Temple Town...

Temple town….Madurai, Tamil Nadu…the ancient capital and famous for its Sri Mennakshi Temple, one of the three largest in all of India…where literally thousands of devotees flock to worship as Hindus..its sheer size is beyond description, 4 towers for the four directions..nothing in Madurai can be taller than these towers..in vivid colors, the many gods and goddesses of the Hindu culture

The Temple of Pandai…a much smaller local temple where I saw to live goats sacrificed..amazing experience. Surely this will be as close as I will ever come to physically experiencing the ancient cult of the Bible. The goats had garlands of flowers to signify that they were sacred…they were washed with buckets of water. Then a man, not a priest, interestingly, dressed in a traditional lungi and black shirt, with a long curved knife cut off the head of the goat and one hoof. The animal “kicked” for several minutes as it bled out and then was taken to the priests, the meat is cut up and made into food for the people of the local village. On a simple straw mat where the heads of several goats and chickens/roosters-cocks…it was very hot yesterday, nearly 90…the remains of the sacrifices were attracting “thousands” of flies.

I had tried to find some common religious realm in the large temple as I watched hundreds of Hindus offer baskets of ‘food’, flower garlands, incense, and fire to the many idols and priests. Again I tried to open myself to whether I could DO this, sacrifice animals as Leviticus requires in very detailed discipline…I actually wanted the animal sacrifice to be ‘extraordinary’. I have taught for many years that there is NO spirituality per se in the biblical act of worship…and as I witnessed yesterday, it is “work”…which is the play on the Hebrew-Avodah! I went with a new friend, John Samuel, an excellent OT/ Hebrew Bible scholar who wrote his second PhD on Gen 22-An Interfaith Perspective. John had never been to this Temple and was also deeply “shaken” by the experience. He said several times, if this is just two goats, a few severed heads…what must it have been like when tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands came during the festivals to Jerusalem, imagine the blood and physical remnants of the animals, the heat and stench. I no longer need to imagine what the Bible is describing, and can say without any equivocation that I could not and would not have “enjoyed” the religion of our biblical ancestors.