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Clarion call to a fresh struggle

Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

Diyagala is off Ragama and is conveniently located for those travellers disembarking at the Walpola railway station. Anybody there will direct you to the Prasansaramaya.

Although its name has a Buddhist connotation this aramaya is actually a Catholic monastery, the closest approximation in this country to an early Christian community.

Set in a vast rambling natural wilderness of gnarled old trees, creepers, vegetation and gravelled pathways it is an experiment in community living launched by an unusual Catholic priest Fr. Siri Oscar Abhayaratne.

Community life was the characteristic of early mankind whether it was the early Christian community, the Sangika order during the time of the Buddha or the primitive communes which inspired Karl Marx.

This was the idyll predating the arrival of private property with all its rapaciousness and predatoriness. It was also the community evoked by the popular image of the tank and the dagoba which was the motif of early Sinhala agrarian life later exploited as a catch phrase by politicians.

Prasansaramaya is a monastery located among the people or conversely one which has grown from among them. These are simple people leading a semi-rural life even though living close to the Big City and largely uncorrupted by the slick city ways.

They do their own cultivation, cooking and cleaning and their food and way of life is simple to the point of asceticism. The elders are addressed as 'thaththa' and 'amma' in refreshing contrast to the vulgar 'uncle' and 'aunty' of urban usage. And Fr. Oscar himself is addressed as 'Swami Thaththa.'

Fr. Oscar, who celebrated his 49th anniversary as a priest on February 2, is one who believes that the meek and the humble will inherit the earth one day. That is why he finds his flock in the villages rather than the plush enclaves of the metropolis.

His is not High Church bedecked in ermine and purple and mouthing the stale ritual pieties of orthodoxy. His is a community close to the roots. The young men wear cloth and banian and the young women the sari. These are not the vulgar symbols of the political cavalcade but a means of identifying a religion which had for too long been perceived as being alienated from the masses as something sprung from the soil and making the people re-possess it.

And the church which Fr. Oscar would want the people to possess is no ornate structure striking awe into the human heart and looming in its majesty over their impoverished and hopeless lives. The church at the Prasansaramaya is a modest affair set in a pleasant arbour overhung with creepers.

Devotees sit on the ground on cushions or on a circular bench. The altar is a single iron rod carrying a figure of the crucified Christ. A conch shell is placed at its base. Traditional motifs and murals in painting form a back cloth to where the congregation sits.

The whole structure is in the form of an heptagon and surrounding it is a 'sakman maluwa' strewn with sand. All these are again not a self-conscious gesture towards the dominant Sinhala-Buddhist ideology but rather symptomatic of a conviction that Christianity should be able to present itself in the idiom of the people if it is to strike roots among them.

True Christianity is no longer treated as an alien intrusion and there is an evolving dialogue on its part with Buddhism but Fr. Oscar belongs to that section of the church which believes that there is more to be done if the church is to shed its elitist, exclusivist image.

A second monastery is at Matugama which although belonging to the relatively urbanised Kalutara district is among the most backward and remote electorates in the country.

On Independence eve Fr. Oscar came from the backwoods of Matugama and the outer reaches of Diyagala to storm the citadels of Colombo in the company of the Ven. Maduluwawe Sobhitha Thera with an unpalatable but necessary query.

Were we really independent as a people and what is the nature of our freedom? Both bhikkhu and priest released a kind of people's manifesto which claimed that Independence had to be made more meaningful.

It was the platform for a kind of citizens' movement urging that the people had to come into their own within the political process dominated so far by political parties of all hues. They called it the second freedom struggle and hope to organise islandwide towards their goal of a truly people's movement.

Is this another Utopia, the pursuit of another fanciful chimera? But whatever it is it appears as a reflection of a wide-spread disenchantment with the established political system and the spiritual and moral dead end to which it has led the country. Fr. Oscar makes a distinction between religion and the dhamma.

The first is an organised institution the second the true roots of the teaching. How many people practise their religion today? The need therefore is to go back to the source, the roots. Utopia or chimera perhaps the time has come for a true spiritual leadership if we are to escape from our collective agonies.

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