SPRINGBOARDS and WALKING STICKS

 For Fyodor Dostoevsky , suffering was not a glitch in the human machine; it was the engine of its soul. To understand his philosophy, we have to look past the grim reputation of his novels and see suffering as he did: as the primary tool for spiritual awakening and the ultimate defence of human freedom. Suffering as the Proof of Freedom: In Notes from Underground , Dostoevsky argues against the " rationalists " of his time who believed that if society were perfectly organised and all needs were met, suffering would vanish. Dostoevsky disagreed vehemently. He believed that if you gave a human being everything they wanted—food, sleep, and comfort—they would eventually smash it all just to prove they are not piano keys being played by logic or biology. We choose to suffer, sometimes, simply to assert our "capricious" free will . Suffering is often a manifestation of our refusal to be a mere "statistic." It is a declaration of our individuality. The Sole Ori...

  Viktor Frankl found meaning in Auschwitz. Marcus Aurelius found wisdom during a plague. Dostoevsky discovered consciousness in a Siberian labour camp. Not because their sufferings were noble—but because they chose to transform it. Epictetus , who was a slave and crippled, wrote: “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” Here’s the hard part: you can’t choose whether or not you suffer. Life will break you regardless. The question is: will you break open or break apart? The tragedy isn’t that we suffer. It’s that we suffer meaninglessly. Suffering is the universal constant of the human experience, yet it is rarely uniform. From the biological pangs of our evolutionary ancestors to the existential dread of the modern urbanite, the weights we carry differ in both origin and purpose. To live a life of meaning is not to avoid suffering—an impossible feat—but to develop the discernment to know which kind of suffering is a hollow cage and which is a necessa...

 In an interview, The Evolution of Belief , Ethiran Kathiravan explores the origins of faith through the lens of evolutionary biology and sociology . He argues that faith is not a divine gift but a survival mechanism that emerged early in human history. Faith originated from the need to predict and survive natural phenomena. For example, early humans interpreted the rustling of grass as a potential predator. Or a cat that fell in a hot water, believes that any water could be hot water. This "belief" in unseen dangers helped them survive. Faith evolved as a cognitive adaptation to an unpredictable world. In our primitive state, the ability to believe in the unseen—whether it was a hidden predator or the cyclical nature of the seasons—provided a survival advantage. It allowed early humans to navigate a dangerous environment by imposing a sense of order on chaos. Common faith creates s ocial cohesion. As humans formed tribes, faith became a tool to unify groups. It created...

 There's something profoundly unsettling about how easy evil is. There is a glossary of evil  in Mark 7: 14-23 —immorality, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, folly —these aren't achievements. They're defaults. These are the lowest forms of desires. It is cheap. You don't have to work for it. You just sit lazy and idle somewhere, and these thoughts, desires, and feelings overtake us. They require no training, no discipline, and no journey. These vices demand nothing of us except that we stop resisting, stop climbing, stop reaching. They are gravity pulling us downward into our smallest, pettiest selves. We at times even rationalise and justify them, as they are human; as if our humanity were defined by its worst impulses rather than its highest possibilities. Calling something natural doesn't make it noble. Now consider the Queen of Sheba ( 1 Kings 10:1-10 )—a woman who traveled over a thousand miles through desert and danger to sit at the ...

 We all live uneventful ordinary lives; and this perfectly okay. We navigate our days through familiar rhythms—commutes to work, does daily responsibilities, and are happy with the comforting predictability of routine. Jesus spent decades in Nazareth as a carpenter's son. Peter, Andrew, James, and John rose each morning to mend their nets and cast them into the Sea of Galilee, as fishermen had done for generations. There is profound beauty in the ordinary, in lives woven from the threads of daily work and quiet faithfulness. Yet here lies the essential paradox of Christian existence: as one must be simultaneously rooted in the ordinary be also must be perpetually prepared to abandon it. The day those Galilean fishermen encountered Jesus marked not merely a career change but a fundamental reorientation of their lives (Matthew 4: 12-23). They returned home that evening not as fishermen but as fishers of people—to the bewilderment, perhaps even embarrassment, of their families and co...

