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When the Religions Become Context
By Francis X. Clooney

THE Christian encounter with other religions can begin in several ways. First, it may begin through direct personal encounter, when one lives as a missionary among non-Christians and learns to talk to them, or by a chance meeting with a Hindu or Buddhist in one's home town, or at a scheduled exercise in inter-religious dialogue to which one is invited. Second, for others, most usually in university and theology department settings, the religions "arrive" under the guise of the "problem of the world religions"-posed either as the philosophical problem of the "other" and how one is to fit it into one's worldview, or as the series of theological questions regarding what happens to the non-Christian at death, or how the uniqueness and universality of Christ are to be extended to include the entire human race. Third, there are those for whom the encounter begins in the reading of non-Christian texts by engagement in their language, style, and meaning. Although I lived for some time in India and Nepal and have Hindu and Buddhist friends, I belong in this last, "bookish" group; and so, in this reflection I will discuss what happens when one discovers a non-Christian text and is transformed through the reading of it.

I

Since every text is a new one and every reading has its unique features, I will introduce here a single example, a song from Hindu south India, and ask how it has been read, and how we are to read it and "re-read" our Christian identities in light of it. First, here is my translation of a Tamil-language song from the seventh century C.E. It is by the Hindu saint Nammalvar, the Third Song of the Tenth Book of his Tiruvaymoli (henceforth" TVM 10.3").1

1 My bamboo-like shoulders have grown thin, alas ;
the lovely cuckoos sing, not noticing my emaciation and loneliness, alas,
the peacocks mingle and dance, alas.
One day of your going out to herd the gathered cows is like a thousand ages,
alas. You pierce me with your lotus eyes, alas, ungracious, graceless Krsna.

2 Ungracious, graceless Krsna, when you hold my breasts
there is a flood of joy that does not crest in our touch:

Francis X. Clooney, S.J. is Professor of Theology at Boston College. During the current academic year, he is a research fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion, University of Chicago Divinity School.

1 This is my own translation from the Tamil. However, between the first and final drafts of my translation I was able to read and profit from Vasudha Narayanan's as yet unpublished translation of the song, and I am grateful to her for allowing me to see it. I have omitted the 11th verse of the song, generally recognized as a later addition.

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it goes beyond the sky, encompassing, submerging my knowledge,
but then it ends like a dream.
Unlimited desire has entered my inmost self everywhere within me;
when sweet, sweet you leave me and go to herd the cows, I die.

3 I die when you go to herd the cows, my soul burns with hot sighs,
but no one helps me;
I still exist, but without seeing your ink-dark body in its dance;
when you go, the day never ends
and my eyes, slender Kayalfish, never stop shedding tears.
For us, born lowly cow-herd girls in the cowherd clan, this loneliness is death.

4 Govinda, you don't even think about our grief,
about the loneliness of your lowly ones, separated from our support;
You enjoy your herd in its pen, and abandon us for it.
I think about the base, deceptive words that ever flow from your red fruit mouth,
and then in a flood the taste of that ripe fruit enters,
presses on this sinner's mind, and my soul burns

5 I think of your soothing words all the time, and my soul burns, Krsna,
when you've gone to herd the cows all day;
the wind carries the mallikai blossoms and loosens my reserve,
when evening, an elephant in rut, approaches, alas.
So let the mullai flowers on your jewelled chest make my breast fragrant,
give me the ambrosia of your mouth,
place your lotus hands on this slave girl's head.

6 Adorn the head of your slave girl, Krsna, lovely as the dark cool sea.
Many women want to grasp your lovely feet when you herd the flock,
but enough of that, it's now I can't bear my womanhood,
the tears never stop flowing from the ebbing ponds of my eyes,
my mind never rests;
your going out repels me, my soul melts like wax in fire.

7 My soul melts like wax in fire, my bright bracelets and girdle
loosen and fall, pearls fall from my pure flower eyes,
my breasts pale, my shoulders wither, great jewelled Krsna.
You go out to herd the cows, you enjoy yourself among them -
but won't your soft red lotus feet get sore? what if the demons attack you there?

