(No One Around to Look Up to?)
When life is not gliding gallantly, it can be a drag. For all we know, we run out of moral humans to look up to, distinctly as we get older. The postulation that humans are moral beings doesn’t mean that all humans are moral morning, noon and night. We are apex predators tightly trammelled in season and space.
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet takes us back to sober up: we are merely human destined to “shuffle off this mortal coil”. Arthur Schopenhauer was candid when he settled: “A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man”. So was Friedrich Nietzsche, maybe more forthright in his contention,“Man is the cruelest animal.”
Most heads of states, spiritual gurus from all ages and walks of life including Pope Leo XIV and Archbishop Sarah Mullally are all fresh poussin or spring chickens at my vintage! Not that we must put someone on a pedestal but appreciate, cherish, value, treasure, kind of apotheosize or deify etc. A scrawny kid at age eight, I kind of inferred that I must make a choice in life as I looked up to my maternal uncle’s command presence of a police officer and a paternal uncle’s pectoral cross and headgear of a Roman Catholic Archbishop. Decades ago, Flannery O’Connor reminded us, “A good man is hard to find”. Nearly all, as in mythology and fiction, pompously ‘moral’ persons by hook or by crook eventuate into quixotic and fully immoral mortals in our world of noble traditions of faith and spirituality. Faith of the hoi polloi matters most today.
The appointment of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of the Church of Canterbury sets the global church up for a clearsighted and convincing turn and helps the church to break its antediluvian ecclesial glass ceiling for women all over religious landscapes. The paddling patriarchy of gaunt geezers, in their abiding domination of institutions such as government and religion needs to be held back. Warren Buffett, a lucrative entrepreneur and philanthropist, is a well-known exception to the rule. Such controlling behaviour in the church is an empirical aggravation for faithful orthopraxis of the Good News of Jesus. Leaders must up the ante and their competence and dedication to be looked upon as catalysts for urgent change everywhere. An eponymous capacity of many to draw connections between spirituality and daily grind as well as their own example of going all-out to live in harmony with God and global community are special gifts to be shared with others here and now.
Influential writings of well-known theologian Reinhold Niebuhr include Moral Man and Immoral Society written during The Great Depression of harsh worldwide economic recession. The dirty thirties were ghastly when people experienced the wrath of immoral nations. Niebuhr’s premise was built on Augustine’s contentious perception on human nature and incarnation. After all, the garden of Eden is a handy metaphor.
A century later, we live in an enriched and refined world where we must not allow alleged titans and tyrants to take us back to the bad old days before the Second World War. Almost a century later, Niebuhr’s words are imperiously informative to figure out the current dystopian heavily tariffed day and age, “Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love”. The novelist Iris Murdoch would concur with Reinhold Niebuhr as she insists that love, attentive love, is absolutely fundamental to morality. When charlatan politicians, who are out to make a quick buck from the public coffers, mouth words like clarity or morality, it is very much like ‘whiskey on the rocks’ with no rocks but ice cubes or cottage cheese was not made in a cottage!
On the very first Friday of 2026 the US military captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Our world remains the same although our global political landscape is gathering too much debris these days – innocent people are murdered, many are starving and countless human beings are left with nothing to live for. Tragically, we have too many imprudent politicians around who have gone bananas! They suffer from tunnel vision, little imagination, compassion and common sense’. As in the parable of Nathan, when former sheep herders in the wild become upstart affluent pillagers may end up dead in lonely parking lots or forlorn slammers.
The Rev. Prof. Dr. Jerry Pillay, general secretary of the World Council of Churches condemned this savage display of denigration and stated that it was “stunningly flagrant violations of international law”. Vituperatively toxic misleaders buoyed up by their mutinous scamsters take us back to the jungle gym of the Paleolithic period where early barbarians were either chasing animals or were in turn chased by them. The cynical aphorism “Might is right”, credo of monocratic hegemony ‘shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither like the spring flowers’ the Psalmist tips us off.
