Bread of Life: The Word/The Silence

Directed by Klára Trencsényi and Vlad Naumescu. India/Hungary, 2014

The Bread of Life series consists of two short documentaries about modes of Christian devotion and spiritual pursuit in South India today. Shot between October 2013 and February 2014 as part of Vlad Naumescu’s research on Syrian Christians (St. Thomas Christians) in India, the films explore Orthodox Sunday schools and Christian ashrams, taking a different cinematic approach in each case to grasp their distinct rhythms of prayer. Together, the two films contrast a pedagogy of prayer centered on speech and recitation with one based on silence and contemplation. Each draws on a model of ethical formation that ties together certain values, practices, and aesthetics to shape a Christian personhood.

Pedagogies of prayer reflect not only what and how one should learn to address God but also what one can know and what remains unknown. They reveal the strong connection between aesthetic formations (as explored in this portal) and folk epistemologies or theories of mind—models people employ to reason about their and others’ intentions, behavior, and knowledge (see Tanya Luhrmann; Rita Astuti). Such models inform the religious pedagogies and practices Naumescu observed among Syrian Christians in India and, ultimately, their experiences of God.

The Syrian Christian churches in Kerala trace their origins to the first century AD when St. Thomas the Apostle converted a few Hindu families—hence their name, “St. Thomas Christians.” Their history, marked by shifting colonial regimes, intense missionary activity, and intricate relations with Catholic, Middle Eastern, and Protestant churches, records several schisms among them. Today, this community (about three million just in Kerala) has a distinct identity and high caste status within Keralite society. It is split into eight churches, each claiming to be the true inheritor of the St. Thomas tradition: two of these churches are Catholic, one Anglican, one Nestorian, three Antiochian and one Episcopalian. This history affects their rites and liturgies, the devotional culture, and institutional formation; despite this diversity, Syrian Christians remain rooted in the same indigenous tradition and share a spiritual heritage that crosses institutional boundaries and present-day competition. (Joseph, M.P., Uday Balakrishnan, and István Perczel. “Syrian Christian Churches in India.” In Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Lucian N. Leustean, 563-599. Routledge, 2014)

The first film, The Word looks at Sunday school education among Jacobite Syrian Christians through the eyes of Aleesha, a thirteen-year-old girl from St. Mary cathedral in Ernakulam. A very talented and ambitious pupil, Aleesha takes part in many competitions on behalf of her Sunday school, one of the most successful in the Jacobite Orthodox church. In the film, she participates with a speech on Jesus as the Bread of Life, the theme of the annual competition in 2014. Aleesha spent six months rehearsing the speech in preparation for this event. Her speech, entirely written by the Sunday school headmaster, plays on the double-meaning of Appam, the daily “bread” in South India, but also the bread that becomes Jesus’ body in the Eucharistic liturgy (Holy Qurbana). Aleesha says this is a “mystery,” following the Orthodox conception of sacraments as mysteries that cannot be fully grasped or put into words.

In Eastern Christianity, mysteries are usually experienced in liturgical practice; churches put more emphasis on learning through liturgical participation rather than on formal instruction. Sunday schools appeared in the Malankara church through the efforts of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) to establish religious education, introduce vernacular language, and purify the rite of various influences. The shift from practical to didactic reshaped people’s relationship to ritual and made speech, whose persuasive power resonates well with Keralite oratory, central to one’s faith and worship. In doing so, it also placed more pressure on the youth, as the hopes of this Syrian Christian community turned towards them as potential bearers of faith and of their social aspirations.

The second film, The Silence, guides us through the everyday life of a contemplative Christian ashram belonging to the same family of Syrian Christian churches (the Syro-Malankara Church). For the Indian monks in this ashram silence is a mode of expectation and preparation for an encounter with Jesus, whether in the form of Eucharistic bread or in the guise of a stranger. Silence or stillness (hesychia) is perhaps the ultimate expression of Orthodox apophaticism, the negative theology emphasizing that God is beyond human understanding and speech. Monks try to dwell in this stillness while pursuing their daily chores and welcoming visitors. The film camera breaks the silence for a moment as the monks agree to send a video letter to the family of the founder, Francis Mahieu (Acharya) on the occasion of their family reunion in Belgium. The moment is opportune: the monks are about to elect their new abbot and the film offers them the opportunity to reflect on their lives, on Acharya’s heritage, and on the challenge of finding someone to follow in his steps. Francis, a Belgian Cistercian monk, arrived in India in the wake of its independence and built a community in Kurisumala that pioneered Christian inculturation and Gandhian economics. It’s been more than ten years since he died, but his vision lives on, not least through their bread-labor. Their “daily bread” is a concrete materialization of this intimate relationship that crosses time and space: the dark bread they knead reminds them of Acharya’s journey, while the Eucharistic bread embodies the hope for the spiritual transformation he envisioned.