8 My precious soul droops-what if the demons attack you there? don't go!
Tears and desire mix inside me, and even their mixing hurts.
So don't let go of my hand;
show me your conquering lotus eyes, mouth, hands, yellow robe;
stay, with those good women in whom you delight,
the cowherd women whose slender waists seem ready to break.

9 If you stay with those good women who please you and allay your mental anguish,
we will be marvellously happy;
But now we cannot bear our womanhood, Lord, don't go to herd the cows.
On Kamsa's orders, many demons come in many forms,
if you fall in among them terrible battles will rage:
hear me; pay attention!

10 Hear me; pay attention! on Kathsa's orders the strong-armed demons
gather and disturb even ascetics; battles will rage!
You like to be alone, you don't enjoy even your brother Balarama's company,

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and don't go about with him.
My soul burns inside me;
and you seem to prefer herding cows to heaven,
cowherd God whose lips are red fruit.

II

This is a song of longing, of tangible desire, of a love that is spiritual and physical; devotion mingles uneasily with anger and fear, despair with unlimited expectation. It may strike us as intensely personal, as spontaneous words "right from the heart"; and, to some extent, it is. But it is also a subtly woven product of older Tamil and Sanskrit language genres and themes which Nammalvar has chosen to borrow.

In the Tamil tradition to which Nammalvar is heir, there is a body of poetry, the songs of the so-called "literary academies" (cankam), which explores with great subtlety and skill the experience of being in love, its moods and moments.2 Much of this poetry was composed from the viewpoint of a young woman whose lover comes and goes, and about whom her feelings keep shifting, depending on the current state of their relationship. One important motif, which provides the background for TVM 10.3, is the woman's experience in his absence--or his imminent departure-at the key, vulnerable twilight moments of dusk and dawn. At dusk, she waits expectantly and anxiously for his appearance; at dawn, she stands depressed, because he did not come, or with mixed feelings of ecstasy and anxiety, because he did come but is now about to leave again, as daybreak restores the regular, proper order and duties of society.

Coupled with this Tamil love-and-separation motif, through a complex textual and religious lineage, is a Sanskrit religious tradition which recounts the loves of the young, beautiful, and amorous god Krsna and the village cowherd women (the gopis, as they are called). Texts of mythology such as the Visnu Purana (from perhaps the third century C.E.) recount these stories.3 In the course of the series of myths, Krsn a meets, plays, dances, and makes love with the gopis; he enters their lives usually in the evening, and stays through the night; but in the end he always leaves. His departure is perhaps just to tease them, a seeming forgetfulness; perhaps he seeks to purify their love through a full cycle of absences and presences. Their portrayed reactions mirror the Tamil love poetry's representation of the moods of the vulnerable young woman in love-only now the lover is Krsna as God, and the woman in love is the ideal religious devotee.

2 These date back as long as four or five centuries before Nammalvar. For examples of this poetry, see A.K. Ramanujan's The Interior Landscape (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967) and Poems of Love and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). His translations of selected verses from Nammalvar Hymns for the Drowning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) are also highly recommended. For comprehensive background on the motifs of love and separation in Tamil secular and religious poetry, see Friedhelm Hardy's Viraha Bhakti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.)
3 Examples of these myths are included in Wendy D. O'Flaherty's Hindu Myths (New York: Penguin, 197 5), pp. 204-231.

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Nammalvar's song evokes this double, Tamil and Sanskrit, background, as he weaves it into his own poetic creation, As the commentators suggest, he speaks indirectly in TVM 10.3, concealing himself behind the words of the young woman, as if to say in her voice what, as a great devotee of Krsna and defender of God's ultimate goodness and faithfulness, he cannot say in his own voice.

