Daily Fix

No Brokers, Please

T. SHER SINGH

Several years ago, I received a strange invitation.

My phone rang one morning. A stranger was on the line and wanted to know if I’d accept an offer to join a “Men’s Group.” He and eight other men in his group were familiar with my work and activism and thought I might be a good fit.

I had heard about Men’s Groups. Each consisted of a handful of male friends (parallel to Women’s Groups doing the same thing) who got together, say, once a week, to chat and bare their souls to each other … a forum where they could freely and confidentially talk about anything and everything, including very personal and private matters, with the idea of supporting each other by providing feedback, guidance, advice … and camaraderie.

The idea had never interested me. Probably because, I must confess, if I had my druthers, I’d rather be in the company of women; why would I go out of my way to “bond” with groups of men? It wasn’t my cup of tea.

But, I gave the unexpected invitation some serious thought and decided I was game. It would be a new experience, and I could only learn from it.

So, I said yes.

Thereafter, on an early morning every week for the next few years, ten or so of us would get together over a coffee in a quiet, private and relaxed setting, and shoot the breeze.

It didn’t take me long to figure out why I had been invited to join the group, even though I had never met, or heard of, any of them before.

They were mostly tired, aging men. Most of them retired. All ‘white’ and of the Christian faith, though of different denominations.

I, on the hand, was the youngest of them all. I was Sikh and of a different ethnicity, spoke a bunch of other languages, was the only one born outside Canada and therefore an immigrant.

I think they felt they were ready to broaden their horizons.

They became good friends. I enjoyed their company and friendship. Through time, we got to know each other’s families … spouses/partners, especially. I learnt a lot from them and still savour and value the experience.

Especially since they were all older than me. Certainly wiser.

Particularly because most of them had, at some point or the other in their lives, pursued careers as clergy in one church or the other. As ministers, they had held paid positions as employees of the respective churches, and had then retired as each hit the magical age of ’65’ and had gone on to pursue other careers … as therapist, counsellor, psychologist, psychiatrist, academic, etc., depending on their educational training or their new interests.

What particularly bowled me over, though, during those years was the utter disillusionment these retired clergymen expressed about their former, religious vocations.

Given the nature of what we did in the men’s group, they were honest and forthcoming.

Each seemed to have lost respect for not only his respective denomination but also for religion itself. They were bitter and angry, some even labouring under the feeling they had wasted their lives. Each had abandoned active involvement in any religious observance, and even expressed, to my utter shock and surprise, disdain for the very things they had taught and nurtured for their respective flocks until so recently.

It troubled me so much that I explored it further.

They hadn’t come together because they were birds of a feather in this jaundiced view of religious life. They had merely stumbled into the group -- either by accident or invitation -- one by one, and had therefore come together randomly.

I also knew many other clergymen in town through my various involvements and was able to piece together a picture -- admittedly not a scientific or foolproof one -- of a fairly common experience.

Extended, prolonged, or intimate exposure to dogma and doctrinal religion -- I learnt -- ultimately revealed its hollowness and led to loss of faith. Working full-time in a religious environment as a profession and career, instead of as a labour of love and devotion, brought out the tedium of the job, and it became a daily reminder that it was more of a worldly scam than a route to divine salvation.

Furthermore, I learnt that the combination of three elements always proved, without exception, a volatile and noxious mix:

Superfluous wealth.

Untrammelled power. 

And a veneer of piety.

Any one of these, on its own, is dangerous in itself and laden with immense negative potential and possibilities.

Any two of them together, are a toxic mixture.

But all of the three -- when found in the same person or group of people or institution -- become a high-speed, out-of-control, runaway train heading for a guaranteed and spectacular wreck.

It is unfolding before our very eyes todday, isn’t it, even as an ill-chosen Pope has run for cover through early retirement as scandals explode all around him. And now that the process of selecting his successor has begun, horror stories are emerging about the ’princes’ who are to do the honours.

The papacy has long been a shallow veneer of piety, not even pretending to hide superfluous wealth and untrammelled power, on a permanent, public, obscene display for centuries.   

And it has stumbled from scandal to scandal, each one of which would otherwise have embarrassed any criminal, whether individual or organized, into oblivion.

Even more sadly, what goes on in Vatican City in the name of religion is not limited to the Catholic church.

Each and every religion that plagues humanity today suffers from the same disease.

Is the Jewish religious heirarchy free of the same crimes against humanity?

And the Muslims? The Hindus? The Buddhists?

Yes, even the Sikhs have jumped on the bandwagon.

And that’s a surprise to me because there are, based on the experience of all the other groups that have preceded it, clear guidelines in Sikhi prohibiting the formation of a clergy or anything akin to a priesthood.

Anything or anyone claiming to play the role of a broker between Man and God is anathema to Sikhi. Sikh thought has been revolutionary in establishing a clear-cut regime whereby each man, woman and child has direct access to the divine and requires no intercession, no intervention, no mediation.

For the sake of clarity, it goes beyond mere discouragement pr disapproval: it prohibits any form of brokerage in matters of spirituality.

And yet we see deras and sants sprouting all around us. Our jathedars and our politicians are, pope-like, brahmin-like, behaving like and turning into mahants.     

It is not a mere coincidence that in our native language, the word for a pimp and for a broker is one and the same: “dalal”.

It is also a term of abuse in our colloquial lingo, a “four-letter-word“!

For good reason.

Have you seen how quickly priests of every religion, as soon as they start raking in riches and wielding worldly power over their divinity-hungering flock, start to acquire the accoutrements commonly associated with pimps?

I have devised a simple test: anyone who wishes to publicly claim piety, but looks over-dressed when compared to St Francis of Assisi or Bhai Vir Singh (to name but two examples), is not worth writing home about!

The thirst and hunger that each one of us has as a human being is a universal one.

That we then become easy prey to those who would exploit that fact is an equally universal phenomenon.

There ought to be a law against it.           

February 27, 2013

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