Tuesday 27 June 2017

Underway, at last

It's getting late in Manali. I'm sitting on a balcony with excellent access to a wireless router, I've straightened out my access to it, informed new German friends, of the password, and done the washing! (Many may think that's madness, but I reckon Manali is one of the best places to dry clothes in the world!) I've only managed a snack for dinner, and tried, turning in ever decreasing circles, to choose what I'll need to take with me on the long journey to Leh, Ladakh, starting tomorrow morning. The characteristic, deep burbling noise of Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycles keeps drifting up from below, a sure sign of young men having fun, and not wanting to go to sleep.

Perhaps I'd better back up. Internet access is patchy and a fair bit has happened. Early on June 22nd I headed off to Amritsar on the Bullet I've hired. I rode very cautiously although the conditions for riding were excellent. Nevertheless, I still reached St Paul's Diocesan School,Palampur, halfway to Amritsar, by midday. Under the guidance of its current Principal, Rev V.P. Singh, St Paul's is being extensively rebuilt. It needed it! Several of the previous buildings, relics from the era of Canadian missionaries, had reached their use-by-date. I had asked Mr Singh I could stay over for the night in the school's guest bedroom, so his secretary sent me there. Awkwardly, the guest room is in the same block as the kindergarten classrooms, and I was kitted out in black, heavy motorbike gear. The children were intrigued and their female teachers were a bit anxious at this large European male dressed like Darth Vader minus the cape! A number of them bunched together for mutual support as I walked past. Out of the corner of my eye I could see one of them gather her courage:

"Good afternoon sir," she ventured, so I spoke in my improving Hindi, explaining who I was and where I'd come from. Just then Mr Singh arrived and all tension dissipated. I told them that I'd be back with 40 or so other motorbike riders in a few days.

Early the next morning I set off again. Making good time I arrived in Amritsar by about midday. Unfortunately, the city's extensive new system of flyovers and bus lanes so confused me that I wandered around in the heat before my iPad's GPS app found me a street I knew.

I found lodging like so many times before at DMRC (Dit Memorial Resource Centre), an Institution run by the Church of North India's Amritsar Diocese. Coincidentally, the 4 Germans had arrived that day too. Three have come representing their church, the Evangelische Kirche in Hesse und Nassau, which is an ecumenical protestant denomination that covers an area north of Frankfurt am Main. The fourth is a biker, and friend of one of the pastors.

So is Bishop Samantaroy, both a biker and a friend of the pastor! He decided to take us for a ride along the famous Grand Trunk Road in the late afternoon traffic. To keep up I had to throw my previous caution to the winds! These guys were good! I thought I had adapted well to Indian driving conditions, but here they were, jetlagged  and weaving in and out or the westward-facing traffic as though they'd be doing it all their lives. That evening we attended we all attended the monthly prayer meeting conducted at the Bishop's house.

I spent most of Saturday making use of wifi. Meanwhile groups were coming from around northern India. The groups from Jammu didn't have too far to come, but the the people from Chhatisgardh traversed most of the subcontinent, arriving in the middle of the night. There were church services, city bike rides and information sessions, and young men strutting their stuff (I thought I'd left that behind me!) Then Monday morning was upon us. There was a public meeting in the middle of the city, photos taken with prominent politicians, and at last we were flagged off. Even then there were meetings every 40 km or so, at which Bishop Samantaroy spoke about peace in both interfaith and predominantly Christians settings. After the meeting at Pathankot, 100km north of Amritsar, we turned east and got down to the serious business of riding. Until we reached Palampur again, where that very same group of female teachers had ben waiting for 2 hours! There was another meeting.

Today has been more of what we can expect for the rest of the Rally. We travelled until we reached Manali, and another meeting with community leaders, talking about peace. At Manali the hospital, school and church had cooperated. They had used chalk to make an avenue that we all rode down onto the basketball court. The broad smiles on the faces of my friends at Manali as I rode past them very very touching. It felt like coming home.


