2021 is coming to an end.
We do not even think twice when we refer to the year as 2021. It has become the standard across the world, even though cultures had their own ways of measuring years.
In my old tradition, people used the Kollam Panchangam, according to which this year 1197. In a different computation, it is 5,122 years into the Kali Yuga.
Yet, even in the old country, it is 2021. December 2021.
As a Jewish comedian joked, this standardization of the calendar is the ultimate victory for Christians. Even though most of the world is not Christian, we are marking time with reference to the birth of baby Jesus.
Until a few years ago, we even noted the years as BC and AD. AD being short for anno domini, or in the year of the lord. Hindus used AD as did Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and atheists and everybody! We have since moved on to a neutral language of "common era"--CE--though the reality is that the common era years neatly correspond to everything after the birth of Jesus.
Does it really matter?
It does not. After all, what we are measuring is the number of times earth goes around the sun. It has been far too many years of our home planet doing this iteration. Our minds cannot keep adding to the billions of years that have gone by. In order to keep track of a system that we can mentally understand and use, we need to arbitrarily create a starting point for the calendar. It does not matter if it is 2021 or 5,122.
What really matters to me is what we do with the time that we have.
Jesus' message on how to behave as humans matters.
As I understand religions, there is very little difference on their directives for goodness.
The Pope reminds the Roman Catholic organization about the fundamentals and zooms into humility. "It is not easy to understand what humility is," he says.
Deep down, most of us have an idea of what humility is. It is just that we do not want to practice it. To his flock, the Pope says:
Humility is the ability to know how to “inhabit” our humanity, this humanity beloved and blessed by the Lord, and to do so without despair but with realism, joy and hope. Humility means recognizing that we should not be ashamed of our frailty. Jesus teaches us to look upon our poverty with the same love and tenderness with which we look upon a little child, vulnerable and in need of everything. Lacking humility, we will look for things that can reassure us, and perhaps find them, but we will surely not find what saves us, what can heal us. Seeking those kinds of reassurance is the most perverse fruit of spiritual worldliness, for it reveals a lack of faith, hope and love; it leads to an inability to discern the truth of things.
That paragraph works well even if one removes any reference to Jesus or Lord.
Later he says:
For this reason, if the word of God reminds the whole world of the value of poverty, we, the members of the Curia, must be the first to commit ourselves to being converted to a style of sobriety. If the Gospel proclaims justice, we must be the first to try to live transparently, without favouritism or cliques. If the Church follows the path of synodality, we must be the first to be converted to a different style of work, of cooperation and communion. All this is possible only by following the path of humility. Without humility, we cannot do this.
Amen!
That papal message is no different from the kinds of religious ideas that I grew up with. Adi Shankara, who lived about 1,400 years ago and established maths in four corners of the Subcontinent interpreted the upanishads and authored numerous works, all of which are beyond the understanding of most of us mere mortals. He made things simple in a Q/A--Prasnottara Ratnamalika. It is not difficult to understand the direct messages like:
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