TVM 10.3 is set at dawn, the moment of likely separation when the world awakens and Krsna prepares to leave her bed in order to take the cows out for the day's pasture. Her desire for Krsna has flamed up during the night's union, is caught in a painful "twilight" moment between the joy of union and the fear of separation. Moreover, she knows the dangers that accompany cowherding: the hot toil in the fields and the chance that his tender body will be bruised by the hard work; the (implied) likelihood (for she knows the myths, too) that he will flirt with the village women who also have a great deal of time on their hands while herding the cows; the possibility of attacks on him by the minions of the demon king Kamsa, whose defeat by Krsna has been prophesied, and who has sought Krsna's death since the boy's birth. As she lies there at dawn, the dangers of ordinary life, desire, and myth converge in her agony.

The song is vividly sensual, portraying without hesitation the hot passion and desperate desire of the girl who has felt the lord inside her body and wants more. It explores her anger when in a panic she decides that he is going to leave, and that his soothing night-promises have no weight now that the sun rises. It envisions, too, the course of the day, his work and play and her misery-and even, to compound her unhappiness, the next evening's anxiety about whether he will return to her then.

As the commentators point out, her feelings evolve during the song-from lust and rage and grief about what is happening to herself when he leaves, toward an apparently selfless concern (or is this, too, a lover's pretext?) about the dangers he will undergo. In the last verses, she appears even to offer a bold, contradictory alternative: stay here, don't go out, even if you will stay only in order to be with women other than myself: even that is better than total separation.

III

I have already mentioned the "commentators" several times. In the centuries after Nammalvar his songs were recognized as a sacred scripture by the Srivaisnava Hindu community of south India, as the final, best word of the Lord Visnu,4 surpassing even the oldest, most sacred scriptures, the Vedas of two thousand years before. By the fourteenth century, five theologians had written major commentaries on Tiruvaymoli, exploring with great reverence and in increasing detail each song's every word and image and meaning. They chose to read all one hundred songs of Tiruvaymoli as consecutive portions of the single

4 "Visnu" is the more generally applicable name of the God who was thought to have appeared in many forms, including that of Krsna.

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story of Nammalvar's spiritual progress and hence as the map of every devotee's journey toward God; they also connected the songs with the Sanskrit Vedanta tradition of philosophy and theology, and so re-read them and that Sanskrit tradition in the light of one another.5

They saw TVM 10.3, one of the last in Tiruvaymoli, as expressive of Nammalvar's mature, nearly perfected state, as he nears his climactic, irreversible union with Visnu. While recognizing that the first verses are harsh and angry, they read them not as the thougless words of an impetuous lover, but as the torn emotions of the mature devotee who still finds a difference between what she has and what she wants: God is within her, and her goal is only to care lovingly for this God; but she finds herself still in a body that makes separations as well as unions possible, and she is still plagued by all the limitations and contingencies that life "in the world" carries with it.

The commentators say that the song is ultimately about the subtler forms of debilitating spiritual fear, that fear which itself becomes the last obstacle to union. She is afraid of herself and of her God; her desire clashes with her unworthiness, her hope with the realization that God is utterly free to come and go at will. She knows that humans cannot force God to come and that she has no means to make God stay. She is depressed also by the possibility that she does not love enough; would God ever have left her if she loved perfectly? And could she keep on living, in separation, if she really loved? Yet, she knows that somehow she does indeed love her God, and that she will not settle for anything less than the most tangible of unions, "inside her." All of this hurts her most at dawn, the point between the "night" of union and the "day" of tepidity and absence, "ordinary" religion.6

The commentators say that the song traces her meditation on her self and on divine freedom, her plea to God, and her eventual realization that God will remain faithful to her. Drawing support from other songs in Tiruvaymoli and other Alvar works, they find in the song the gradual dispelling of her fears as each is voiced, one by one. She realizes that she can serve God here and now, not needing a better place or state. She recalls that God's unlimited freedom is in fact limited by the divine promise to save the devotee. She realizes that because her own limitations are undeniable and irreparable, improvement is not the real issue, and that she can more easily become free by forgetting herself and letting go of obsessive self-consciousness. Finally, she realizes that the

5 The commentarial observations I recount here are generally agreed on by the major commentators, although I follow primarily the views of Periyavaccanpillai (b. 1228). The details of commentarial interpretation are in general quite complex. For examples of these, see my essays, "'I created Land and Sea': A Tamil Case of God-Consciousness and its Srivaisnava Interpretation," Numen 35/2 (1988), pp. 238-59, and ""Nammalvar's Glorious Tiruvallaval: an exploration in the methods and goals of Srivaisnava commentary,'' Journal of the American Oriental Society (forthcoming).
6 The commentators do not make this last point explicitly, but I think it follows from their comments here and elsewhere.

