I never expected to come to India. It certainly wasn't one of the adventures I might have planned for myself. But they have a saying in the Network of Biblical Storytellers: Once you start learning and telling biblical stories, there's no telling where it may lead. For me, it led 5,000 miles to South India - and what an experience that is.
It came about as a result of an invitation from Revd Vinay and Mrs Colleen Samuel, and the Divya Shanthi Christian Association which they founded, for Alison and me to visit Bangalore and share some of our knowledge and skills with the people here. In Alison's case, that is her research into how young children learn mathematics, and the most helpful methods of teaching a subject which is difficult, if not terrifying, to many teachers as well as their pupils. She ran three two-day workshops: one for teachers in the Christian schools; one for the Divya Shanthi teachers themselves, some of whom run doorstep education classes for adults as well as children in the slums; and a third for teachers in the Hindu schools that were set up 50 years ago by a man who is now an elderly and saintly Brahmin.
My own workshops in biblical storytelling were attended by about 70 pastors, teachers, seminarians and lay workers. Two workshops were held in Bangalore, and a third in Chennai (formerly Madras) which is even hotter and more humid than Bangalore. The aim of these workshops was to enable participants to experience for themselves the power of biblical storytelling, and to teach some straightforward ways of learning the stories. In India there is a great tradition of storytelling, with epic 'story-plays' which go on all night in the way that Homer's Odyssey may once have been told. But Christians seem to have lost the art, or the confidence, of telling our great Story. Instead, we read it from behind a book - often from behind a great brass bird as well - and all too often it can sound like a dead message instead of the living and life-giving word that it actually is. It was thrilling for me to see the workshop participants becoming enthusiastic about telling our stories in such a way as to bring out the life that is in them, instead of keeping it locked up and inaccessible.
India itself is an overwhelming experience, almost impossible to put into words. The heat and the light, the crowds and the noise, the dust and the traffic, the utterly different way of shopping, the extremes of wealth and poverty, from beggars in the streets who really are destitute, often lacking limbs or sight, to affluent people whose lifestyle is every bit as modern and hi-tech as any in the West. I don't think I will ever forget being approached by a street-child, at about 10.30 at night, begging not for money, but for water.
Lying awake one night I found myself praying, 'Lord, you have brought me to this strange land - to make me alive.' I'm still not quite sure what it meant or will mean. But I believe God sometimes (often?) wants to shake us out of our comfortable, sleepy complacency and renew that wonder that we used to have as children. This is an amazing world, teeming with so much variety, interest and colour. Are we, adults, going to sleep through this life, dozing in front of a moving picture on the box in the corner? Or are we going to come alive with the immediacy of this astounding creation, and the sheer power of God's Story, and live that life which is real?
Published in the Marston Times, May 2002