Silence of the American Pulpit

A comment on one of the early books of Bishop Sabapathy Kulandran, as a tribute on his 108 birthday – September 23, 2008. It was first published in 1949 by Pilgrim Press.

by Patrick Ratnaraja

(September 29, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The title “Silence of the American Pulpit” attracted my attention even when I was a student at Jaffna College and that is why I have kept this book as one of my proud possessions for years. Even today, I turn to its pages whenever I needed to have some inspiration that has been our grandpa to us from our childhood.

This is a book full of great anecdotes that must have inspired him and marked his personality a great deal especially in his relationship with others. I was told that whenever he presided at meetings especially the Jaffna Diocesan Council sessions, he tided effortlessly over all kinds of situations with anecdotes that he would relate with darts of wit and kegs of meanings apt for the occasion; and grace was his forte.

In his book, the American pulpit certainly seems silent and it is Indian philosophy that has marked presence and effect. Here and there he has made passing references to life in the States that portrays that silence. On the question of rights and privileges he observed while all men are regarded as equal by the American Constitution, all men are never regarded as equally law-abiding, equally intelligent, equally clean or equally healthy.

India’s place in history was appositely defined when he said she “was old when antiquity was young.” India he said is a synthesis of tremendous diversities and contrasts. India has one of the earliest books extant in the world, viz. the Rig Veda. Its literature in its various languages is one of the richest in all human history.

Evidently Bishop Kulandran was inspired to write Silence of the American Pulpit for an American audience at a time people in the West had all sorts of wrong notions about India. It was also the time the historic efforts to bring the protestant churches in India together were making rapid progress and by the time the book was published, the Church of South India had become a reality.

In India, he said “have lived men and women who have wrought great and noble deeds. Poetry, epigram, and proverb through many centuries have here sounded many appeals for virtue, truth, and honour. Hers is an immemorial tradition that has preferred the higher values of life to the coarser and more material ones. Here are enough theories about the ultimate to give occupation to most sophisticated mind. Here is a religious devotion one seldom sees anywhere else. Here is a kindness that has become proverbial. These things were there before Christianity came in, and they can be there even if the last Christian leaves her shores.”

Commenting on the enthusiasm of an earlier era that sprang from the belief in the superiority of everything western which has rather dwindled through the educative process, he said that path of history is strewn with discarded institutions. “Tradition and sentiment are not sufficient warranty for existence.”

But he asserts quite categorically: “As far as the church is concerned even mere usefulness is not sufficient justification for its existence. The claims of the church are such that there could be only two alternatives. It is either irreplaceable or it is a pompous hoax.”

Silence of the American Pulpit is an inspirational, easy to read and understand book. It shows how Bishop Kulandran has brought to bear the realism that many issues have engaged the minds of people through centuries of time with intense devotion and loyalty. They were issues that inspired them and for these, people went willingly into exile, imprisonment, torture or death.

We all have to take a stand on some issues and that includes the church too and other such institutions as well. Courtesy: JDCSI Newsletter - September
- Sri Lanka Guardian