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farthest reach of this self- forgetfulness is to love God as her own tender child, imbued with a selfless concern for God alone, about what her Krsna might suffer out in the fields.

IV

What are we to make of the song, the materials it reworks, and the Hindu commentarial reading of both?7 In the previous sections, I have sought first of all to shift our attention from the very large question, "What is the Christian supposed to think of non-Christian religions?", to the smaller, more fruitful questions, "What occurs to me in reading Nammalvar's song and reflecting on its Hindu theological interpretations?'', and, "What occurs when 1, then, turn again to the Bible and the Christian tradition and re-read those?" I believe that a great deal that is important occurs simply in the repeated asking and answering of these two questions regarding TVM 10.3 (or, of course, regarding any of a wide variety of other non-Christian texts). Reading the song attentively initiates an "encounter" of religions, and involves the reader in hearing and understanding a specific other voice, not just the generic "world religions." This attentive reading will have an effect, because the song has its own beauty and power, an "excess of meaning" that intrudes on the world of the reader.

We can welcome this new arrival, TVM 10.3, and can do so without prejudice to our Christian beliefs, without having to choose between reading this song and our accustomed, faithful reading of the Bible. For we can read the song in the context of the Bible, as new context for it, and without forgetting that it will always be the Bible which gives shape to the Christian's world. But if readers read with openness, they will find that their reading of the Bible is transformed, and that TVM 10.3 is a new, important addition to the set of texts which are the Bible's context. Nammalvar's song begins to echo gently in all our reading, as its images and powerful, plaintive cries intrude ever so quietly-or dramaticallyon the great biblical texts.

What precisely happens depends on what one has made of Nammalvar's text, and on how one has already been reading the Bible; the weaving of context need not create the same literary fabric for all Christians. One might hear the girl's mixed emotions while reading one or another of the psalms of lament and exile; her night and dawn might coincide with those of the Song of Songs; her fear of her God's freedom might form a counterpoint to Job's questioning of the divine will. For some, her longing and love might seem to mirror the state of Mary Magdalene in the Gospels, or of Paul as his experience of the dichotomies of life in the flesh mixes with his astonished awareness of God's

7 The following comments sketch briefly thoughts I have developed more fully elsewhere. See "Christianity and the World Religions: Religion, Reason and Pluralism," Religious Studies Review 15/3 (July 1989), pp. 197-204; and "Reading the World in Christ," for The Myth of Pluralism: Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, edited by Gavin D'Costa (Maryknoll: Orbis, forthcoming).

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overwhelming grace and faithfulness. And for some-and this point will surely have struck some readers from the start-the song awaits a feminist theological reading, which would question the portrayal of woman, man, and God in the song, the varied confinements and limits introduced into it from the cultural milieu of seventh century south India. How does the late twentieth century intrude on our reading of Nammalvar?

One can also allow the voices of Nammalvar's commentators to be heard in one's theological conversations. One might, for instance, find ways to join them in inquiring into the nature and limits of divine freedom as this is experienced first in dread and fear, and then as transformed through the commitments of love. Or, one might find a place for their ideas when asking about the nature of human helplessness in a sinful world, or about how attentiveness to God instead of self is achieved as a gradual, graced process of redirected attention and acquired simplicity. Finally, one may watch their transformation of myth and song into theology, and ask about the similar and differing aspects of the Christian efforts to transform scripture and spiritual experience into theology.

After one has read and re-read, thought back and forth from text to context-one can then review the questions posed in the theology of religions: "What are we to make of these religions?" "Is Christ unique?" "Are Hindus saved by Christ alone?" "Is there revelation outside Christianity?" Although it is not possible here to take up such questions in detail, I wish to stress two points which need to be balanced, however one goes about answering the questions.

