I said Mass for them,” reported Pundit Bala Krishna Dass, exuding an enthusiastic sense of achievement. “Did you?’ said I, a bit doubtfully, “How did you say it?” “The same way as you do,” he replied cheerfully, “except that I didn’t give out communion.”
I was intrigued by this and wondered what the Roman Curia would make of it. “But tell me in detail what you did,” I probed. “Well,” he answered, “we started with a hymn and then a prayer. Then we had a reading from the Bible and I preached on the reading for about 15 minutes. Something came over me and I really got absorbed in the sermon. We had another hymn followed by a decade of the rosary and then we finished with some more hymns.”
I smiled as it dawned on me that my friend, Bala Krishna Dass, had not actually conducted a Eucharist with his Catholic Indian relatives in Canada but had led them through the format for a prayer meeting. Rome could breathe a sigh of relief!
I was chatting with Bala Krishna in his house near Lautoka, Fiji, shortly after his arrival home from a six month visit to his daughter in Vancouver, Canada. His stay in Vancouver coincided with Pope John Paul’s visit there and his impressive six feet two frame shook with emotion as he described his joy on seeing the Pope. “A lot of people make a big effort to go on pilgrimage,” he remarked, “but it seemed to me that I had been given an opportunity to make a pilgrimage and accomplish something with my life when I saw the Pope.”
The Pope had passed so close to the Hindu pundit that, if he had stretched out his arm, he could almost touch him. Bala Krishna softly pronounced the traditional salutation, Namaskaram (I bow before you) in his own Telegu language, as tears of joy trickled down his cheeks.
These two incidents show us something of the man that Bala Krishna is: deeply religious, proud of his own culture and amazingly open to and tolerant of religions different from his own. I see him as Christ’s Hindu missionary.