Mary

I was reading this today and my heart leaped. Hearts leap, I think, every time there is an instinctive recognition! My heart does this for the clear voice of God, when I stop to listen; for rain and snow, for as long as I can remember; for babies; and for puppies and other little things; for missions; for ideas and stories that have been mine and I see in other people's writing... When I was 14, I remember describing this in a composition assignment as the germ of my idea having taken root and grown in someone else's imagination...

My heart leaps for many things (chocolate comes close, ladies!) It leaps for that unmistakable presence of God that comes in worship at church, in the process of cleaning out a stubborn stain on my jeans, or even when I'm singing barefoot in my classroom during planning time! That's a good expression. I admit to being a geek. I looked for something to tell me the background, the story of a Hebrew idiom, what it meant when the babe in Elizabeth's womb leaped for joy. The other place it's used in the Bible is when a woman is pregnant with twins. The story is that they definitely jostled each other and mummy knew it. The twins were going to be pretty important in history and they were fighting for their places! Leaping = strong emotion? Definitely. But I found no contextual interpretation. It is quite literal, I suspect.

Here's the background. An expectant Mary visits her cousin, Elizabeth, who is now pretty darn pregnant! Elizabeth has been waiting for motherhood for a really long time (if you know how that feels, back me up here!). There is joy in the encounter. And baby John kinda skips a little when the ladies are saying hello. He knew who he was meeting. Not his pregnant aunt, but someone else. Inside that cocoon of his mother's womb, he recognises the Spirit of God, now made flesh... and John's giving a little gasp and a stutter and screaming in his head 'There he is! That's him!' and wants to get out. Like your heart kinda flips over and knocks on your chest to reach out to the one you love.

Well, so here I was, my heart leaping, my head thinking about the beautiful account of the resurrection by this amazing blogger and trying to make connections. And I was struck by how another Mary's heart must have leaped on that Sabbath day.

Mary was in that dreadful waiting place with all the others when we just don't know. We think we're facing irrevocable loss. Something as final as we believe death is. Most of us haven't taken God seriously when he said he was going to raise up that temple in 3 days, anyway. We've become used to interpreting statements outside God's vision, inside the most-likely box. Some of us haven't even heard that there is more to the story. We think we've just read the last chapter and we've lost. Some of us think there might be because there is hope but it comes and goes. I know I have to hold on to it with every last ounce of strength some days. I know you all have those days. So we're... what is that word? Oh, 'coping'.

Mary's there (I'm assuming she's also the woman caught in adultery). And then there is a 'But God' moment. Mary sees him and knows in that moment, that Jesus lives.

Still that isn't what made my heart leap today. Those moments when I recognise my God, when I look and find that I'm looking into His eyes - they're beautiful. Heart-stoppingly, undeniably beautiful. And you can't but smile or grin or laugh in joy. But what made my heart leap was thinking about what made Mary's heart leap.

This - Jesus said to her, "Mary!" (John 20: 16)

He knows my name. He knows me. He knows that I sinned and pushed my limits so much that I was the black sheep of my little Magdalene community. The one that nobody really talked about at weddings and feasts, the one that everyone whispered about. He saw my demons. He cast them out. He knows. 


But He also knows just how very, very much I love Him. Because He was looking into my eyes as I faced death, and He was willing me to live. He was there daring everyone else to so much as touch me before He cold reach out and save me. And He saw the light change in my eyes, when I felt it and knew I would never be the same again. And with that one word, He turns my life around. Again. Mary. Just the sound of his voice.

And that's what really amazes me. Love so big that it hurts. That He died for me. That He knows me inside out, better than I know myself, and loves me. I am constantly learning about this God who loves me.  Despite my pastor who keeps telling us more about who God is every meeting, and God Himself who reveals more every day, I will never fully know Him because He's infinite God. But thank God that I do know Him. And this vast, this infinite, endless God with no limits, this Man who simply died and rose again because death had not a finger's hold on him... this God is my God. And this God knows me. Little, insignificant me. And because of that, I am who I am. I have my identity in Him. I am the person He made and loves and I'm growing into who He wants me to be.

And I still can't get my head around this - He knows me intimately. And when I don't see Him because I've forgotten to look, He's gonna call my name.

