Writing about a giant is a dwarfing experience. The giant is my spiritual mentor (I won’t call him Guru), Fr Augustine Deenabandhu Ofm Cap. I write this on the occasion of his Birth Centenary.
First the basics. He was born on the 9th of April 1911 in Bajpe parish of Mangalore diocese, and baptised Henry Joseph Lobo. He died on the 13th May 1991, so this is also his 20th death anniversary. What was so gigantic about the 80 years this priest spent on this earth? Perhaps I knew him better than anybody else, having spent 7 of the most beautiful years of my life with him – from 1975 to 1982.
Henry joined the seminary in Mangalore in 1927 to become a diocesan priest, and was duly ordained in 1935. Nothing gigantic so far. We now go off the beaten track. He was not satisfied with being a diocesan priest. He was influenced by the frugal lifestyle and deep simplicity of the Capuchin friars (a Franciscan order). Three years after his ordination the Bishop of Mangalore permitted him to join the Capuchins, where he took the religious name – Augustine. He began life all over again as a novice in the Order.
As a Capuchin he was known for his piety and simplicity, so he was inducted into formation and teaching theology. He was also a caring pastor. During the Second World War, when there was food scarcity, he began a Fair Price Shop, long before the advent of ration shops, to assist the needy. When posted to Kirol parish in Mumbai, he strongly advocated the Catholic Workers’ Movement. Because of his sterling qualities Rome appointed him as the first Novice Master of the fledgling Indian Missionary Society, for two terms. So far so good.
Fr Augustine was not a man to rest on his laurels. Like St Augustine he would rather say “My heart is restless till it rests in Thee”. If we are satisfied and satiated we become complacent and revert to mediocrity. Not for this giant. At every stage of life he felt that he still had to walk that extra mile (cf Mat 5:41). There were three events that impacted his future – the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the Church in India Seminar (1969), and the move to Jyotiniketan Ashram, Bareilly, U.P., in 1971.
Fr Augustine was deeply influenced by Vatican II ecclesiology – that the Church was still a pilgrim, not one which had “arrived”; that it should be more Catholic than Roman, rooted in the local culture; that there had to be a preferential option for the poor; that the Church is not a monolithic “spiritual edifice” with big buildings, facades and structures, but a living community of believers. The Church needed to shed its extra baggage and return to its pristine scriptural roots. This new ecclesiology was echoed in the post-Vatican euphoria of the “Church in India Seminar”, India’s endorsement of Vatican II. So Fr Augustine experienced another restlessness, to move on, to explore the unknown, and to renounce the comparative comfort and security of the Capuchin monastery.
This kind of stirring is very well reflected in the earlier call of St Francis of Assisi (the founder or inspiration for all Franciscan Orders, including the Capuchins). The divine call to St Francis was “Go and repair my Church”. He took it literally, and with his own bare hands began to repair a church building in his vicinity. It was later that the real mission dawned on him. In 13th Century Europe the Church had become opulent and corpulent; a far cry from the Son of Man who had no place to lay his head, and told his disciples to “take nothing for the way, when on a mission” (cf Mat 10:9-10). St Francis took the Gospel to heart, living a life of abject poverty, renunciation, humility and simplicity. Before his conversion he had wanted to be a knight to join the crusades for liberating the Holy Land. Post conversion Francis sought to dialogue with the very same Saracens (Muslim invaders).
When the common man lived in awe of the papacy and the hierarchy, Francis was a man of courage, who would even tick cardinals off for their wrongdoing. When Italian society was divided between the Majors (the landed aristocracy) and the Minors (the landless peasantry), he made a preferential option for the poor, calling his group the Order of Friars Minor (OFM). Had be been in India he may have called it Deen Bandhus or Chhotebhais! Centuries later Blessed Teresa would make a similar choice, when she chose the blue-bordered saris of Kolkata’s municipal sanitation workers as her form of dress. St Francis identified so closely with Jesus, that he was called the Alter Christi (the other Christ), to the extent of receiving the Stigmata (Jesus’ own wounds) in his physical body.
Francis would seem like a digression from the Augustine story. It isn’t, for it is impossible to understand the one without the other. After Vatican II Fr Augustine was looking for a more authentic way of living his Franciscan life. Through one of his students, Rev M Devanand Ofm Cap, he came in contact with Rev Murray Rogers, and Englishman, a pastor of the Anglican Church, who had a pristine ashram called Jyotiniketan in Bareilly.
Rev Rogers, in turn, was influenced by Gandhiji’s ashram way of life. Padmashri Laurie Baker, another Englishman, who specialised in low-cost housing, built Jyotiniketan. It was truly “low-cost”. We called it an all-weather construction – hot as hell in summer, bitterly cold in winter, and damp and leaky in the monsoons! It had no electricity or running water, and was as close to nature as one could get. Peacocks and bamboos abounded. When Rev Rogers (another restless soul) felt that an Indian should take over the ashram, to make it authentically Indian, he found no takers in his own Anglican Communion. That is how Fr Augustine stepped in, in 1971, at the ripe old age of 60.