Savitri Medhatul is a Mumbai-based documentary filmmaker whose latest film, “And All God’s People Said…”, follows the small, but rapidly growing population of Pentecostal-Charismatic converts in India. Medhatul, whose work is supported by the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer Initiative, recently spoke with Jennifer Lois Hahn about the complexities these self-described “believers” face in a majority Hindu society, their innovative use of technology to spread the gospel, and the advantages and limitations of the medium of film for capturing their stories. 

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Jennifer Lois Hahn: One of the things I really liked about your proposal is how you talk about prayer as a desire for change, both personal and societal. Could tell me about how you came to conceive of it that way?

Savitri Medhatul: I started going to these churches because of my husband. He and his family belong to a believer church. My in-laws wanted me to get exposure to the church. In this church, giving testimony is a very big activity. I would listen to people’s testimonies and what they were sharing in the church meetings. In India, a huge percentage of people are first generation converts. They’re not from Christian families, they’re not from believer families, but at some point in their lives they have made a choice to become a believer. Going from a majority religion to a minority religion is always a very interesting choice. They would say in their testimonies, “Since I have started going to church, this has happened and that has happened and in this way my life has changed.” So those testimonies actually got me interested in knowing a little more behind the story and how people perceive change in their lives. Would it have just happened anyways? Was it really because they started coming to church? It does happen, because you start believing in a certain values system, your perspective changes.

JLH: What are some of the problems that people bring to the church? What is motivating them to want to change?

SM: Church almost works like an alternative to going to a psychiatrist many times. People who are depressed, people who are suicidal, people who have issues with their business, in their marriage, people who are just looking for certain spiritual answers which they are not able to get in other ways of praying or other beliefs. Illness is a big reason, because healing is very important in Pentecostal and believer churches. Many times, people who come to church have been brought by their neighbor, friend, or relative who is already a member. That person will tell them, “You have tried everything. Why don’t you come to my church? I promise you that in Jesus’s name you will be healed.” 

JLH: Why do you think converts feel they cannot find this kind of support and healing in the Hindu tradition?

SM: Most of the people that I spoke to had at some time in their life reached a stage where they were depressed, where they were not getting the outputs they expected from life. They were searching for an answer to “Why is everything going wrong?” And they were not able to find it in a temple and whatever pujas (Hindu prayer rituals) they were doing were not effective. The Pentecostal practices are completely different from Hindu religious practice. There is no idol worship. There are no elaborate rituals. It feels a lot more spiritual. They needed an extremely drastic change. If you go from one temple to another things don’t change as much. Sometimes you need that jolt of extreme contrast in your life.

Also these believer churches are actively involved in helping the poor denomination of the society with infrastructure such as education, work, and food, for which the state is not able to match the need. These churches are able to fill smaller gaps, maybe not at the very wide scale, but in their own small ways. When basic needs are fulfilled people see it as a kind of blessing from a god and that also motivates them into believing in this god. The fact is that the god that gives me answers and the god that provides for me is the god that I choose.

Another difference is that there is a lot of physical contact and direct person-to-person connection in Pentecostal prayers that is not present in Hindu prayers where the connection is with the idol or the middleman who is the priest. Whereas in a believer church I am actually feeling you. I’m either holding your hands or putting my hands on your head or your shoulder. I’m holding you and I’m actually looking at you. There is no middleman. There are no other kinds of representation or symbols. It is directly between two people or you and god the almighty, which is an abstract space. You’re not praying in front of a cross, statue, or photograph of Jesus. So I think that this extremely personalized experience might be attracting people. There’s also definitely a certain kind of break in the whole formality of prayer. In believer church when there is praise and worship people are singing and jumping and dancing. I think it’s a very liberating experience for people to express their bodies like that.

