december 2008 newsletter...
immanuel...
The first semester of my teaching in India is now officially complete. Thank you for your prayers. I needed them. I have read all the papers, entered all the grades, and locked my classroom for a solid month. Now I'm enjoying some wonderful rest and time with family. My younger sister has joined us for the holidays!
Last week, we headed off to Agra together, visiting old favorites, along with some places I've never seen before. Agra served as the on-and-off capital of the Mughal Empire for a number of years in the 16th and 17th centuries, so the city abounds with architectural marvels. It also abounds with refuse, open sewage, aggressive street sellers and the most chaotic traffic imaginable. I find the contrast shocking.
From the dusty, bustling road outside Agra, laden with thousands of cars, buses, trucks, and camel carts, we stepped through a magnificent sandstone entrance 
into Sikandra Bagh, the tomb of Akbar the Great. The entire monument is made more magnificent when you consider that it was built about 400 years ago - right when the first settlers arrived in Jamestown. The stillness of the walled garden inside actually shocked me. Several hundred black buck grazed peacefully around the central tomb. Islam envisions Paradise as a well-watered garden, much like Eden, so most Mughal tombs sit in the middle of four waterways that flow out to the North, South, East, and West. The combination of green lawns, flowing water, and perfect symmetry creates a degree of harmony unparalleled by any building I've seen in the West.
In the last few weeks of the semester, my Indian History students pieced together presentations on the illiterate Emperor Akbar's greatness (or lack thereof) in several different fields. I was amazed at the breadth of his accomplishments. Along with doubling the size of the Mughal Empire and figuring out how to administer it, Akbar also designed the first prefabricated housing, began one of history's great miniature painting workshops, and invented a new religion on the side. Like the syncretistic religion he invented, his tomb (which he personally designed) reflects elements of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian architecture. As we walked into the coolness of the wildly decorated entrance chamber and down a long low hall to the bare crypt, though, I couldn't help the recognition that Akbar is now simply another dead mortal man. He cannot even appreciate the exquisite lantern that the British added in 1905.
This same recognition of human mortality was repeated and magnified at the two successive tombs we visited. The first, that of a Mughal vizier named Itimad-ud-Doulah, was designed by his loving daughter, the Empress Noor Jahan. She ordered that the tomb be decorated in the Persian fashion, to reflect her father's heritage. Located in a walled garden squeezed now between the bank of a river and one of India's filthiest bazaars, the marble tomb glows with fantastically intricate inlay work in gold, black, and amber. Ud-Doulah himself, however, has no way of knowing how his life has been commemorated.
Then, of course, no trip to Agra would be complete without a visit to everybody's favorite monument to love: The Taj Mahal. The Emperor Shah Jahan (Akbar's grandson) designed this wonder to proclaim his love for Mumtaz, the wife who died while giving birth to her fourteenth child. The miracle of the Taj truly is that while it dwarfs every other tomb in its sheer immensity, the design and the color manage to preserve an air of fragility and sorrow. Even after shuffling through security and wading through the crowds of visitors, I still took a deep breath of awe when the Taj came into full view. Mumtaz cannot know the same awe, though. She is gone, as is Shah Jahan himself.
Perhaps what jarred me into thinking more deeply on this question was our visit to Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar's city of sandstone just outside Agra. We took a guide, who led us very thoroughly around the adjoining tomb and shrine of the Sufi saint Salim Chishti, whose descendants are also buried on the site. Rows and rows of graves stand next to the marble tomb/shrine. These are the saint's male descendants. Female descendants, however, must be buried behind a sandstone purdah, or curtain, representative of the veil they wore in life. My sister and I entered the shrine itself, narrowly dodging the giant feather with which a mullah was blessing visitors. In a corner towards the back, an elderly woman squatted, huddled up, gazing at the sarcophagus and obviously fervently praying. The overwhelming beauty of the surrounding marble now struck me simply as vanity. Over and over, we encountered monuments to the dead; monuments that involved staggering amounts of time, labor, material, and money.
In sharp contrast, the theme that echoed through my heart all Advent season was Immanuel, God with us. I don't care where Jesus' body was buried, because He isn't there. We celebrate a God who lives. He lives in us and with us, as much in the filthy bazaars as in the walled gardens that remind me of Eden. Were He to be born today, I wouldn't be surprised to learn of His birth on a heap of discarded plastic at the edge of one of India's industrial cities. Perhaps His first breath would be choked with smog. Before leaving for Delhi, I attended the evening Christmas program at a school in the village of Sainji that my church has supported. Villagers there guffawed when the children got to the part about Jesus being laid in a manger. They comprehended the incongruity, the humiliation, in a way we Westerners cannot.
Even in death, Emperors and their wives rest in luxury, set apart from the squalor of their people. Not so, our Emperor. He made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of a man. He stands with us and in us still. From the beginning of Advent, when I chose this theme of "God with us" for an annual Christmas CD, I have been blessed at how the concept of Immanuel has echoed through the season. I've heard three different Christmas sermons and all centered on this word Immanuel. All our hope, as Christians, rests in the idea of God with us.
I've seen the difference this hope makes beautifully modeled in the life of my grandfather, Charlie, who I've mentioned in previous letters. He's here in India visiting, too, at the age of 87. He returned to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Delhi Bible Fellowship, the church he co-founded, and the one I attended throughout my childhood. I loved hearing him speak again, and meeting familiar faces from 20 years ago. It's wonderful to see the church living and thriving, with 17 different congregations around the city.
As lovely as were the tombs we visited in Agra, I'm reminded that the only way our efforts count for anything, the only way they live eternally, is if God is with us. Psalm 127 says, "Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for He gives to His beloved sleep." In a time of seemingly universal uncertainty regarding the future, I find security in the idea of God abiding with me. I also long for my life to be wholly in line with what God wants to build, rather than my own ambitions. Please pray that my life will be wholly submitted to His purposes for me. I pray the same for you.
Your fellow pilgrim,
Amy