Meesai Machismo

So such a serious blog name doesn't mean I am usually a serious person. Maybe INFPs are the intense kind generally. But maybe being a joker is a defence strategy I've developed over the years to a fine art ;) This preamble simply to say you're going to get no soul-searching outta me tonight. If any of you are reading, and are committed to handlebar meesais, you should probably not read any further! Coming up: one full-blown rant on unfashionable facial hair types.

I call them meesais and not moustaches because they are prolific in the motherland. And I associate them with the oh-so-Tamil man - and woman, for that matter - and self-satisfied smirks of fatal attraction possibilities! Get this for example:

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=S7C_5NB4bSU&feature=related

Ha! My dad had a pretty big moustache and other people I respect do - and my mum swears that without a moustache every weakness of the mouth shows so that one can only giggle in response to 'hello'. My poor mother. Still I am scarred by encounters with the meesai.

I walked out of school one afternoon, blazing hot 1 pm sun. And I walk circumspectly edged against the wall that lines the long, narrow driveway into the alma mater, knowing every incoming car knows the schoolgirl comes first. I was 11? 12? Anyway, I'm swinging my starched, A-line not-long-enough, not-short-enough skirt, holding my unwieldy lunch basket and shifting 13 kilos from one shoulder to the next (such troopers we were) until I'm nearly certain I don't have any more shoulders. And I'm glad school's done for the day, when who should come along but Biker Dude, in wanna-be black sunglasses and all-black shirt and jeans. He only gets classified dud in retrospect though - so I don't know how coloured my historiography is! At the time, I chose to name it The Curious Incident of the Uncle in the Afternoon. He must have been a little younger than the going rate for uncles generally, with handlebars that vied with his bike's for symmetry and attention. And he tried, from a distance of several yards in a harmless attempt at humour, to block my path. You know it - you go left, they go right, and you do that little dance, so often unintentional. And then he grinned - and oh sorrow, he waggled that meesai at me. I crossed the road. Dance over. No, 'hello, uncle, I'm studying in 3rd standard' opp for you, bud.

Scarred.

Again, switch slides to another after-school journey back home. What do we have here? Policeman combing his badge of honour down either side, twirling it manfully in the face of a police bike's rearview mirror. Guffaws of laughter in the backseat. More tarnishment of the poor meesai.

Not so scarred, but etched for life.

Upward curls on pot-bellied policemen. Tarnishment - check.

Prerequisite for the upswung lungi, symbol of extreme proprietorship, Mallu and Tam landlord images, swaggering but uncreditable machismo. Like, check this out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aCShcWz5XQ&feature=related The moustache is what you get ID-d on. No entry into Kerala's hottest and most exclusive, or TN's for that matter, without.

More tarnishment. From a colonised, conditioned, Peetru. If you don't know what that is, embrace your identity in Madras terms.

Colour

Do you think some of us run away from intensity? Father, forgive me.

I know I have been away for some time - I have had a rollercoaster ride of a few months! And boy, do I mean that. I had supervisor problems - race, being one of them. I have learnt that people everywhere can be racist and not. I have learnt that I have a lot to learn - at least in so far as blinder-ing myself to what others do and don't do that strikes me as so wrong. And I've also become a lot humbler in thinking that I am not above certain emotions...

I am so mad when people say 'I want a black/white guy' or 'International students are not as intellectually capable'... People, that second sentence is a whole story but not for here and now! I went through years of being mad at members of extended (and not so extended) family being caste/colour/race-prejudice-ridden. White people aren't different. I'm saying white because, in post-colonial India, they used to be the other. Political correctness is all very well, and I love us all, but for the purpose of this blog, can I just call us by our colours? I am brown. There are shades of us. And black and olive and white. It gets me somewhere deep inside and twists my gut in a pre-sick feeling when I hear it being called 'our culture' - when what they mean is our race/nationality.

Are we really that different?

We're loving whatever our colour. We're racist whatever our colour.

I had an interesting class this morning. One student called another 'not Chinese deep inside your heart' because she had learned English at a young age and so 'was corrupted by Western culture'. Another crime was watching 'Western' movies and listening to the music.

I hurt. She hurt, but she was the bigger person. It hurts. And the more you hurt, the more you grow. Why must this be?