The faith and its flock

I was in my 20s when one day I discovered that I had one more aunt than the three I had known growing up.
She showed up that day, out of the blue, a woman who came bearing a family resemblance and left a load of questions. Until that day I had never heard her mentioned in the household, never spotted her in family photographs. Where had she been all these years? Why did nobody — my parents, my paternal grandmother who lived with us, relatives, our Parsi colony friends in Bombay —ever bring her up? How amazing that no one had even accidentally mentioned her within earshot all these years. Or was I not paying attention? It was disconcerting.
Family lore is that she was banished by her mother — my grandmother — before I was born, for violating an inviolable rule: She married a man who was not a fellow Zarthoshti. The tale would lodge itself in my generation’s imagination as a stern object lesson — Disobey at your peril!
But peering back into the haze of ancient family history, with none of the principals available to consult, I have concluded that the matter was not as clear-cut as it initially appeared to me. For instance, was my grandmother’s objection mainly to the man’s religion or to the man himself? There are hints of other provocations between mother and daughter, differences that can split apart families even without the incendiary of religion tossed in. Sadly, for reasons known and unknown, it all culminated in hardened hearts and estrangement.
Sometime in the late 1940s, this aunt was airbrushed out of my family’s portrait, and apparently out of their consciousness. She helped by moving with her husband far from Bombay, as if choosing self-exile. In fact, they moved abroad.
A thaw of some kind, perhaps facilitated by the passage of time, had enabled her to return to the fold for a visit in the 1970s when I first encountered her. Things, however, wouldn’t change much after that. She continued to dwell on the periphery of my family until she died.
Fast forward more than a half century, a span that encapsulates the entire existence of Parsiana. All the main characters of that long-ago family melodrama are gone. Their descendants have scattered all over the world, floating away on the winds of fate like dandelion puffs. The extended family’s landscape has also changed in other significant ways. Some members have married within the community, some outside it. Adjustments have been required, and made. No one has been banished, or chosen exile.
The old episode came to mind as I contemplated Parsiana’s request to envision the next 50 years in the life of our community. I do so with the caveat that 50 years ago I would have been wrong in everything I might have predicted about my own family, let alone our community.

The immutable verities of my life back then gave no inkling of how differently things would turn out decades later. My family is hardly unique in this, as I can tell from following news of our community in Parsiana and elsewhere. In fact, the changing demographics and geography and psychology of my family seem to be fairly closely tracking those of our community.
For instance, the fault line of intermarriage, once sure to cause major family earthquakes, has lately caused barely a tremor in a growing number of households in our community, going by the data I see and what I see around me.
Along with immigration, this trend will surely change the community. Some of the things we cherish today as quintessential to who we are may be lost or amended — cuisine, language, idiosyncrasies, outlook, customs, beliefs, rituals, historical perspectives, and so on. Contemplating that fills me with melancholy sometimes. Change can be daunting, even though I accept the inevitability of it. So to some degree, I can understand the impulse, as an American conservative said in a different context, to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop!”
But then I remind myself that the certitudes of my childhood and youth that I pine for in moments of nostalgia have long since fallen away, many through my own decisions — including migrating far from home, an act that requires not just physical travel but also mental.
So these are the truisms I find myself leaning on: The only thing that is constant is change. Adapt to survive. The tree that bends in a storm doesn’t break.
The community is dwindling in its centuries old strongholds of India and Iran, and growing in new worlds — places such as Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, London. Imperceptibly, but inexorably, the center of gravity of Zarthoshti life is shifting yet again, just as it did centuries ago from Iran to India.
Immigration has exacted a price for the professional and educational and lifestyle opportunities that being in the West offers: There is no agiary where we live now. There are few mobeds. Few of us have extended family around. Grandparents, if they have not passed on, reside thousands of miles away in the old countries, to be visited most often on Skype. Though with every passing year there are more and more fellow Zarthoshtis around us, there is no cocoon of a Parsi colony, as in Bombay, to nourish and nurture a uniquely Parsi Zarthoshti identity. We measure proximity to our Zarthoshti "neighbors” not in footsteps, but in miles. Our Zarthoshti identity is more and more learned and less and less intuited.
There are new cultural challenges: Our co-workers and friends and even new relatives now include names we did not normally encounter growing up in places like Bombay: Smith and Siegel, Brown and Jones. Where we once resided, for centuries, in an ocean of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, we now dwell in an ocean of Catholics, Protestants and Jews. We have cast anchor in uncharted waters.
Yet the most formidable competitor for the hearts and minds of our young people in modern, secular, prosperous societies may not be another faith, but non-faith, the feeling that religion — any religion — is a quaint vestige of less sophisticated times, usually irrelevant to our daily lives.
In that we Zarthoshtis are not alone.
The New York Times carried this report recently:
"The first major survey of American Jews in more than 10 years finds a significant rise in those who are not religious, marry outside the faith and are not raising their children Jewish — resulting in rapid assimilation that is sweeping through every branch of Judaism except the Orthodox.
"The intermarriage rate, a bellwether statistic, has reached a high of 58 percent for all Jews, and 71 percent for non-Orthodox Jews — a huge change from before 1970 when only 17 percent of Jews married outside the faith. Two-thirds of Jews do not belong to a synagogue, one-fourth do not believe in God, and one-third had a Christmas tree in their home last year.”
Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York told the paper: "It’s a very grim portrait of the health of the American Jewish population in terms of their Jewish identification.”
Christians in the West are also noting erosion. This from another recent Times article: "Church attendance is falling across Europe as belief in God wanes and even cultural attachments wither.”
Religion it seems — ours included — will have to reinvent itself for modern times if it is to remain viable as a road-map to a moral life and an instrument of forming community.
So, we who have made new lives in the West adapt and improvise and innovate, and try to keep the faith essential, especially in the minds of our youth.
No agiary, but many places have darbe mehrs. Others of us meet in homes or rented premises, for prayer classes for children and adult discussions and to enable participants of all ages to make vital social connections. Mobeds explain the meanings of prayers and rituals. Discussion leaders make historical connections. One mobed offers religious education over the Internet. A national federation of Zarthoshti associations tries to make wider connections, including interfaith ones. Youth groups are active.
Some of the non-Zarthoshti spouses are among the most curious and zealous about our faith, learning about it, eager to preserve it. I recall one who became so proficient, she was a star prayer class teacher.
Few mobeds, but we have a mobedyar program that is training lay Zarthoshtis to perform outer liturgical ceremonies.
I don’t wish to leave the impression that the community here is monolithic or our efforts perfect. Over the years there have been disagreements, sometimes sharp ones, and there have been stumbles. For instance, Parsi Zarthoshtis and Iranian Zarthoshtis have on occasion found more things that divide them than unite them.
But you get the point.
The faith is not exactly what I knew in my childhood and youth. It has morphed many times over. But never beyond recognition.