JLH: Can you tell me a little bit more about the relationship between Pentecostal-Charismatics and other religions in Mumbai?

India is a secular country, but some of the states in India have issued anti-conversion acts. Some say no one should be given any incentive for conversion, that there should not be any force, that you can only convert if you feel the need from internally. Many church activities can be interpreted as forceful conversions. So those acts are used in many states to prosecute church members and there are certain incidences of violence against believer churches in these states. But the state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is, does not have an anti-conversion act. The church population there is in such minority.

Another interesting thing is that in India many people live in joint families and many times only one or two members of the family have joined the church and other members of the family are still following their old religion, still doing the pujas and everything regularly. You can’t just pick up Hindu idols and throw them out because for all you know your mother and father are still praying. So in that given space what does one do? That I found very interesting, how people find solutions to these kinds of problems. Some say, “Ok fine, if you want to do your puja then you do it in your room and don’t ask me to participate in it. And you will do your thing and I will do my thing. And if you want to do any big ritualistic puja in the house, please excuse me, I will be out of the house that day.” These kinds of territories and borders are negotiated within a family because not everybody is a believer and there are two different kinds of beliefs and rather drastically contrasted ways of praying among the family members.

JLH: I want to switch gears a little bit and have you tell me more about your choice to work in the medium of film. In the U.S., at least, we have a tendency to think of prayer as a private, internal thing that would be difficult to capture on camera.

 SM: It was a little difficult because even in India when people are praying many times it is done in their room alone. But thankfully in believer church the prayers are very vocal. Even if they are praying alone in their rooms, they are speaking out the words of the prayer. So the way these people pray helped me to do my filming. There is a lot of speaking in tongues. There are a lot of gestures. There is a lot of energy. You can feel that energy in the room. So these are the aspects which I think can be captured with an audiovisual medium, because then you actually get to see what is happening rather than just somebody narrating a scene.

At the same time film as a format has its own limitations. It has its own structure. You have to develop characters in a certain pattern. I can’t make a four hour film—it would just be too much to watch. There is only so much information you can give. Also, information given in film is more experiential than analytic, especially the kind of films that I make. There is a lot of sharing of experience rather than some expert discussing how these things are. The way I see it is that my film could be a starting point for a discussion where you watch things, you experience them along with the characters and then maybe go read more analytical and detailed stuff on it. Also, in a film there is a lot of information which is given just in the visual sense. Either you get it or you don’t get it. Right now in this film, I have a lot of footage of Mumbai and there is a lot of visual imagery and icons that just pass by you while you’re watching the film. Now if you’ve not been to Mumbai you might miss these cues. So the experience and the understanding that each member of the audience would get from a film differs depending on their previous exposure. I can’t sit and explain every shot in the film because that’s just the limitation of the format. Ideally I see my film as a collaborative work with those doing academic research, such as my friend Nate Roberts who works with Max Planck Institute right now doing research on a Tamil speaking believer community in Mumbai.

JLH: Can you talk about how your subjects interact with media and technology and other aspects of modern life?

It’s very interesting. The believer churches do not accept people going to pubs or restaurants or watching certain shows on TV or certain films and the whole cultural exchange that takes place through these channels. They’d like to stay in a much more closed community, keeping you away from evil influences. At the same time, believer churches are one of the most modern in terms of use of technology in order to spread the message. At every church, even the smallest, you see a basic sound system or a screen on which something is shown. One of the characters in my film is a pastor in a Banjara church. Banjaras are a nomadic tribe in India. Most of the members of the Banjara church are illiterate and daily wage laborers, so reading the bible is not possible for them. The pastor uses a film made on the life of Jesus that’s available online and has been translated in hundreds of languages including the Banjara dialect to tell them the stories of the bible. I find that an extremely interesting use of modern technology. They use these films to spread the message and at the same time, they are asking them to watch the Jesus film but not watch something else. So they are using the same technology, but kind of censoring the content. Also they have something called MegaVoice, which is a device like the iPod that runs on solar power. They have recorded the entire New Testament translated in the Banjara language and a few Banjara believer songs. These devices are being distributed free of cost to people. In India, because people are converted from other religions there is a lot of cultural baggage that also comes with it. When you become a believer you don’t leave your culture completely outside the door. So there’s a very, very thin line between what is accepted and what is not, and what becomes a part of Hindu religion and what becomes a part of Indian culture. What things you leave outside of church and what things you take in with you becomes a very interesting question.

