Jesus and dad #2 covered in snow
The 55-foot tall Hanuman statue erected in my hometown of Brampton, Ontario reminded me of a similar incident (albeit at a far smaller scale) I witnessed when I was growing up there.
One Sunday at my family's church, the father of a devout Indian family came up to my dad and said:
"We are unveiling a statue of Mother Mary and baby Jesus on our front lawn this afternoon and would love it if you would come."
We’d never heard of anyone doing such a thing.
And it wasn’t as if they were being pretentious. I could see they were quite sincere in their devotion and in their efforts to "fit in."
The incident inspired me to write this scene in Much Ado About Corona (where Vince is on the run from the Ontario Provincial Police and hiding out at the Chatterjee’s moving company):
……..
Eleven years ago, the Chatterjees had purchased a life-size statue of St. Joseph. Looking out the window now, I could see the backside of the replica of Jesus’ Middle Eastern father. Joseph probably never saw a flake of snow in his entire life. Now he was covered in it. I was only thirteen when Baba had invited everybody from St. Jerome’s to the unveiling of the statue.
“Almighty everlasting God,” had prayed the late Father Chittick at the gathering, “who does not forbid us to carve or paint likenesses of your saints, in order that whenever we look at them with our bodily eyes we may call to mind their holy lives, and resolve to follow in their footsteps...”
The Chatterjees had indeed followed St. Joseph’s entrepreneurial footsteps. The statue clutched a carpenter’s square—reflecting Joseph’s status as the patron saint of hard-working people. And, most fittingly, he was also the patron saint of house sellers and buyers, making St. Joseph an apt guardian for Chatterjee Moving.
I think it was Baba’s way of trying hard to fit in. I’m not sure it worked. Lay people owning such large and expensive statues, let alone displaying them on their lawn, was unheard of even among the most devout in twenty-first-century Moosehead. I rather suspect such practices were more common in his mother country of Hindu gods and goddesses.
Another reason they chose the statue was that St. Joseph was also the patron saint of immigrants. St. Joseph, after all, had had to escape to Egypt when the local government was hunting down the baby Jesus.
Now that I was being hunted down by my own government, I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer to St. Joseph, also considered the patron saint of Canada—a country certainly in need of all the prayers it could get.
….
Those few paragraphs were the result of at least two hours of research.
To my surprise, readers often write telling me how much they loved the Chatterjee family. Will Dove, host of The Iron Will Report, said that Raj Chatterjee was his favourite character.
But not because Raj was an immigrant. It was because…
Well, I’ll let Will tell you himself. If you haven’t heard his interview with me you can watch or listen to it over here at Strong and Free Canada:
https://strongandfreecanada.org/iron-will/much-ado-about-corona-a-dystopian-love-story-john-manley/
John C.A. Manley
John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/
