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Church of St. ap. Thomas in the city of Elur (Catholic)
India
(Hindi भारत, English
India
), official name -
Republic of India
(Hindi भारत गणराज्य, English
Republic of India
) is a state in South Asia. Population - more than 1.22 billion people (2010), territory - 3,287,263 km², by both these indicators it is the largest country in South Asia. It ranks second in the world in terms of population and seventh in territory. The capital is New Delhi. The official languages are Hindi and English.
Orthodoxy in India[edit]
Christianity
is the third largest religion in India.
According to legend, St. Thomas the Apostle visited the territory of India in the 1st century to preach. According to the tradition of Indian Christians, Apostle Thomas brought Christianity to India in 52. He arrived in Kodungallur, now the state of Kerala, and founded the Seven Churches of Apostle Thomas there, and also preached sermons in what is now the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It is believed that he suffered a martyr's death and was killed by a Brahmin at St. Thomas's Mount in Chennai, and was buried on the site of the present St. Thomas Cathedral.
According to a number of historians, India began to conduct intensive trade with Central Asia, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, both along mountain routes (from the north) and along sea routes (west and south coasts) long before the new era. This suggests that Christian traders settled in Indian cities along trade routes.
The second wave of Christianization occurred during the era of Portuguese colonization of India after the expedition of Vasco da Gama in 1498.
As of 2011, the number of Orthodox Christians in India numbered about 5 thousand people, which is about 0.0004% of the country's population.
Orthodox churches in the country are represented by: the Russian Orthodox Church and the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
On December 4, 2006, the Russian community began construction of a temple in honor of the Apostle Thomas on the territory of the Russian embassy in New Delhi.
Since 2013, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia has been considering the issue of opening an Orthodox mission in India.
Jesus loves Goa
The northern border of Goa runs along the Tirakol River, followed by the state of Maharashtra. The mouth of the river is blocked by a fort standing on a high hill. The first fortress in this place was built by Khem Swant, the Raja of the Maratha principality of Sawantwadi. In the 18th century, the Portuguese took possession of the hill and erected their bastion, Tiracol, on its top. Painted white and blue, the walls of the fort rise above the green jungle and blend with the sky and ocean water. The Portuguese built a chapel in the courtyard of the fort. In front of its entrance, on a slender pedestal stands, with arms outstretched, Jesus Christ - a painted, colorful statue. Tourists leave their mopeds in front of the entrance, walk along the walls of the fort, go down to the courtyard, hide in the shadow of the chapel and look at Christ. The vibrations of India come into contact with the image of the Savior, and the soul feels something. It's hard to say what. Tourists get on mopeds and ride back to Goa.
In the late 1960s, hippies came to Goa and found here a place of absolute freedom. They smoked hashish, listened to the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and practiced yoga. Like Digambara Jain ascetics, they went everywhere completely naked. Richer people followed the hippies. The market opened, then restaurants. Goa has become fashionable and travel agencies have included it in their catalogues. Over time, the hippies disappeared. It so happened that commerce was taking over the state from the south, and freaks looking for a free life migrated to the north. Arambol is the northernmost party town on the Goan coast. From there to Tirakol there are no more than five kilometers.
Arambol has a mixed reputation. Fans of a sedate holiday in hotels with swimming pools do not bother in Arambol, for fear of desecrating their glamorous status. Others believe that only Arambol remains from the original idea of Goa. Of course, the heirs of the hippies also live in the south, and in Arambol there are many who left the vanity fair for just a moment. It is difficult to separate one from the other. Everything in a person is mixed, internal harmony is rare. However, there is a formula for such division.
“Wealth does not make mortals happy,” said the young brahman Nachiketa to the god of the dead Yama. Their dialogue is the basis of the plot of the Katha Upanishad, an ancient Vedic text. This is how real “Goans” are identified - they strive for happiness, not wealth. There is no hippie radicalism in them. They don't fight for world peace, don't live in communes, don't go naked. But, one way or another, they all use the concept of “Spirit”. If you carefully ask a resident of Arambol about the reasons for his move here, he will talk about spirituality. This is quite a lot in our times. Atheism, skepticism and the dominance of machines left no place in the city man not only for the Spirit, but also for the individual soul. There are no such categories in his thinking anymore. And in Arambol the Spirit breathes freely.
Walk north along the beach. Overcome the lava flow that goes into the sea, pass the rock from which paragliders take off. Behind it you will find the beginning of the trail. The trail will lead you to a large banyan tree. Sitting next to him on an old tourist rug is Baba ji, the spiritual protector of Arambol. He cooks chickpeas in a saucepan over a small fire. “This forest is sacred, this banyan tree is sacred,” Baba ji will tell you. “And a holy man should live here,” you answer him. Baba ji will smile and thank you with great dignity.
