Physical ailments

Two days ago a friend invited me to watch a parade for Kali.  A crowd had followed the procession, and people clustered on the broken-up piles of gravel beside the wide road.  Traffic roared just feet away, but in the margin between the cars and the nearby compound walls the parade had created a space for itself. 

This parade was in honor of Kali, one of India's most misunderstood but least forgiving goddesses.  She is the goddess of war and justice, and some of her followers practice physical mortification.

There were six people in the parade.  Four men and two women.  A man came first, wearing a mane of blonde wood.  He had inserted the points of narrow wooden sticks into his back, chest and stomach.  There were hundreds of sticks, it must have taken him hours.  Someone must have helped him with the ones on his back. 

The next few men and women had run a metal spear horizontally through both cheeks.  One end was tipped with a trident, the other with a sharp point.  It was six feet long, the same thickness as my pinky finger.

The last man had the same spear through his cheeks, but he also had two sharp metal hooks, about six inches long, run through little flaps of skin on his back.  Ropes ran between these hooks and a taxicab, several feet away.  I was at first confused, but then he leaned down.  Men beat drums, many others leaned to his eye level and began to clap, setting a rhythm.  The man moved forward, and as he did so, the taxi came with him.

This part of Kali's devotional ritual is understood, this part that is both strange and viscerally jarring.  But there is more to it.

Walking through the press, my friend described the procedure to me, and like many people, I shuddered.  But when I reached the parade I forgot my initial reaction.  Because the marchers were not bleeding.  They did not grimace.  They smiled.  They stopped and posed for cameras, and for their friends and family to cheer them on.  The atmosphere was that of a reunion or a party.  The marchers were neither fundamentalists nor masochists; they were people who had made a vow to do this in exchange for a stroke of good fortune granted to them recently by God.

"They feel no pain," my friend explained to me.  "Because God is with them.  They'll remove the spears from their mouths tonight and there won't even be a hole."

Cynically, I thought, Maybe those spears aren't driven through their cheeks at all.  But of course, they'd inserted the sharp metal pins in front of hundreds of onlookers.

Afterwards I discussed the celebration with my uncle.  We realized that bodily punishment is not unique to these Hindus.  It appears in many religions.  Christian penitents once donned hair shirts, some Muslims self-flagellate on Moharram, a day of mourning.

Hollywood has done a good job of extracting the shock from these rituals and capitalizing on it.  And why not?  The descriptions, at first blush, are shocking.  It's easy to look at people who practice like this, and from them extrapolate (in our secular society) a disdain for all things overtly religious.

I rebel against the word 'miracle,' with its undertones of superstitiousness, but what I saw was a strong testament to human faith, even in an age of increasing secularism.  Such belief shouldn't be mocked - the same strength of conviction led to the discovery of electricity and gravity, and the perseverance of democracy.

It ocurred to me that there are no easy ways to limit faith.  And really, what business is that of mine to try, anyway?