Tony DeyalWHAT DO you get when you buy crayons for your children? A gift to make your kin scrawl. That is what my children were doing on Tuesday evening when Indranie reminded me of my promise to take her to a nearby Hindu temple. I reluctantly left the book I was reading, one of Colin Dexter's fabulous Inspector Morse series.
My two children, Zubin and Jasmine, moved from scrawling to squalling when I told them we were going to Forest Reserve, a rural and distant part of Trinidad. Compounding the problem was the rain. It was squalling worse than the children. Having seen so much flooding and so many communities isolated by heavy rainfalls and landslides over the past week in Trinidad, I figured we could also suffer the fate of the red and blue ships when they collided. They were marooned, and we could be too.
The temple is small, secure and serene. My mother, who was born in Forest Reserve, told me that a man, cutting grass for his animals, had hit a rock with his cutlass and milk started to pour from the rock. The people in the village, mostly very staunch Hindus, believed the rock was a sign from the Lord Shiva, the creator and destroyer in the Hindu Pantheon of Gods, and built a temple around it. I am not sure whether it was the tranquillity of the temple, or my own sense of humour impishly asserting itself even in the midst of an unaccustomed calm, but suddenly I wondered what is this thing that the gods have with stones.
Almost every religion has some direct link with stones. In fact, the first recorded pun comes from the Bible and is about a stone. In the Bible (Matthew 16.18), Jesus says, "Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church." The original translation of the Bible was in Greek. In that language, the name Peter translates as Petros, while the term rock translates as petra. Fortunately Simon Peter's name was not sand although this was how it looked at one stage when he denied Christ thrice.
I figured if punning was a sin, I was sinning in the best possible company. The Bible is replete with other examples of the link between religions and rocks or stones. The Ten Commandments were written on tablets of stone. Christ was tempted by the devil to convert stones into bread. The semi-precious stone, garnet, was used by Noah to light his path and to illuminate the Ark. Noah was the first and greatest financier in history. He floated his stock while everyone else was in liquidation.
The ancient Dravidian religion, in what is reputedly the cradle of civilisation, the Indus Valley, was based on memorial stone worship. The stone is called Sivalinka. Siva is the God of Love and linka means symbol. Then there are the numerous Stone altars, like Stonehenge, in Britain. There are the Stone Creatures of Easter Island, and the pyramids and other stone structures of Egypt, Mexico and Peru.
As part of the Haj or sacred journey to Mecca, Muslims gather together 49 or 70 small stones which they throw at pillars called Jamarat. These represent the devil. In Santeria and Shango, stones also play an important role. Shango creates lightning and thunder by casting thunderstones down to earth.
Catholicism is also included. A group of French monks, the Vittorini from Marseilles, built a chain of churches in Sardinia. These churches have been described as monuments of the spirit, the stones of the faith. As I left the temple, I thought perhaps this is what the Trinidad priest must have been seeking from the young man who claimed that the priest grabbed him by his. At the same time, I remembered another story from Lima, Peru. Almost 4,000 angry people stoned the local church to prevent the priest designated by the Catholic hierarchy to replace Rev. Jorge Arbanil from entering the building. Arbanil was expelled from the church for announcing that he lived with a woman and their two children. The story was headlined, "Casting Stones at Priestly Celibacy."
As the Trinidad events unfold and the priest has subsequently been suspended and ostracised, I thought of another story. Jesus saw a crowd chasing down a woman to stone her and approached them. "What's going on here, anyway?" he asked. "This woman was found committing adultery and the law says we should stone her!", one of the crowd responded. "Wait," yelled Jesus, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Suddenly, a stone came straight out of the sky, and knocked the woman on the side of her head. "Aw, come on Dad," Jesus cried. "I'm trying to make a point here!"
Tony Deyal was last seen asking why Mick Jagger and his fellow band members throw away all of Colin Dexter's books? Because a Rolling Stone gathers no Morse.
