Lent Reflection -

50 days of Lent – that is what Orthodox church in Kerala follows. Its only in last 15 years that I have got to know about the details of rituals and traditions of Syro Malabar Christians. Before that while living outside Kerala we used to go to the nearest Catholic church (Latin Catholic) whenever possible and things were very simple and straight forward and yea I was ignorant too.

I won’t call myself very religious person, but when I go to any religious place (any religion for that matter) I try to make sure that I know the basic rules of the place I am visiting. So when I became member of Orthodox church, I came across  all the traditions and rituals and one of the main such tradition/ritual/practice is 50 days Lent or “Valiya Noyombu”. There are lots of Do’s and Don’ts for people who decide to follow the 50 days of Lent, I am not getting into the details of that listin this post as it’s another interesting topic all together. During this season, church schedules ‘talks and classes’ on spirituality and values of Christianity and Christians. Usually the talks are given by Priests or well known speakers. This year decided to attend couple of the talks as I observed some of the speakers were young priests in early 30’s and wanted to hear what  modern day priests take is on Lent and life of people in cities.

Again not going to the details of the talk – the one major common topic in the all the different talks by different people from different background has been ‘How Gadgets and New technology is bad for spirituality’. As someone who always takes mobile or tab to church to refer to the Manglish version of prayers and songs, as someone who refers Online English bible, and the only way to have completed listening to all the 4 gospels multiple times because of David Suchet’s Audio recordings of Bible reads on YouTube, I just could not accept this point. It is pity that new generation priests are not open to accept new technology as tools to spread their beliefs and spirituality and connect to younger generation and are only talking about the distractions it has brought in daily life and feel cannot be used to spread the ‘Good News’.