Ordinary folks think of retiring at such an age. Not the extraordinary and indomitable Fr Augustine. He was just beginning his second innings. He now took the name Deenabandhu (friend of the poor), and switched to a biscuit coloured (not saffron) khadi habit. At 60 he had to learn Hindi, to cook on a wood fire, to go to the loo in the jungle, to roll chapattis and squat on a cow dung plastered floor. Not easy at any age, let alone at 60, with no community support. Though his Capuchin Order professed poverty and simplicity, he got no companion from his Karnataka-Goa-Maharashtra Province. The few and far between Capuchin companions he had were from the Kerala province.
I joined Fr Deenabandhu in 1975. By that time he had already developed diabetes, because cooking was burdensome for him, so his staple diet was chapattis with gur (jaggery). Other than that he was a bundle of spiritual and emotional energy. Though slightly hunch backed he believed in doing atleast one hour’s manual work every day, be it tending the garden, sweeping the compound or chopping firewood.
The day I entered Jyotiniketan a bullock cart from the neighbouring village of Kareli knocked down the entrance gate. For the subsequent 7 years that I lived there, there was no attempt to rebuild the gate. It was for me symbolic of the total openness and utter defencelessness of Jyotiniketan and Fr Deenabandhu.
I first set foot in Jyotiniketan on a cold and misty December morning. There was Fr Deenabandhu, his nose red with cold. But he wore no socks. His feet were shod in sandals made by the village cobbler from discarded rubber tyres. He was addressed as “Father”, not guruji, swamiji, acharyaji or any other ji. I felt at home in the presence of a genuine person who had no pretence.
His back was hunched from spending hours in prayer. In scorching summer, under an asbestos roof, he would be praying before the Blessed Sacrament, in mid afternoon. At midnight (even in the dead of winter when no one wants to leave a cosy cot) he would be found in the windswept chapel. Very few outsiders knew that he had a metal chain in his room with which he would flagellate his frail body as penance.
But he was no zealot. He believed in service to the neighbouring villagers and leprosy patients by ministering to them, and helping in whatever way he could. Before my time, in the neighbouring village of Choubari, there was a long lasting and bloody feud. Fr Deenabandhu went and dwelt in their midst, fasting and praying till peace was restored.
He was a practical person, not an idealist. Once a Capuchin brother was complaining about the reforms ushered in by Vatican II, saying that earlier the friars kept a strict fast that they had now abandoned. Quick came Deenabandhu’s retort “Dear brother were you fasting out of the compulsion of the law, or the love of God? If you love God nobody can stop you from fasting”. This was an abject lesson in Vatican II spirituality, so much closer to the free flowing heart of Jesus, and in contrast to the Pharisaic keepers of the Law!
Fr Deenabandhu’s openness and simplicity were seen in his attitude towards diverse movements in the Church, like Inculturation, Liberation Theology and the Charismatic Renewal. He espoused them all. A somewhat conservative bishop, who was more comfortable with the pre-Vatican Latin liturgy, once visited Jyotiniketan. He found no dichotomy between liturgy and life. They were deeply Christian and authentically Indian. He frankly admitted, “If this is the meaning of inculturation I fully endorse it”. Indeed there were very few people who met Fr Deenabandhu, or visited Jyotiniketan, who didn’t go back touched in some way.
I lived with him as a layman for 7 years. Not once did I feel that I was a second-class citizen of the Church. Fr Deenabandhu had a deep understanding of the lay vocation, married life and human sexuality. He was no prude. When I once told him that I was attracted to a female visitor to the ashram and felt like kissing her, he floored me by saying that he too felt like doing the same! Of such stuff are spiritual giants made.
It is because of him that my to-be-wife Meerabai, reluctantly agreed to marry a mad cap (not ofm cap) vagabond like me. He even solemnised our marriage in 1984. Seven years later, when he fell critically ill on a journey, he asked to be taken to our home in Kanpur. He knew we were his family. We rushed him to hospital, stayed by his bedside day and night, and willed him to live; till his fellow Capuchins came to take him. We last saw him alive on his 80th birthday, twenty years ago, in another hospital, in Lucknow.
A few days later he passed on to his eternal reward. We bundled our sleeping children into the car and drove through the night to be in time for the funeral in Bareilly. He was a sentinel of God and a servant of mankind. I salute his revered memory on the occasion of his Birth Centenary. I hope and pray that the Church in India, and more particularly the Franciscan fraternity, will not have to wait another hundred years to see another like our beloved Father Augustine Deenabandhu Ofm Cap. Will such spiritual giants tread the earth again? As I said at the very beginning, I am dwarfed by the thought.
* The writer considers Fr Deenabandhu his spiritual Father.
MAY 2011
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