1.1.Positive
impacts of changes
The
positive impacts of these changes give allegiance to the Gospel and accommodate
the message of the Good News into the local cultural context and paving the way
for contextualization.
1.1.1. Religious
transformation
In
adopting Christianity, some existing elements such as the concept of God (Khazohpa),
the concept of peihrâ (heaven) can be used as a vehicle for
communicating the message of the good news with new meaning. The Mara
traditional world view was transformed by Christianity into a new set of
doctrines and beliefs. The traditional assumption of a Supreme Being Khazohpa
was identified with God; the concept of ‘taotheihna’ the means of
salvation which needed several costly sacrifices are superseded by faith in God;
peihrâ has been transformed into eternal heaven in the light of the
gospel. D.E. Jones preached a gospel based on the Lushai as for Mara
eschatological expectation as follows:
‘Believe on ‘Pathian’ Jehovah and worship Him,
then you don’t need to
This
preaching connected Khazohpa and peihrâ by faith but without
costly sacrifices. This gives new hope for all believers irrespective of their
positions, and transformed peihrâ into heaven with greater hope of
enjoying eternal bliss. This new found faith and doctrine prepared the Mara
people for psychological and intellectual transformations and to abandon
completely anything connected with their old religion, culture and social practices.
If we summarize the transformations and changes in the life of the Mara society
in a single sentence, we may say that the head-hunters are transformed into the
soul- hunters or the soul-winners.
1.1.2. Social-cultural
transformations
There
are quite a number of transformations in the social-cultural life of the Maras
which can be summarized as follows:
The
appearance of the villages in the past was controlled by the
Mara traditional religious practices. When they became Christians, these
changed as all the elements of sacrifices and their paraphernalia such as small
altars, stone platforms, posts on which skulls of all animals killed were hung
and sacrificial posts all disappeared and the appearance of the villages was
much better and cleaner than before.[2] In
addition Christianity united the Maras and there was a closer relationship and
unity of society in the villages.
Death
and burial: In the Mara pre-Christian culture, when
a child dies, it was generally placed in an earthen-ware pot which was partly
filled with water and buried at some little distance away in the jungle. When
an adult dies, the body was placed on a small stretcher and propped in a
vertical position against the wall of the inside of a hut, the corpse being
decorated with all the beads and ornaments whichever he/she had possessed
during life. Relatives and friends crowd the hut whiling away their time by drinking rice
beer, talking at the top of their voices whilst, the nearer kin and kit wail
and lament the dead with cries that are indeed heart-rending, and which to some
little extent describe the awful anguish of a lost soul.
The
dead body was carried out of the hut towards the grave either outside or very
close to the deceased’s hut and the flintlock gun of the deceased was fired
into the air, whilst a sacrifice of some domestic animal was made so that this
spirit of the animal may accompany the spirit of the dead to the world beyond,
which is known to the Maras as ‘athipa khi’ (abode place of the dead).
But
this changed so that all the dead bodies were buried in the burial ground
outside the villages with Christian funeral services. Peihrâ or athipa
khi or life after death or eschatological expectation was contextualized
into a place called heaven where God reigns.
Morality:
The
Mara moral and ethical principle of apiepasaihna hro was redefined in
the light of the Gospel eliminating its negative impacts. Apiepasaihna hro still survives in the
Christian context in a redefined form because apiepasaihna hro ‘self
sacrifice for others’ and ‘doing good to others’ remains in agreement with the
Gospel.
Traditional
festivals: In the place of Mara traditional
festivals, Christian elements were introduced like baptism, the Lord’s Supper,
observation of Sunday, celebration of Christmas, New Year and Good Friday.[3]
1.1.3.
Intellectual transformation: Although
the Maras were illiterate until the
1908’s, they thought
of themselves as at the top of the world because of their isolation and lack of
knowledge. It was during the
beginning of 19th century that the Mara language was reduced into
writing by the missionaries. This gave them
No comments:
Post a Comment