The sacred banyan tree has been growing for a long time, and an ascetic has been sitting next to it for a long time. Baba ji is young, he took the place of his grandfather. This is the role of this family in the structure of the Universe. New tourists consider the ascetic a freak and go to the banyan tree for photographs. But we know that only Baba ji’s meditation protects Arambol from the demons of the outside world. Receive his blessing and go to the beach to watch the sunset.
Links[edit]
- Amazing facts about the stay of the Apostle Thomas in India
- Letter from an Orthodox Indian
- Eight days in India. Priest Georgy Maximov
- Orthodoxy in India: problems and prospects
- Orthodoxy in India. VKontakte page
- Orthodox Church in India
- Indian notes
- Greek Orthodox mission in India: conversation with nun Nektaria (Paradisi)
- Window to India. Orthodox pilgrim
- How do Christians live in India? (photo report)
Orthodox Life
For St. Apostle Thomas, we bring to your attention our old material - an interview with priest Alexey Trubach, who in 2004-2005, during the Christmas and Easter period, made pastoral trips to India and Nepal, where the Apostle Thomas once preached.
Photo from the priest’s personal archive
The Temptation of Spiritual Indifference
– It’s surprising to hear that Orthodox priests preach in India and Nepal...
– The first to bring Christianity to India was St. Thomas the Apostle. His memory lives on this land to this day. He founded the Christian Church with five converted high-caste noble families in southern India. Unfortunately, due to territorial isolation from Ecumenical Orthodoxy and ignorance of the situation in the Church, first in the 4th - 5th centuries, Indian Christians switched to the Nestorian, and then in the 17th century to the Monophysite Patriarchate of Antioch, thus leaving Orthodoxy. Nowadays it is an autocephalous Indian church, although it is called the Syrian Malankara Orthodox Church. It is part of the family of Monophysite Orthodox churches (Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Indian, Syrian). After the Apostle Thomas, the last and perhaps the only reliably known preacher of Orthodoxy in India was the monk, Russian missionary-ascetic, Archimandrite Andronik (Elpidinsky), who spent 18 years in India from 1931 to 1949 and established close relations with Indian Christians. He was an active supporter of the reunification of Indian Monophysites with Ecumenical Orthodoxy due to their affinity, in particular, to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Now Russian Orthodox priests are sent to serve in India and Nepal twice a year, at Christmas and Easter, mainly for our compatriots, employees of diplomatic missions in these countries, as well as for Orthodox fellow citizens working or living here. By the way, Orthodox services held in 2004 in Kathmandu at the request of Russian women living in Nepal were the first in the history of this country. But, in fact, all our missionary activity is limited to caring for the Orthodox and maintaining ties with Indian Christians.
– What kind of people come to services?
– There are quite a lot of Russian people in India and Nepal. The Russian diplomatic corps in Delhi alone consists of about a thousand people. Employees of diplomatic missions, Russian specialists working in joint ventures, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian women married to citizens of India and Nepal.
Most of them would like to preserve their Orthodox roots, but maintaining faith in conditions when you are surrounded by an alien culture becomes a serious problem. This is even more difficult to implement in a country where there is not a single Orthodox church, except for two small Greek churches in the Greek diplomatic missions in Delhi and Calcutta, which are generally inaccessible to our fellow citizens.
– Is there really no Orthodox community in India?
- There is a community. At the Russian Embassy in Delhi, it includes about seventy Orthodox people. And she has already shown her resilience and prayer activity, at least over the past four years. But, unfortunately, their dream of building at least a small embassy church until now seemed simply unrealizable. However, recently there have been certain hopes: a prayer room has been allocated and renovated, and space has been allocated for the parish library. The Ambassador of the Russian Federation to India V.I. provided great assistance in this initiative. Trubnikov.
However, although the visit of a priest twice a year is not entirely sufficient to care for the Orthodox of the entire region, on the other hand, the regularity of visits and their organization by the embassy is already a great achievement. Thus, the Greek priest did not come to the Greek temple in Delhi on Easter 2004. It turned out that the Greeks, Serbs, Cypriots, and the embassies of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine remained unfed. Ambassadors from nine Orthodox powers attended our Easter service.
I just want to emphasize that the community not only needs the temple, but they are ready to accept it and fill it with life.
– Why is the cultural environment in which our compatriots find themselves dangerous for faith? – Most often we observe not a transition to another faith, but hesitation of people. And the scary thing is not that they will convert to Catholicism or Hinduism, but that they may become lukewarm.