First, a Christian must always in some way "read" the world in Christ, finding its meaning only in his death and resurrection, and must in some way venture the claim that this meaning pertains to every human being as the single, all-embracing horizon for human experience. I am, therefore, not a pluralist, and do not believe that all religions are equally salvific paths, or that Christianity is only one of numerous paths. Nor do I believe that Hinduism--or, rather, the variety of "religions" we locate and group under the name "Hinduism"-is true in the sense that Christianity is true.

Second, however, the Christian who reads Nammalvar's song openly and becomes vulnerable to its influence must also find that the song does not easily surrender its power to provoke fresh meanings. When it has been "read into" the Christian context, it becomes a permanent part of it, neither to be later excised, nor to be confined to a single, controlled set of possible meanings. The Christian who first reads and then asks the theology of religions questions will not be asking about what is entirely strange or alien, as if she or he were a gate-keeper who has to decide whether to let the other in at all; nor will she or he be dealing with what is entirely predictable, once inside. Rather, the basic question will be about how to make sense, as a Christian, of a set of Christian experiences and

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texts and theologies that now includes certain non-Christian texts that remain vital and creative.8

V

When one tries to state a position about how these two points fit together-that all is in Christ and within the biblical "margins," and that all is to be read differently because of one's new reading-a creative process is set in motion, in which the number of possible conclusions is as large as the number of Christian theologies. But, in my view, the general position usually called "inclusivism" best recognizes and respects the dialectic of a contextual reading in which one reads and learns, but without permanently losing sight of one's Christian starting-point and destiny.

This inclusivist position holds two things as true: first, that Christ alone is the savior of the world and second, that salvation in Christ is universally available, even outside the boundaries of Christianity as those are marked by any normal, observable standard of connection with Christ and the Christian community. This two-fold claim ably describes the act of being a Christian and the act of reading as a Christian, and is not to be confused with a handy philosophical position which assumes a higher viewpoint and smooths over the difficulties of merging the universal and the particular, (somehow) knowing in advance what the other must be.

Instead, one dares to read a text like TVM 10.3 and to allow it to have its effect through an assimilation of the accumulated meanings of all of its particular words and phrases, rhythms, and structures. One tries for a moment to see what it is like thus to cry out to God, to desire and be afraid and angry, to let go and finally to love. One cannot predict in advance, even with the best of intentions, how precisely one will be affected by this reading. But one is in any case learning thereby to include in one's enduring Christian worldview a set of new texts and meanings that have, up to now, been thought to be outside the Christian horizon.

I have chosen TVM 10.3 only as an example, without claiming that it has any special pertinence to the articulation of a theology of religions. The girl is, after all, preoccupied with other things. Perhaps, though, it may shed a little light on how we go about becoming Christians who truly encounter other religions. For the first problem always to be faced in such an encounter is fear: a fear of the loss of God, of Christ; a fear of the dangerous "other" and of a future one cannot fully predict; a fear of a God who is completely free. To experience another religion, however one meets it, is to awaken at a double twilight of dusk and dawn, where

8 It is crucial that we allow the non-Christian text-or ritual or temple or, indeed, the non-Christian person-to have an impact on us before we explain it entirely in already established Christian terms. I have developed this point in a small essay, "Praying through the Non-Christian," Review for Religious (forthcoming.)

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God comes but also goes. We should not be surprised if we are vulnerable, afraid, in love-and also alone, angry, annoyed. Nammalvar's song points also to the gradual alleviation of that fear, by an honest probing and voicing of the depths of love and what love implies. He tells us that gradually one's focus shifts from self to God, and fear yields to a calmer, quieter union with the God who is free, but chooses to abide. The "non-Christian" is, at that point, no longer a problem to be solved, but a possibility that has been given to us.

It is my hope that these reflections open one pathway into the encounter with religions and the theology of religions, particularly for the many who, like myself, begin things by reading and pondering words; who want to continue to be enlightened primarily by the biblical Word of God, while yet broadening the context in which that Word is read.