However much of him India has claimed, he has always clung resolutely to his Christian faith, as devoted to the Anglican Church today as he was as a schoolboy at Marlborough, a theology student at Cambridge, and at Lincoln Theology College, where he once hoped to become a priest. He remains a regular worshipper at Cathedral Church of the Redemption in the Indian capital.
Yet now, at the age of 76, Sir Mark appears to have embarked on a spiritual journey that few of his fellow worshippers there, and almost one million devoted listeners of his Sunday evening programme Something Understood on BBC Radio 4, would consider recognisably Christian: he has accepted the eastern religious ideas of karma and reincarnation.
There are different interpretations of karma and reincarnation within the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, but Sir Mark has come to believe that he will be born again into a new life, the nature of which will be determined by how he has lived and behaved in this one.
“His journey has taken him to a place where he no longer accepts central Christian tenets of God’s forgiveness and redemption, or the physical resurrection of Christ. And he must reconcile somehow this departure with his refusal to give up his connection to the Anglican Church.”
He can only call himself “Christian” by lying. He is no longer Christian by his own admission.
I’ve always admired his reporting and he seems, and I intend this as a compiment, an eminently decent and likeable man but he has become a sort of hindu. I remember meeting a tailor with a shrine to a hindu god in his shop who had been to an Anglican founded Indian public school. He prayed the Lord’s Prayer every morning before his shrine. Sir Mark prays to his own god, who is, it seems also eminently decent though unforgiving and unredeeming, as he prays his beloved evensong or sings “Abide with Me”.
It’s surely incorrect to say that his disagreement is with “certainty” as such – for he seems willing to affirm his own alternate understanding of the character and being of the divine. Better to say, he disagrees with the faith of the liturgies and hymns he loves. There are, of course, hindus – perhaps millions – with a devotion to Jesus. Sir Mark, ironically, seems to have become a hindu with a devotion to evensong and public school hymns but not to Jesus.
“Sir” Mark generously maintains a wife in England and another wife in India. “That’s big of me!” he’s reputed to have said (but didn’t).
#3 clarin,
An [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1735083.stm]other source says[/url] that the woman in India is his girlfriend, not a “second” wife.
Ahh – perhaps rather more louche than I had known. Pick’n’mix in every department of life, it would seem.