Forty Years

N.B. Although I wrote this on June 22, the Uniting Church's birthday, I didn't get adequate access to the internet until the 27th. So here it is, a bit delayed.

Like many other Australians I know exactly where I was the day in 1983 when Australia 2 won the tacking duel that took the Americas Cup from American hands for the first time in 157 years. I was in my flat on the top floor of the guesthouse across National Highway 43 from the leprosy hospital in Salur, a town in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh where I was then starting a research laboratory that tested for drug resistance in different strains of the leprosy bacillus. It was about 4.30am in India when the race was decided, Sleepless with excitement, I was listening to equally excited Australian commentators whose voices waxed and waned, and were masked by that high-pitched whistling noise characteristic of short wave radio. This turned out to be one of the most frustrating events of my life. The next morning nobody in that rural, Indian Leprosy hospital had any idea what yachting was, let alone the significance of taking The Auld Mug off the Yanks. Except, perhaps, Elisabeth, the Cornish OT, who wasn't the slightest bit interested. I had no one with whom I could share my joy.

There was plenty of joy at the inauguration of the Uniting Church, 40 years ago today, and some 6 years before the the Americas Cup passed from American hands. There was joy aplenty at the official inauguration service at Sydney Town Hall, and joy at various regional events held around the country. The joy came, I think, with the sense of a long-anticipated and worked-towards union formalised, and the realisation that with this ecumenical act Australian Congregationalists, Methodists and Presbyterians were doing something deeply right and of God. That it sometimes has felt like the last 40 years have been equivalent to Israel's 40 year Exodus in the wilderness has not diminished my conviction that we did the right and godly thing back in 1977. Even though my major ecumenical memory of 1977 was in getting to know the young women (and some of the young men) of Pymble Presbyterian's PFA group, and I am celebrating the UCA's 40th anniversary once again alone and in an Indian guesthouse, there are many things about the Uniting Church that I love and am proud of.

One of them is the many partnerships the UCA has formed with sister churches, particularly in the two thirds world. The guesthouse I'm writing this blog entry in belongs to St Paul's School, an institution run by the Church of North India and situated in a town called Palampur, in the foothills of the Himalayas not far from Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan government in exile reside. I'm overnighting here. Tomorrow morning I'll continue my journey on a Royal Enfield Bullet (500 cc for those interested) to Amritsar where I shall join more than 40 other riders on this Ride for Peace which I've described in previous blogs. I'm not being charged for tonight's board or lodging. While I and my congregation think I'm on long service leave, realising my long-held dream of riding a motorbike to Ladakh, for the school Principal, Mr Virendra Pal Singh, I'm on Church of North India business. And for the Bishop of the Diocese of Amritsar I am an ecumenical guest. At points along the way the Rally will stop and hold meetings with local civic and religious leaders to promote peace. I and the 3 other ecumenical guests will undoubtedly be called upon to make speeches. 

So my contribution to the Uniting Church's 40th Anniversary celebrations will be to ride a motorbike to Ladakh as an ecumenical guest of the Church of North India, promoting peace along the way.
Today, while others have been celebrating I've ridden half way to Amritsar where this year's Ride for Peace will start. I have a huge weight in tools which along with the other luggage I've brought along makes the bike wobble alarmingly at the very low speeds one's often forced to accept in Indian traffic, and which I'll gratefully pass on to whatever service vehicle is attending the riders. I'm worried that that something will go wrong, and crave your prayers that nothing will. But the big adventure is under way.


A bit like the Uniting Church, perhaps!

Saturday 17 June 2017

Facing Fear

Some days ago I followed my motorcycling tutor, Steve Ringeisen, 60km down the Kullu-Manali Valley towards Delhi, to a place called Bhuntur. Steve had several pieces of business he hoped to transact that day. (None of which he was successful with, as it turned out. That is not unusual in India. I have discovered that the way to live here is the way the Australian cricket team learnt to play their cricket here in the recent series. Stop behaving like a westerner! Be patient. Eventually the results will come! But that’s a story for another day.)

