However, India has launched the greatest environmental clean up in its nations history - the Ganga Action Plan or GAP in April 1985 - to clean this so-called "pure" river. The river rises from the western Himalayas and stretches east 1,560 miles to drain in the Sunderbans delta in the Bay of Bengal. It is estimated that two million people bathe daily in the river, as well as many cattle, also considered holy by the Hindus; they are watered there daily as well. It is not uncommon to find rotting corpses of both humans and animals in the river. Ecoli bacterium, dysentery and cholera exist in this river as well as many other pollutants from sewage systematically dumped into the river and pollution from industrial manufacturing plants and the hundreds of communities that share the water's borders.
This however doesn't stop millions of devoted Hindu followers from daily drinking and bathing in this river to be cleansed of their sins. The followers also are not unaware of the pollutants put into this river, but they believe that because of its holy origins that it can never be polluted. The secular Indian government knows this to be a problem for its people in controlling disease and due to the health concerns they rightly have, thus the launch of the GAP restoration and cleaning plans years ago.
These believers believe that a drink from the river or by bathing or even a simple breeze from the river holds healing powers both for the body and, again, to cleanse one's spirit from sin. Our American minds cannot fathom drinking from any such source. The booming bottled water industry proves that Americans take our drinking water very seriously and are blessed to have access to clean drinking water without having to go daily to a river to gather personal water for daily needs.
It's unfathomable that anyone could believe such dirty, disgusting, polluted water filled with dead corspes, feces and urine would ever be drank by anyone... especially for spiritual beliefs. But we Christians drink daily from the Ganges River. No, we don't fly or trek to India to drink from its waters but we spiritually sip from the Ganges River and commit the same heinous-to-health acts as these Hindus. We live our lives so secularly with the only notion of a different life - or belonging to a spiritual, heavenly city - when we attend a church service once a week if it's a good week. We have been cleansed by Christ and have sworn allegiance to walk after Him and to follow Him with all that we are yet every day we drink from the pollution of the world. We watch movies and television and listen to songs that promote murder, espionage, chaos, brutality, adultery, fornication, mayhem, deception, homosexuality, lude jokes, innuendo, blasphemy, witch craft, atheism - and these can all be found on current prime time television and PG-13 movies. We watch these concepts and are so inundated by these images and concepts that we think nothing of them.
This is not a diatribe aimed at readers for the sake of condemnation but a revelation received about myself. I am careful to guard my eyes of what I watch but how many countless - seemingly innocent - romantic comedies do we sip into our hearts that promote promiscuity and then chalk them up as great romantic movies. It has escaped us what love and romance actually are to the point that we see couples sleeping together with no thought given to marriage and then get a warm fuzzy feeling about what such a love story it was.
Daily we sip from the Ganges River of pollution and think this is okay because we are saved, or covered, or bought by the blood - or whatever term we use to excuse our natural sinful desires for such vices. This isn't an incitation to throw our televisions, magazines, books, music, etc out the door - but should it be? Is our slow fade into assimilation into this world keeping us from being the Church that God came - the broken and polluted Earth - to die to create?
Someone said to me yesterday that they wished Adam and Eve hadn't eaten the forbidden fruit that caused our Earth and our forms to be cursed, bringing all our pains upon this Earth causing it to groan for redemption. But we drink from forbidden rivers daily and that we shouldn't be so tough on the celestial first couple because we are given daily their same choice and we jump into the river and bathe.
No comments:
Post a Comment