well-known books and ever appreciated homilies and classes, I would consider his life as basis for what is written above. What is scripted is my very personal opinion as I knew him for the last 20 years and I had an opportunity to live with him in the same community for a considerable period of time.)


The link given below leads to one of his speeches in his mother tongue 'Malayalam'.
http://www.shalomtv.tv/vod/video/194

Summary and Crits. (A short description about an athropologist and Religionswissenscaftler) Part 9.

Summary

His works deals with a lot of notions and ideas. As I have already explained, here i may try to bring everything together. So the main notion is his ritual process. He had developed a unique ritual approach stressing the processual nature of ritual among the Ndembu and of ritual activity in complex societies. „I have used the term "anti-structure,"...to describe both liminality and what I have called "communitas." I meant by it not a structural reversal...but the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of social statuses“(From Ritual to Theater). He is for the transformation of the society or the betterment of the society. Society (societas) seems to be a process rather than a thing--a dialectical process with successive phases of structure and communitas. There would seem to be--if one can use such a controversial term--a human "need" to participate in both modalities. Persons starved of one in their functional day-to-day activities seek it in ritual liminality. The structurally inferior aspire to symbolic structural superiority in ritual; the structurally superior aspire to symbolic communitas and undergo penance to achieve it (based on his book ‘The ritual process’) Turner believes that individuals deprived of either structure or communitas will seek to fill their needs through rituals that provide them with either structure, in the case of those that are structurally inferior, or communitas, in the case of those that are structurally superior.

Crits

Turner’s schema provides a social revolution through ritual, which draws both from his Marxist past and his Christian present. His structure anti-structure ritual process is dialectic in nature. Theoretically provocative discussions on Turner are very rare. Victor Turner is primarily an anthropologist. His concrete data regarding ritual comes from his fieldwork with the Ndembu. Turner's theoretical approach is reliant on the work of Arnold van Gennep, who developed the idea of liminality in his own work. Turner used ideas, like communitas and liminality to organize his thoughts and to assist in understanding the ritual behavior of the tribe he studied. Turner's work is also influenced by structuralists, such as Levi-Strauss, and by sociologists of religion, such as Emile Durkheim.

 Turner has often been praised for the careful detail in his accounts of ritual among the Ndembu. Turner has been widely acclaimed for his views on the processual nature of ritual, and his identification of the liminal phase in ritual was an important innovation in the anthropological study of religion and ritual. Turner has been praised for the ethnographic richness of his ritual analyses and for his theoretical innovations, but he cannot be applauded as a great systematizer. Turner's failure to treat his ideas systematically is evident from the multitude of labels with which his work has been characterized: It has been called "situational analysis" (Collins 1976), "symbolic action theory" (Holmes 1977), "the semantics of symbolism" (Gilsenan 1967), "comparative symbology" (Grimes 1976; Turner 1974b), "anti-structural social anthropology" (Blast 1985), and "processual symbolic analysis" (Arbuckle 1986; Keyes 1976; Moore 1984; Saler 1979).

Turner's most valuable contributions remain his conceptual apparatus, his distinct analytical mode of ritual analysis, and his application thereof in his Ndembu research. This last accomplishment is a major strength of his work. He was not a theorist for theory’s sake. 


Literaturverzeichnis

}Axel, Michaels (Hrsg.,1997): Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft, München: Beck.

}Ashley, Kathleen M (ed.1990): Victor Turner and the construction of Cultural Criticism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

}Turner, Victor (1957): Schism and continuity in an African society ,Oxford: Berg.

}Turner, Victor (1969): The ritual process, Structure ans anti-structure, NY: Aldine publishing company.

}Turner, Victor (1974):Dramas, fields and metaphors, Ithaca and London: Cornell university press.

}Auszug aus: http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/turner.htm

Relation between ritual and religion. (A short description about an athropologist and Religionswissenscaftler) Part 8.

Turner regarded that there is in ritual an essential element of religious belief. The religious component in ritual was essential for Turner. We see that for Turner ritual is religious, and religion involves both social experiences in ritualistic activity and a systematic corpus of beliefs "which have for their object invisible and intangible beings or powers which a human group recognizes as superior, on which it depends" (Victor Turner in ‘From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play’). Ritual is inspired by a religious belief in supernatural beings or powers.

 Religion in Turner's work refers to both belief (religion as thought) and practice (religion as ritual action). The component of practice or action is clearly demonstrated by Turner's focus on detailed analyses of ritual performances. The component of religious belief and its significance in ritual, however, are less well developed in Turner's writings.

The religion is above any secular form of thought since by religious belief in supernatural beings and its powers; its nature is different from the worldly or better inner-worldly forms of knowledge. The references are made to the supernatural or ‘really real’ and they are independent from man made arrangements.  In this way, it can be said that religion is not just like any other system of ideas and does have supreme ontological value, but only for the subjects involved in religious rituals. Religion, referring to the supernatural, is more than "theory," but only in the eye of the believer.