After lunch Steve asked me if I’d like to ride up into the hills that form the valley. “Well, I’m here to train for riding in mountains,” I thought. “I’ll give some hills a go.” Pretty soon, however, I was wondering whether I’d been mad to accept Steve’s suggestion. The accompanying glorious (I think) panoramic picture in no wise does justice to how steep that mountainside was. The road was at least surfaced, but it was barely 1 lane wide, and we had to negotiate really steep, repeated, narrow hairpin bends. I discovered that I’m much more comfortable making right hand turns than left hand ones. This ride also drilled into me that the relationship between clutch and accelerator is of the essence in biking. Nervous and tentative as I was, I had no real idea how to “feather” the clutch. Kangaroo-hopping while learning to drive in my parents’ 1969 Triumph down a broad street in East Killara was one thing. Trying not to do the same thing on a motorbike while going around hairpin bends that cling to a precipitous mountainside was, with all due respect to my 18 year old self, a different proposition. Then it started raining.

All of a sudden things resolved, as they do in India. Our asphalted goat-track joined a larger way. The rain ceased. We met some fellow adventurers eating lunch by the roadside, and upon hearing that the new road led down to a bridge over the Beas River that was well-known to us we decided that we’d had enough excitement for one day. The trip down that road was lovely, passing through village after little village, each with a spreading banyan tree at its heart. That, too, is a story for another day.

At least as much as learning how to feather the clutch, this ride was about facing fear. This whole expedition is. “How is it,” I ask myself, “that aged 61 I’m preparing to ride a motorbike in the high Himalayas?” A MOTORBIKE? The number of times I came off my old Honda 175 as a young man when I last rode bikes a lot! On the other hand, pain is a good teacher, at least for foolhardies like me, and preparing well is a good learning. I am learning that one calculates the risks, prepares as best one can for them, and does not go beyond what one has prepared for. As scary as that mountainside and its hairpin bends were, I was never in any real danger. My fear was both my ally and my opponent. It kept me cautious and alert to danger. But if it had paralysed me I would have been in real danger.

I’ve been learning to face fear ever since I became a follower of Jesus nearly 50 years ago. My experience of this has been that even when I was not well-prepared, could not have been well-prepared, God has many times seen me through difficult situations. I think the situation in which I was most fearful was when I somehow became involved with a neighbour in our Swedish country town in building a double garage with central wall across our boundary line. For this I was woefully unprepared. A new migrant, I had to learn a whole building vocabulary. Though strong enough to have become an experienced builder’s labourer, as a builder…let’s say my bent is more to the theological than to the practical! I felt hopelessly inadequate for the task. Each day I awoke with worry (fear’s close relative) gnawing at the pit of my stomach. I certainly made my fair share of mistakes, yet the project  succeeded. The critical point was when we had concrete poured into the building’s foundations and floor. There is a real art and science to spreading concrete which I had never learnt. The cement truck came, poured its load and left, giving us a few hours to complete the task of spreading, ‘floating’ and surfacing the concrete before it set too hard to work. While I was shovelling concrete and my congregational chairperson, a farmer with a farmer’s ability to turn his hand to everything, was floating it things went well. When he had to leave I continued doing what I’d been told to, but it became clear that there was a large area at the front of my side of the garage that needed more concrete moved there.

By now it was late afternoon, the concrete was setting and I was  desperate. Suddenly things resolved, as they can do, even in well-planned Sweden! A neighbour from across the road offered his services. Unbeknown to me, he was a concreter who had retired early with a bad back. Expertly, he caressed the concrete into place, giving this story its happy ending! That day I learnt that God seems to enjoy helping us when we have to go beyond what we are capable of, and we are impelled to cry out for help. “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.”