 There's something deeply unsettling about the persistence of religious middlemen in a faith founded on their very abolition. When Jesus repeatedly declared, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," he wasn't offering a mild suggestion for liturgical reform. He was dismantling an entire economy of spiritual brokerage that had inserted itself between the divine and the human. Consider the strangeness of it all. God, who counts the hairs on our heads and notes the fall of every sparrow, apparently needs someone to explain our needs to him. God, who knows our thoughts before we think them and our needs before we voice them, requires elaborate rituals and institutional procedures to be moved to compassion. Jesus addressed this directly when he said that the Father knows what we need before we ask. This wasn't poetic flourish. It was a radical statement about the nature of divine awareness and the needlessness of human mediation. If God already knows, then what precisely is th...

  The title "Lamb of God" (introduced in John 1: 29) carries immense theological weight because it synthesises multiple foundational themes from the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), acting as the culmination of God's redemptive plan. It signifies Jesus as the ultimate, voluntary, and perfect substitute whose death atones for sin and brings liberation. The theological weightage rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures are manifold. The Lamb Provided by God: When Abraham was commanded to sacrifice his son; he stated to the curious Isaac, "God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering" (Genesis 22:8). God substituted a ram caught in a thicket for Isaac, establishing the concept of substitutionary atonement. Jesus is seen as the "Lamb of God," the divine provision that replaces the need for human sacrifice, acting as a substitute for humanity.  The Passover Lamb:  The Israelites were saved from the plague on the firstborn by applying the blood of an unblem...

 Here is a story from the margins of the infancy narrative (Luke 2: 36-40). Prophetess Anna appears at the threshold where the Christmas story fades and the chronicle of the adult Jesus begins, positioned after the presentation at the temple and before the boy lost amongst the scholars. From the tribe of Asher—a lineage barely whispered in scripture—she emerges: a woman, a widow, advanced in years. Anna had kept her hopes alive; she looked forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem. Jesus is brought to the temple for the rite of purification and presentation. Anna recognised him at once and began to speak of him to everyone around; she was perhaps the first proclaimer of the gospel in the temple. This passage acknowledges a great truth: people from the margins of society—the poor, the widowed, and the outsider—are often the first and fastest to recognise and speak aloud the truth. The people at the centre are busy maintaining the status quo, and defend their space, rituals, doctr...

 Freedom and privilege may appear similar on the surface—both grant us the ability to act—but they diverge fundamentally in their nature and consequences. Freedom is progressive. When we exercise true freedom, we take a step forward into possibility. We move beyond our circumstances without requiring someone else to step back. Freedom expands the circle of human dignity; it creates space where there was none before. The formerly oppressed person who gains freedom and uses it to build, create, and flourish exemplifies this principle. Their advancement doesn't demand another's diminishment. Privilege, however, operates through a different logic—one rooted in hierarchy and reciprocity of harm. Privilege isn't simply having advantages; it becomes problematic when it functions as permission to replicate the very dynamics that once hurt us. This is where privilege reveals its manipulative character: it positions someone at the receiving end of actions they cannot refuse or esca...

  Israel , and the Jewish people were proud of their temple, Jerusalem city, and even the city wall. While singing hosanna to Jesus, who was making his meek entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, they must have also sung of the magnificent temple, and expected triumphant victory. Some even asks Jesus to ask them to be silent, lest the Romans get provoked. Their priorities were all over the place. Jesus looks on the city Jerusalem and wept over it ( Luke 19: 41-44 ). Jesus does not see their achievements and success as real victory and success—and that is a painful reality. Our successes are not successes in the sight of God is a subtle reality that we conveniently don't see or acknowledge. His tears fell because of what the city had failed to become. As its name suggests, Jerusalem is ‘the city of peace’—and it was given all the opportunities to be—prophets, the temple, a fortified city etc. But it made a mockery of it all. And gradually it would even kill its Saviour. Some had support...

 There is something unsettling about this parable ( Luke 19: 11-28 ) that we must not rush past. A nobleman goes away to be appointed king, and before leaving, he calls ten servants and gives each of them ten pounds each; and says simply, " Do business with these until I come back." The story unfolds; the man gets appointed as king and returns and calls in the servants to present the account of their business. The first servant has made ten pounds more. The second, five. But the third has wrapped his pound in a cloth and hidden it away, returning it unused, untouched, exactly as it was given. The greatest talent is the talent to use a talent. The master doesn't give these servants his money to keep safe. He doesn't ask them to guard it, protect it, and preserve it unchanged. The biggest gift is not the money or talent given, but the power and authority to use, to put into circulation, to risk, and to engage with it. The name of that talent is trust, courage, generosi...

