Sunday: A L'il Contemplation And The Perfect Cup Of Filter Kappi

Today, like most sundays in my life so far , was spent absolutely unproductively. But what makes it different from your average , equally unproductive weekday , is that i don't feel so guilty. Sunday is meant for rest. Or so i'd like to believe. Rest from what? The guilt that accumalates as a result of an unproductive week.

Well, anyway, I went to church today after two weeks (my failing faith and all that..) and as usual i sort of switched off as soon as the sermon began , slipped into my own tiny , self-involved world. But for once the priest happened to read out something that happened to reach out and pull me out of my reverie. I've just been looking for that poem , it is particularly religious and i have just found that the entire sermon is available online. God! priests don't even come up with their own sermons these days. But i suppose they hardly expect for us to happen upon the sermon they deliver as their own on the internet. And here i was thinking , "Not bad, the guy has actually thought about what he's saying."

Well , i suppose plaguarism is alright , if you are plaguarising something sensible.A lot of people don't even do that. Well,anyway the first part of what he read out particularly appealed to me. It's not profound. But It is so very true.

A poem by Joseph Nolan :

We wait all day long,
For planes and buses,
For a dates and appointments,
For 5 o’clock and for Friday.

Some of us wait for a second coming,
For God in a whirlwind.
Paratrooper Christ.
All around us people are waiting

A child, for attention.
A spouse, for a conversation.
A parent, for a letter or a call.
The prisoner waits for freedom,
And the exile to come home.
The hungry for food,
And the lonely for a friend,
The whole earth’s a waiting room!

The savior will see you now.
Is what we expect to hear at the end.
Maybe we should raise our expectations.
The savior might see us now if we know how to find him.
Could it be that Jesus too is waiting
For us to know that He is around?

Towards the end , it shifts from being philosophical to religious. but i think that's just the way the poet chose to look at it . I chose to ignore that part , although i guess once , not too far back , it might have appealed to me as well.

I was never ashamed of my faith in god. I learnt rather early , to compartmentalize that aspect of my life and keep it separate from what i try normally to be : Logical , Rational and if I can manage it , Scientific. And since i cannot support my faith with logic , i just leave it at that and put it down as something that works for me, of which i have no real understanding. But for perhaps a year or more now , my faith has dwindled. It bothered me a lot , because over and above everything else , i recognized that my faith in god provided me with solace and hope.

(I should say that although i had a deep faith in god , i was never religious. I guess that's a result of being the product of an inter-religious marriage. Both my parents are deeply religious and yet have managed , and i think this makes them pretty cool people, to maintain their own identity , while respecting each other's and conveying to their children a sense of faith in god rather than indicating a particular religion to follow or not. )

So, everytime i go to church or the temple , do i feel hypocritical ? Absolutely! But i've resigned myself to that now, i'm hoping that someday it'll sort of just miraculously come back . One part of me questions whether my life is very different now as compared to then, but since obviously i do miss it , it must have done something for me.

Well anyway , getting back to the poem , as i sat there listening to this being read out , i sort of felt that it was meant for me...some sort of divine message , (if u still believe in that, my mind whispered.) telling me to get up and get going not keep waiting for something to materialise out of thin air. Ok so this is common sense, why the religious context. well the priest meant for it to be religious. But it applies to my life in such a practical way.

And it occurred to me , that there was such a universality in the act of waiting. like the poem tries to convey, we spend so much thought and time and energy in ANTICIPATION of something or the other. It's pitiful how much passes us by while we wait. Especially for things , we know , deep inside , might probably never happen. Or things like waiting for the weekend, when we know pretty well we have to back to the week very soon.

Ok well, apart from this rather contemplative reflection, my sunday went as usual. The absolute highlight of the day was that i think had an almost PERFECT cup of traditional south indian filter coffee (or as they say here filter kappi). It was awesome. Just the right amount of bitter. Like a friend of mine says " T'was Groovy!" Surprisingly, it was at a nice restaurant , usually the best coffee is to be got at smaller kadais (shops) or atleast so is my experience. Anyway , Baristas and the Coffee Days of the world are all very fine , but nowhere near the league of what i had today. (Although i think i paid as much for it as i do there).

Ok it's about 2:30 and i've to get up early tomorrow for college...So if i have rambled , attribute it to the late hour.Especially 'cos i'm not a nocturnal person.