Fear is a good servant but a bad master. That’s why, I think, the Bible’s most frequently uttered command is “Don’t be afraid!” This journey is teaching me more, or perhaps embedding in my consciousness the counter-intuitive truth that faith helps us to face fear. For example, I don’t even know whether I’ll make it to Leh, the journey’s goal. I’ve discovered that the Leh motorbike hirers’ Union is not allowing bikes registered out-of-state into Ladakh. The bike I’ve hired is registered in Manali, in the neighbouring state of Himachal Pradesh, and apparently it was the Manali motorbike hirers’ Union which precipitated the dispute! I don’t know what I or the whole expedition will do, and I need to decide this week. While not fear-inducing this situation is worrisome. That cry for help is a natural and right response to a tricky situation, even as I employ the best information-gathering, assessing, discussing and decision-making I can bring to bear.


Monday 12 June 2017

On Fatigue, Joy & Giving

It looks like this Himalayan TravelBlog isn’t going to be a daily thing.  The reason for that is the travelling plus my increasing age. The Air India flight was not the problem. Leaving Sydney around 11am it landed in Delhi at 7.30pm, so it was like a day’s work. I’m so used to the taxi ride between Indira Gandhi International Airport and Church of North India Bhavan, where I’m now regarded as family, that I often give instructions to the driver! But the 4½ hour time difference does extract a toll.

Nevertheless, the next morning I took a Metro train to a major transport hub called Kashmere Gate, where I met with my publisher, ISPCK. The Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge is, obviously, a child of  the British SPCK. It’s not only cricket and railways that the British have bequeathed to India, but at well over 300 years of age ISPCK is very much its own entity. I’ve been commissioned to write a simple textbook in ecotheology for Indian pastors and laypeople. But I argued strongly (not that I needed to!) that any such book needed to be well and truly Indian and to be a collaborative affair involving both Indians and Australians, and women and men. I had a good meeting with Ella Sonawane, ISPCK’s Deputy Director. She has, marvellously, found a number of Indian women who are willing to write a chapter in collaboration with some unknown (to them) Australian! Suddenly my launch deadline, 26 January (which is both India’s Republic Day and Australia Day) next year looks feasible again.

Having run into the Church of North India’s Moderator, The Most Rev’d Pradeep Kumar Samantaroy, I exchanged my ticket in an “ordinary” bus for a lift to Chandigarh in the comfortable church school-owned vehicle that had taken him to Delhi, then bought the last available ticket on a Volvo (= “luxury”) bus to Manali. At 61 my body protests more than it did on my first adventure through Asia, when I rode through the night in “ordinary” buses! Starting at midday we made good time, and would have arrived in the evening except for the exceptional traffic queues caused by hordes of newly-rich middle class Indians who ascend to this tourist town at this time of the year. It was nearly midnight before I got to bed in the same flat Lena and I inhabited when we lived here.

The next morning my American friend Steve Ringeisen took me to the agent from whom I would hire the 500cc Royal Enfield Bullet that would be my means of transport on this Ride for Peace. To my surprise and pleasure Raju, the “hirer”, is the husband of Poonam, our cleaner during our sojourn in Manali. Later that afternoon I braved heavy traffic and rain to test out the Bullet, riding up the highway to Steve’s house in a village called Shenag some kilometres north of Manali, then back along a 4 wheel drive track. I found it to be an “easy rider” with an upright stance better suited to my ageing knees than some of the more modern bikes. My task will be to “stay upright”!

Church the next morning was something of a reunion, but afterwards I fell into bed, dropped off and, with short breaks slept until this morning. Sometimes, as my mother remarked during our Skype conversation, the body just takes over when the mind is not sensible! I had awakened to discover that my father as been awarded an OAM. Life can be really good!

It does feel like a privilege to be doing this. It is my very personal way of taking long service leave: on a bike, in India. It takes me back to my first Asian adventure, doubling Ian, my travelling companion, around Bali on a Yamaha 125. At the same time I’m hoping to do some good by supporting the local Indian church in its message of peace in a part of the world where violence is often not far away. “My” church, the Uniting Church in Australia, is in a partner relationship with the Church of North India, and in particular with its Diocese of Amritsar. That expresses itself in part in personal exchanges like the ones Lena and I have been involved with, and in part by projects that UnitingWorld, the Uniting Church’s overseas agency, supports. These include projects supporting church-run schools and hostels for girls and for boys.