  Zacchaeus over years has distanced himself: he distanced from his own people through collaboration with the Romans . He broke away from the community that formed him, named him, prayed over him as a child. He distanced from his conscience through the accumulation of wealth extracted from the vulnerable—wealth extracted from the vulnerable creates its own insulation, the more you have, the less you must feel. You are afraid to come in touch with your conscience. Now when the time comes to meet Jesus he again distances himself from that possibility by climbing a tall sycamore tree ( Luke 19: 1-10 ). Short people think of walking to the front to see and be seen, but Zacchaeus ran away on to a sycamore tree. He climbs. He creates distance once more. The sycamore tree is not just a solution to his short stature; it is the culmination of his entire life's distancing. From the safety of the tall tree, he can observe without being observed, see without being seen, and remain a spectato...

 In the crowd at the scene of the blind man of Jericho ( Luke 18: 35-43 ) three kinds of voices surrounded the blind beggar. These same voices perhaps echo in every crowd and groupings. First, there are those who sit beside us in our darkness. They are helpless, just as we are helpless. They know what it means to be stuck, to feel powerless, to wait by the roadside while life passes by. These are our companions in struggle. Second, there are the messengers of hope. These are the people who lean in and whisper: " Jesus is passing by ." They point toward possibilities we cannot yet see. They tell us that change is near, that help has arrived, that this moment—right now—could be different from all the moments before. Third, there are the silencers. "Be quiet!" they shout. "Know your place. Don't make a scene. Accept your situation." These voices try to keep us small, to maintain order, to preserve the way things have always been. The blind man of Jericho...

 Luke 21: 5-19 may be the least consoling words from a man who preached peace, compassion, and love. most popular preachers and writers try to fix a timetable for eschatological times from it. It in fact does not indicate any time, perhaps there is no common time that is applicable to all. It is not about predicting timetable but for forming character, for the passage ends saying, through your endurance you shall save your soul.      Luke penned his gospel around 85 CE, a decade and a half after the Roman legions had reduced Jerusalem and its magnificent Temple to rubble. One can scarcely imagine the trauma that reverberated through the early Christian communities—the very stones that had seemed eternal, the sacred spaces where God's presence had dwelt, now scattered and profaned. Surely, many whispered, this must be the end. The apocalypse had arrived. Yet Luke's response to this existential crisis reveals a pastoral wisdom that transcends his particular histori...

 Once Christopher Coelho OFM, an artist, author, and composer was traveling in a bus in India. At a bus stand, a young man selling combs came to him to sell a comb. The man insisted that Christopher buys a comb. Pointing the combs to Christopher he began the conversation saying, ‘one for you sir.’ Christopher removed his cap and he was completely bald. They both had a smile. The comb seller did not give up, he said, ‘one for your daughter sir.’ Christopher said, ‘I have no daughter.’ ‘Then one for your wife sir’, said the man. Christopher said firmly, ‘I don't have one’. The comb seller still did not give up, ‘then please sir, buy one for me.’ In spite of its uselessness to him, because of the sheer persistence of the man the 'bald priest' finally bought a comb. In Luke's Gospel, Christ presents us with a striking parable: a widow, marginalised and powerless in her society, approaches an unjust judge repeatedly, demanding justice. This judge, by his own admission, neith...

 The passage from Luke 17: 26-37 presents us with one of Scripture's most unsettling paradoxes: the people of Noah's generation perished not because they were committing extraordinary evils, but because they were living extraordinarily ordinary lives. They ate, they drank, they married—all legitimate activities, all necessary for human existence. Yet Jesus uses this very normalcy as a warning of spiritual catastrophe —you are called to be much more than just eating, drinking, and making merry. What made their destruction inevitable was not the activities themselves, but the totalising absorption in them. They had become so enclosed within the immediate that they lost the capacity to perceive the ultimate. The floodwaters rising around them were not merely meteorological but metaphysical —they represented the consequences of a society that had made comfort its compass and self-interest its creed. This is the danger Jesus warns against: not dramatic apostasy, but a kind of sp...