JLH: Can you tell me more about your personal experience with religion?

Honestly, I grew up in a very non-religious family. My parents are atheists. So whatever Hindu religious practices I followed were at my grandparents’ house because they used to have all these pujas (Hindu prayer rituals). At that time it was more about having fun and eating good food rather than the rituals because we were never really expected to do those things. And in my own house, we didn’t have a single idol because my parents didn’t really believe in any kind of god or any kind of ritualistic practices. I did have exposure to church because I went to a Christian college, so I was quite open towards this idea of going to church. I really enjoy the music, and I like that atmosphere. I would not say that I’m an atheist, but I still don’t follow a particular religious belief either. I like to pray. We all say, “Oh my god, please no traffic today.” [Laughs] That’s the space that I personally operate in.

In this excerpt from the documentary film Birds Way, the reader, a Russian-speaking Old Believer in the Romanian Danube delta, recites a passage from Paul’s first letter to Corinthians (IV 9-16) where the apostle urges those who call themselves Christians to imitate Christ even if this may look foolish in the eyes of outsiders. The book he holds while reciting is not the Bible, but a nineteenth-century book of needs (trebnyk) containing the most important liturgical services for this community of Old Believers. The book itself is quite new if we are to consider that some of the liturgical books they use are from the seventeenth century, the time of the liturgical reforms that led to a schism in the Russian Orthodox Church. However for them all the books are “old,” for the books are the only carriers of the theology and ritual of the pre-reformation Orthodoxy. These books together with the literacy practices create the textual community that makes Old Belief. It is the apparent immutability of liturgical form and language maintained in textual form that generates the sense of continuity and authenticity of their faith in the face of others.

Old Believers are socialized into this textual tradition from early childhood, as the old books are present in their churches and homes. In church the books are placed behind the wooden screen that separates the readers from the community in close proximity to the altar icons, and used on a daily basis for liturgical services and collective worship as is common in Orthodox churches. But the books are also found in almost every Old Believer home, inherited from parents together with the family icons. Inscribed by those who wrote themselves in as copyists, readers, or lifelong owners, the books often recreate spiritual or family genealogies and mark essential moments in their individual biographies. In homes they are most often hidden from view or covered with some clothing and are “activated” once a person literate in Church Slavonic engages with them—which some say needs to be done regularly. Similar to an icon placed in the house, the book constitutes a salient presence that puts the reader, the book, and the text in a particular relationship, prompting an act of prayer associated with specific practices: when taking the book in his hands the reader crosses himself, opens it deferentially and starts reciting from it. This action is as much a recited prayer as it is an occasion to commemorate those inscribed in the book and evoke the broader community of Old Believers.

Forged early on, the Old Believers’ relationship with the books persists throughout a lifetime even though few literate people turn out to become priests, deacons, or readers in church. Young children start learning to read and write with the azbuka, the primer in Church Slavonic, then slowly progress towards the proper service books (chasovenniks and kanoniks) and liturgical singing (znamenny chant), which in itself requires serious training. Since Church Slavonic literacy is the basis of religious authority and the books are authoritative references in religious matters, religious education aims to form skilled readers by emphasizing precise repetition and correct reading. Thus the efficacy of prayer comes to depend on the correct, fluent recitation of liturgical texts with no engagement with or reflection on the content. This passive literacy has turned reading into a powerful act of prayer and the old books into objects of visual piety. The film reveals how the reader’s gesture goes beyond the act of reading to become a spontaneous recitation from the heart, which acknowledges the sacredness of the old book. Similar to an icon, the book refers the reader to a reality beyond itself and at the same time it retains its distinctive historicity and presence, generated at the intersection of materiality, sociality, and transcendence. More so than in other branches of Eastern Christianity, the old book is a privileged semiotic form that constitutes the very means through which the Old Believers’ relationship with God is defined and lived out.