It is very easy to lose faith. Everything starts small. For example, just put “for beauty” an ordinary figurine of Ganesha, the Indian god with an elephant’s head, on the table. A person does not so much accept someone else’s faith, but is deprived of any faith at all. A superficial perception of their symbolism leads to a superficial perception of what we ourselves have. A person no longer cares what to live or die for - after all, in different religions these issues are resolved differently.
Here's an example from church history. Back in the 3rd century, when Christianity was banned in the Roman Empire, many people were already baptized. However, it often happened that people simultaneously believed in both their gods and the Christian God. Therefore, when the persecution of Christians began, those who had only one God in their hearts and in their home behaved differently than those for whom turning away from Christ was just removing one figurine from the pantheon.
The same thing is happening now. Most of these people do not become truly believing Hindus or Buddhists. And by betraying their roots, in return they acquire a spiritual fetish, which subsequently turns into a spiritual vacuum.
– Is there a flow of seekers of Eastern mysticism from Russia to India?
– Yes, people come and seek spiritual insight in India. The secretary of the Russian consulate in Madras told me that the consulate was inundated with letters from relatives asking them to rescue their relatives from Sai Baba’s sect. They stayed there to live, idolizing him, believed in the idol, being lured by his “miracles,” they prayed to him. About three hundred Russians permanently live near Sai Baba's ashram. Of course, our Orthodox church in Delhi could become some kind of feature, a milestone, a chance to come to our senses before embarking on the path of idol worship, and then to complete devastation.
– How do our Orthodox Christians keep their faith here?
– In Nepal, I met especially vivid evidence of the living Orthodox faith, even in a country so isolated from the Orthodox Church. For example, Alla Sharma, former chairman of the Association of Russian Women in Nepal “Ivushka”, its permanent leader, originally from St. Petersburg, has been living in Nepal for 25 years. Her husband is a very famous person in Kathmandu, a surgeon, the king's personal physician, and the rector of a state university. He is a Hindu, she is an Orthodox believer. Alla not only did not lose her faith, but, periodically visiting her homeland in St. Petersburg, she became a church member, and during my pastoral visit she did not miss a single service. It is interesting to note that her husband himself helped her install the corner with icons.
– What is the peculiarity of worship in India outside the walls of the temple?
- I served on the antimins. All church utensils are taken with you, so services, and most importantly, the Divine Liturgy, can be performed anywhere. In fact, wherever you serve, the grace of God and angels gather there during worship: in an open field, or in a trade mission, or in an embassy building. And during the service this place becomes a temple. I was told that when the embassy children passed by the trade mission, where Christmas services were held, after my departure, they said, pointing to the building: “Here is the temple, but the priest has left.”
Of course, they dream of a temple. Because the temple is the place where angelic forces will always be present. And even outside of worship, a person feels the presence of God there.
– Do the local population convert to Christianity?
– Hinduism permeates the entire life of Indians. In order to abandon Hinduism, a very strong internal revolution is needed and an Orthodox community is needed, an environment where a person would have the opportunity to preserve his acquired faith.
Just on my last trip, I baptized two Nepali men. They studied in Ukraine for five years, and already there they went to Orthodox churches to pray and turn to the Lord God. Therefore, in Nepal, having Orthodox wives, they quite consciously decided to be baptized, although for them, living in a Hindu kingdom and intending to stay there, this would not bring any benefits. It is worth noting that Nepalese society is very tolerant and does not infringe on the rights of people of other faiths. Yet Baptism for them is a conscious rejection of the religious tradition in which they were raised. But they have small home communities, where, I think, they will be able to acquire and maintain Orthodoxy. Many people in mixed marriages baptized theirs in Orthodoxy.
Some Hindus convert to Catholicism, although such conversion is often very superficial. Many of them admit that they go to both Hindu and Catholic churches at the same time, since there they can receive humanitarian aid and educational grants in exchange for even an external acceptance of the faith.
The apostle walked there
– What holy places associated with the name of the Apostle Thomas did you manage to visit? What did you manage to find out about him?
– In Madras, on the coast of the Indian Ocean, two hundred meters from the sea, St. Thomas the Apostle built a temple with his own hands. The last four years of his apostolic ministry from 68 to 72 passed in this city. His preaching there was successful: many of the local population converted to Christianity, which became a reason for the envy of one Hindu Brahman, who hired soldiers to kill him. After the martyrdom of the apostle, his disciples were buried under this temple.
This place is described in the historical notes of Marco Polo (XII). Later, Vasco da Gama recalls that even Muslims living in Madras perceived the apostle as a saint and revered his grave. Now here is the Catholic Basilica of St. Thomas the Apostle. The Lord vouchsafed me to perform the Orthodox Divine Liturgy at the grave of the Apostle Thomas in the crypt of the basilica for our Orthodox fellow citizens, employees of the consulate, which, by the way, is located a five-minute walk from the grave of the holy Apostle.
