We recently were put in a position where we had to make a trip to Chennai. I wish this had happened under more happy circumstances. A close family member had taken ill and was admitted to hospital. Thankfully, he recovered, and is now in the phase of a slow but sure recovery.
Our flight was long and neck-ache-inducing, but we got through it.
Chennai smelled good when we got off the plane. That familiar smell of plantain leaves and dosais wafted through the air. I do not remember Chennai smelling this good. Maybe the new mayor was doing a good job keeping the city clean. It certainly was in Chennai's favor that our port of entry was New Delhi - where Instagram photos of an early morning in the airport looked artistically foggy, but in reality, that was smog - and the fog was clearly the lesser part. Where's the cursed mask when you need it. But not at the Chennai airport - which also looked nicer than when Ange and I left...9 years ago.
Visiting the city one spends one's formative years in after almost a decade feels like visiting an old friend. Both you and your friend have changed - quite significantly - but almost immediately you begin to look for the familiar - the features that you picture from those memories. That particular smile, that same vocal inflection, that very specific gait. And then you say without skipping a beat, "You haven't changed at all!" even though your friend has changed quite a bit. Saying it feels true, even though objectively it isn't. I think this feeling is a form of mercy - a way to ease into the ways how things have changed - without you being in the picture. And almost immediately as this feeling subsides and your friend recounts how he has changed in the last ten years, a gentle sehnsucht washes over you - "How would life had turned out if I had stayed back?".
Of course, looking back with clear eyes, staying was not an option. That is a story for another time.
~*~
I mentioned that we had to make a trip to India on a moment's notice. Just a week before we got the news that we needed to be in Chennai, I was joking to my aunt that the reason we are not taking a trip to India was that the tickets were ridiculously expensive - down payment for a house expensive - a house in the midwest maybe but nevertheless - still prohibitively expensive. But we had to go.
As I was thinking about the trip we had to take to be with our family back in India, I realized that the only reason we are going is that we wanted to be physically present there. It actually mattered that we were physically and bodily there. There was no utility for our presence - we could always pay someone to be there instead of us if it was solely about providing for this family member. But it wasn't about utility. It was about presence. And the cost of this presence was significant.
In Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth describes the incarnation as the "Way of the Son into the Far Country". Barth describes God's journey to us in Jesus Christ in the context of the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:13). Except that here Christ takes the prodigal's sin upon himself. Here, unlike the son who came to himself, the Son comes to us miserable offenders. Here, unlike our journey which was spur of the moment, Christ's journey to us was planned before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). And the cost of this presence was significant.
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