My young spirit was barreled as I left home for the capital city to study for five years and then on to Edinburgh to read Theology. It is not hard to find an employment to pay the bills and enjoy life; but I wanted to be part of a massively intense world out there no matter what.Besides my parents, siblings, soul mate and caring teachers, I was blessed to meet, be familiar with and look up to Benedict Mar Gregorios, Samuel Mathai, O. N. V. Kurup, V.K. Krishna Menon, Desmond Tutu, Hans Kung, Arthur Miller, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Harvey Cox, Krister Stendahl, J. K. Galbraith, Diogenes Allen etc. The writings of S. Radhakrishnan, Rabindranath Tagore, Paulos Mar Gregorios etc. came off as edifying. Certainly, no one can pursue scholarly and professional aspirations without unflagging support and encouragement of family and friends.
In the fall of 1969, Malcom Muggeridge who walked out as Rector of Edinburgh University as a voice of disapproval of the Students Council’s views on “pot and pills”, joined us for Sunday Hight Tea. He spoke in Malayalam(!), my mother tongue and said he was ‘overjoyed to meet a novice from Kerala’ where he began his teaching career at Union Christian College, Aluva. When inquired about his departure, he whispered, “Only dead fish go with the flow”. His sermon under the title “Another King” at St. Giles’ Cathedral might be relevant today! At times we have to compromise the situation and go with the flow. Canada, like a house of fire, said “no” to a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 without UN Security Council resolution. Our survival, as free and secure nations, demands a genuine partnership that reflects a great many scorching concerns of realistic and civil engagement.
During the Christmas holidays, I received an invitation to join a ‘virtual event’ on ‘Perspectives on Growing Older in Cananda’. For me, the only authorities on ageing are those who are older Canadians than me: in no way, some fly-by-night rip-off amateurs who are out to get a fast buck. It reminds me of another lure to take a course on ‘morality – practical ethics’ allegedly offered by an appallingly irrational con artist when I was teaching Ethics among other subjects! Suddenly it dawned on me that safeguarding energy, time and passion for what matters most is the recipe to joy, inner peace and success.
In the early 1990s Canada voted for a young prime minister whose term lasted for a few months. Next door, our neighbours elected a young president who left indelible legacy in the very last decade of 20th century. As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, most of the self-appointed and democratically elected leaders are either too old or too young to look up to, to laud and hail as competent leaders except those who lead Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, India, France and Canada.
Now that the annual birthday festivity of Christmas – the sacred carnival of God, in the flesh – is over there abides an abysmal Sunyata or emptiness in and around us which needs to be met head-on in order to make sense of our being and nothingness. January, the first month in the massively endorsed Gregorian calendar, named after the mythological Roman deity Janus with two faces, is an unpromising name to hit the road towards the second quarter of the 21st century. These days watching the news has become a weepycommotion.
In hindsight, willy-nilly 2025 was an ill-fated year for the whole world when we had to shove too many shenanigans created by tariff tirade. Weirdly, according to award-winning journalist Julie K. Brown, the only entertaining but unpromising anticipation in the Transatlantic nations in the New Year, is the drip-feed release of the Epstein files. Are we that brain-dead to gaze beyond the nefarious, weather vane millionaire boys’ club? Pope Leo XIV however, recently warned against dragging the “language of faith into political battles, to bless nationalism, and to justify violence” while telling politicians that protecting the Judeo-Christian roots “is not simply to safeguard the rights of its Christian communities” or preserving “particular social customs or traditions.”
Following the Korean War stalemate, Dwight D. Eisenhower stated: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed”.