A lot of Indians come there - both Hindus and Christians. There is a museum at the basilica where, in the reliquary ***, the spear with which St. Thomas the Apostle was killed is kept.
It must be said that the relics of the holy apostle were scattered in pieces all over the world: in Italy, according to legend, the holy head of the apostle is located. A piece of the relics returned to the basilica itself only in the 19th century.
I was also able to visit two mountains where the apostle took refuge from persecution by Brahman warriors. On Malaya Gora the apostle had his own cave, where he preached. And nearby there is a source of water, which, according to legend, the Lord created through the prayer of St. Thomas, so that the disciples, in such a hot climate, could stay with the apostle for as long as possible. When the apostle, discovered by soldiers, was forced to flee from the cave, the Lord performed a miracle: a crevice formed in the rock through which the saint was able to get out. He fled from the Small Mountain to the Big Mountain. It must be said that all the holy places associated with the Apostle Thomas now belong to the Catholic Church. On the slope of the Big Mountain there is a convent. This holy place offers views of the entire city. It was here, during prayer, that one of the soldiers killed the apostle from the back, piercing him with a spear, the tip of which, as I already said, is kept in the basilica museum.
– What is now located at the actual site of the murder of the Apostle Thomas? – On this site there is now a Catholic church, which was built in the 16th century by the Portuguese. It contains the cross of St. Thomas the Apostle. He carved it with his own hand on a stone, and it was in front of him that the apostle prayed before his martyrdom.
The holy apostle brought with him to Madras an icon of the Mother of God, painted, according to legend, by the Apostle Luke. If we remember that the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God was painted by the Apostle Luke, then it becomes clear where such similarity comes from in the arrangement of the hands of the Child and the Mother of God, in their mutual position on these icons. But, naturally, time forced us to update the colors, and the images of the baby and the Most Holy Theotokos turned out to have more Russian or more Indian features, depending on the icon. There this icon is very revered.
– Was Madras damaged by the tsunami that hit the Indian coast? You ended up there immediately after the disaster, right?
– Yes, of course, Madras suffered significantly from the tsunami. As I already said, our consulate is located on the coast, a hundred meters from the Basilica of St. Thomas the Apostle. I, alarmed by the news of the tsunami, called there on the eve of my arrival, but found out that the wave reached exactly the gates of the consulate and the basilica and... stopped! Although, if you drove 500 meters from the basilica, you could see the destructive power of the wave at the same distance from the sea. Of course, a miracle happened through the intercession of St. Thomas the Apostle. By the way, the clergy and parishioners of the basilica provided great assistance to the victims. Every night for a week after the tragedy, before the government was able to help everyone, up to a thousand homeless people found shelter and food on the territory of the basilica.
During the Divine Liturgy on the tomb of the Apostle, which I have already mentioned, we prayed for the preservation of this place, city, country from famine, flood in Russian and English, since quite a lot of Indians gathered at the tomb, also fervently praying for the preservation of their land according to prayers of St. Thomas the Apostle.
– What did you gain on these trips?
– For me this is a very difficult country. But I am grateful to God for allowing me to touch the shrines associated with the name of His disciple, the Apostle Thomas, and his holy intercession. He gave me the opportunity to serve the Divine Liturgy in a pagan country, to bring the light of Orthodoxy here, because our worship is the best preaching of Christ to the world. And God willing, the time will come when at least one Orthodox church in this South Asian region will shine with a golden dome as a testimony and preservation of our Orthodox faith!
* Monophysitism is a heresy that arose in the Church in the 5th century and became widespread in the East. Monophysites believed that Jesus Christ was only God and had only one divine nature. Nestorianism, on the contrary, taught that Jesus Christ was just a man marked by special divine grace - but not God. Both Monophysitism and Nestorianism were condemned in the 5th century at church councils. Orthodoxy teaches that our Lord Jesus Christ is the God-man, that is, he has both divine and human natures. According to the definition of the IV Ecumenical Council (451 AD), these natures are united “unmerged, unchangeable, indivisibly, inseparably.”
** Antimins (Greek: instead of a throne) - a linen or silk cloth depicting the position of Christ in the tomb with a particle of relics sewn into it and with the signature of the ruling bishop, certifying the legality of the service. Without an antimension, the sacrament of the Eucharist cannot be celebrated even in church; with it, the liturgy can also be celebrated in the open air.
*** Reliquary (Late Latin reliquarium) – a container for storing relics.
THOMAS