If something in what I am doing moves your to want to help the Diocese of Amritsar and the people it is supporting, then by all means read and respond to the “begging letter” attached to this TravelBlog. I’m very conscious of the calls upon our bank accounts these days, and that many of you who read this have previously supported “my causes” (and indeed Lena and myself when we were volunteering) because I’ve brought them to your attention. This is not about supporting my long service leave adventure! As I said, if something in what I’m doing moves you to support those I’ve grown to love, have a look, over the next month or so at UnitingWorld’s begging letter.

This being a TravelBlog, I won’t mention money again…

Grace and peace,

David




Saturday 10 June 2017

Ride for Peace

I’m going to have another go at a weblog, this time in the form of a travelogue. This is the start of long service leave, which I’m using to go to India once more to join a motorcycle "Ride for Peace" through the Himalayas.

Every 2 years Bishop Samantaroy, head of the Church of North India’s Amritsar Diocese and currently Moderator of the CNI, leads this brilliant ministry to young men. These Rallies traverse the far north-western part of India, the Indian Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh and the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, which form the extent of the Diocese and a wedge between Chinese Tibet and Pakistan. Geologically it’s a fantastically interesting part of the world, rising majestically from the northern plains into the high Himalayas. Sociologically, culturally and religiously it’s just as diverse. The four main religions of the greater region are Islam in Pakistan and throughout Kashmir, Hinduism in Jammu and various kinds of folk Hinduism in the mountain valleys of Himachal Pradesh, Buddhism and Communist Atheism in Ladakh and Tibet and Sikhism in the Punjab.  Christianity is a small minority, caught often enough between these gigantic tectonic plates of the other religions. Yet because of the British colonial and Christian heritage, preserved today by many grand churches in various stages of restoration or dilapidation, and numerous young pentecostal house churches springing up in far-flung villages and towns, Christianity plays a larger role than one might have expected.

I see the Ride for Peace as clever in several ways. First, it is a highly visible way of Christians telling both co-religionists and devotees of other religions, “We all say we are for peace. In this part of the world we Christians are too few to play power games; we have to be about peace. But what about you? What does peace actually mean to you? Are you serious about it?” In like manner the Bishop, a few years ago, made a highly visible, much photographed appearance with the Dalai Lama and Bishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu then the latter visited the former at Dharamsala. This town is, of course, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, so Bishop Tutu was visiting the Dalai Lama. But Dharamsala also lies smack bang in the middle of the Diocese of Amritsar. So in a sense Bishop Samantaroy was hosting a colleague within the Anglican Communion.

Secondly, the Ride for Peace is brilliant ministry to young men. Bishop Samantaroy is the kind of leader who maintains a twinkle in his eye, and a youthful mien. The rule is, by all means participate in this adventure in the high Himalayas, but you must follow the rules. Rule number 1 is “No one rides in front of Bishop Sahib!” Rule number 2 is, “No one rides behind Rev Lily Samantaroy Memsahib! Men need to do things, and we need adventures to test ourselves against. If the Church does not provide the, men simply fade away from Church. If your “patch” is some of the most adventurous country in the world it makes excellent sense to use it, pastorally!

And thirdly, part of Bishop Samantaroy’s means for addressing Christianity’s minority status is to form partnerships with Churches and Christian individuals in western countries. The Diocese of Amritsar has a partnership with my Uniting Church's overseas department UnitingWorld. That has resulted in several projects that UnitingWorld, and some Uniting Church congregations support. One thing I hope to do through participating in this Ride for Peace is to persuade people to donate money to one or other of these projects. As I’ve only just managed to connect with WiFi I’ll send the link to that fund-raiser in tomorrow’s blog.

I’ll share the Ride for Peace with several German bikers from a German denomination called the Evangelische Kirche in Hesse und Nassau. EKHN is in a well-established partnership with Amritsar Diocese. There is considerable travel between the two countries by representatives of the two Churches.

And that will do for today. Tomorrow I’ll say something about my journey so far, and send you the link to that fundraiser.

Grace and peace,

David Reichardt