Dear Friends,
“I have a story that will make you believe in God” (Martel: x) – that is how Yann Martel introduces his novel, Life of Pi, in which the main character, the aforementioned Pi, is simultaneously a Hindu, Christian, and Muslim. When he was only 16 years old, miraculously survived 227 days in the Pacific Ocean as the lone human survivor of a sunken ship. Surviving 227 days adrift at sea is hard enough to believe, but add a 450-pound Bengal tiger into the lifeboat and this existential parable is ratcheted up from the inspiring to confounding, from the miraculous to outright unbelievable – which, by the way, is exactly the point of the story. After all, Yann, like many religious writers before him, obviously subscribed to the notion that if the story did not stretch the limits of credibility, it could not make its readers believe what he saw as the unbelievable, to believe in God.
But while the story is introduced with this promise to the reader, what at first appears straightforward becomes increasingly complicated as the story unfolds. For instance, in which God is this story supposed to make us believe – the Hindu, the Christian, or the Muslim? The novel does not say, and if the novel is read by one with secular biased leanings they would remained confused. I found no such confusion in the narrative. I found the fictional Pi, {some would say like Jesus and others), to be a believable character that should serve to demonstrate that our appreciation of the awesomeness of God should not be restricted to man's limited comprehension.
Pi tells us that he is a Hindu because his Aunt first brought him to a temple for a traditional Hindu rite of passage when he was still a baby. While he has no conscious memory of this first introduction to the temple, he writes that “some smell of incense, some play of light and shadow, some flame, some burst of colour, something of the sultriness and mystery of the place must have stayed with me. . . I became loyal to these sense impressions even before I knew what they meant or what they were for” (Martel: 47-48). Thus, in Pi’s
words, he owes “to Hinduism the original landscape of [his] religious imagination” (Martel: 50), and the universe continues to make sense to him through his Hindu eyes.
Though he was “a contented Hindu” when he was 14 years-old, he became both deeply enthralled and troubled the first time he heard the story of Jesus. The story of Jesus was the Christian story that proclaimed to be about God, but not as God should be, or at least not as Pi had come to expect the stories of God to be told. As Pi asked, the story of Jesus tells the story of a God “who goes hungry, who suffers from thirst, who gets tired, who is sad, who is anxious, who is heckled and harassed, who has to put up with followers who don’t get it and opponents who don’t respect Him – what kind of god is that?” (Martel: 55). Nevertheless, the more Pi speaks with the village priest about this thoroughly pedestrian god, the more
enthralled he becomes to the point that he asks what he must do to become a Christian. The priest smiled and answered, “You already are, Piscine – in your heart.” From that point on, Pi could then enter into the church without fear, for, as he says, “it was now my house too. I offered prayers to Christ, who is alive. Then I raced down the hill on the left and raced up the hill on the right – to offer thanks to Lord Krishna for having put Jesus of Nazareth, whose humanity I found so compelling, in my way” (Martel: 58). A prayer of thanks to Lord Krishna for having made him a Christian must have caused quite a stir in the celestial realm.
Then, again in Pi’s words, “Islam followed right behind, hardly a year later.” When walking the streets of the Arabic neighborhood while exploring unknown parts of his hometown in Pondicherry, India, he shares bread with a Muslim baker and observes the baker interrupt his work in order to perform his daily prayers right in the midst of a storm of flour. Pi observes, “So it went the first time I saw a Muslim pray – quick, necessary, physical, muttered, striking. Next time I was praying in church – on my knees, immobile, silent before
Christ on the Cross – the image of this callisthenic communion with God in the middle of the bags of flour kept coming to my mind” (Martel: 60). Soon after, Pi would ask his parents for his own prayer rug, and that same Muslim baker would initiate him into the mysteries of Sufi mysticism.
Pi was now a practicing Hindu, Christian, and Muslim, and the prized student of all three faiths. That is, until his parents and teachers discovered his secret and together expressed their uniform incredulity. After each tried to claim the boy as their own, their attitudes shifted from their suspicion of one another, to their shared breathlessness and disbelief, and finally to their mutual disappointment in Pi. Each of their respective arguments for the exclusivity of their faith failed: from the imam, “Hindus and Christians are idolaters;” from
the pandit, “Mulims have many wives,” and “Christians know nothing about religion;” and from the priest, “There is salvation only in Jesus.” As the Christian sees it, it is the difference between “real religion – or myths;” for the Muslim, it is between “God – or idols;” and for the Hindu, it is between “Our [Indian] gods – or colonial gods.” As for Pi’s parents, they sought to protect their son, thinking that his religious eclecticism was nothing more than a stage he would eventually grow out of. Pi’s father, trying to split the difference, reminded the three religious leaders that the new India was a country that allowed for the freedom of
religious practice, which finally prompted some agreement from the teachers: “Yes! Practice
– singular!” All agreed that Pi’s piety was admirable, “But he can’t be a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim.
So I ask. "If Pi could not be a Hindu, a Christain and a Muslim, what was he?"
No one can argue that his way of life and practice of religious devotions were not a credit to the teachings of all three religions. All three religious leaders would have gladly accepted him to be a shining beacon of their faith if only he renounced the others. However, all three could only see the differences in their respective doctrines and could not accept the obvious truth as seen by Pi. Poor Pi, in the simplicity of his boyhood faith, he sincerely believed that all religions were true. Out of his embarrassment and at the close of this first introduction to inter-religious dialogue, he blurted out,
“I just want to love God” (Martel: 67-69).
Should there really be anything more to it than that?
References
Martel, Yann
2001 The Life of Pi. New York: Harcourt.
You can read the full novel at the following link.
http://e-books-4u.blogspot.com/2008/01/download-free-e-books-life-of-pi.html
Quote of the Day
My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God. ~Albert Einstein
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