All across the broad, the people living in petite to the largest and the oldest democratically elected nations, people are nervous and fearful by perniciously partisan politics played by Janus-faced ringleaders. Certainly, it is not the first time; however, 2025 has transmuted our world into an “orphan world” with no truly competent leader or leaders to help navigate peace initiatives among combatant nations on the planet. Most people around the world hardly cared about dishonorable Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores until they were snatched overnight and flown out. The crime is this nation sends a morsel of fentanyl to corrupt the youth of the world! Evidently, the biggest producer of fentanyl is China. Strangely, in the stark absence of genuine leaders, we have too many unruly gadfly nations controlled by insecure woebegone micromanagers who claim the green light to gobble up a cicada while a giant hornet gets off scot-free.
The world was straddled from global anarchy to call for unity led our Prime Minister Marc Carney. A few oppressive oligarchs and condescending despots affront smaller nations like schoolyard bullies. The gagged United Nations Organization has become a powerless creature for too long. Most international and non-governmental bodies with no financial resources also are toothless paper tigers.
Our children, in seminal years, need role models such as honestly upstanding parents, elder siblings, teachers, high-ranking intellectual, spiritual and political leaders etc. who stand tall at home and in the wider community and whose character is worth simulating. It is not uncommon for many children to suffer self-worth issues. My father, a school headmaster, was the only man in our pristine but primitive village who attended Maharajah’s University College in 1920s. And my maternal grandfather and his brother owned a big chunk of the hill country. Mercifully, such concerns were almost impervious for me. It helps children to know who they are. In younger days, we look out for exceptional examples people who exuded positive benchmark.
In the absence of radio or television, we had yearlong revival rallies orchestrated by amateur evangelists. Loud and proud, they are permitted to exercise wide whimsical latitude across eschatology – the end things including the second coming. Towards the end of their protracted palaver of ranting and rambling, with uninhibited jumps and daring maneuvers, they would urge for a show of hand of instant metanoia and moksha. As a safeguard from child abuse, I would sit next to my father, the only one in the audience who was modestly informed of the global church from diligently learning from the Christian Century magazine, the paramount periodical of Reformed Christian traditions. Once a fly-by-night preacher singled me out hollering: ‘Raise your hand if you’re ready for the second coming of Jesus!’ My father shooed him off waving his hand!
Six decades later I was invited to a Kerala congregation in Toronto where a Kerala evangelist tried the old trick from 1 Thessalonians 5:2: “For you yourselves know very well that the Day of the Lord will come as a thief comes at tonight”. I ventured to help him. ‘My mother-in-law in Jalan Kayu, Singapore walks in the evenings unafraid’. Same with most folks in the urban centers around the globe. Some folks keep reminding us that we live in ‘cataclysmic’ times or earth-shattering days. A theological theory suggests a chasm of seasons between Genesis 1:1 (creation of heaven and earth) and Genesis 1: 2 (Sunyata or void). Then we learn the Big Bang and Hadean Eon from science and mythology. In hindsight, religious traditions always startle children about catastrophic days and tumultuous times.
Two decades ago, as my cardiologist started an angiogram on me, shivering with no clothes on before a few folks – nurses, couple cardiologists and my wife; a bit wound-up, my blood pressure went up. Dr. S. U. Mecci, a caring, celebrated, beloved and faithful man of God, intervened, “Reverend, relax”. All I could do was to take a few deep breaths ruminating over the refreshing words of Jesus: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”. Amazingly, he handled the situation well and whispered, “My God! What did you do?”. I was glad that he knew who to look up to. I purred, “We are on the same page”. Smiley-faced he carried on.
“When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace…….
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars” – William Butler Yeats.
[The Rev. Dr. John T. Mathew is an ordained minister in The United Church of Canada who served several urban and rural congregations in Ontario, Canada since 1974 and taught in the Department of Religious Studies, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario. Mathew was awarded Merrill Fellowship at Harvard University Divinity School and served as Pastor-Theologian at the Princeton Center of Theological Inquiry. He was Ecumenical Guest Minister at St. Machar’s Cathedral, Aberdeen (Church of Scotland) and Interim Minister at St. Andrew’s Church in Gore, Southland, Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand]
