Dindigul is a typical Indian provincial town nestling on the fringes of the Kodai hills in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. I spent several months there during the final stage of my training as a Jesuit. It was a time of prayer and study, time marked by a wonderful freedom to get to know a world that, up to that moment, had been transmitted to me mainly through novels, travelogues and the standard textbooks on Indian religions. What I remember from those days was no great insight into Vedantic philosophy as it impacted on Christian theology, but, rather more prosaically, a sense of the religious routine somehow built into the land itself. Early in the morning I used to stand and watch the sun as it rose over the lip of the distant horizon. Day after day I found myself totally captivated by this symbol of new life. The whole world seemed to respond with a symphony of noise – birds and insects, traffic on the road, and the strains of devotional music from the temple by the railway. ‘They are waking up the god’, one helpful old man told me. During the day the sun crossed the sky and I took refuge in the shade. In the evening a deep stillness attended the setting of the sun – often in a brilliant array of reds and purples. Those wonderful moments of twilight were always so short, as if the sun was in a hurry to put the world to bed. Small wonder that Vedic mythology is so powerfully endowed with references to the mysteries of nature and the power of the seasons.

Since then I have been back many times and seen a lot more of this vast subcontinent with its array of spiritualities and religions. There is, of course, more to Hinduism than romantic images of wizened sannyasis at their puja and sacred cows wandering languidly into the setting sun. But if I begin with this particular memory it is not because I wish to obscure the complex ways in which the aesthetic, mystical and social dimensions of religion are interweaved or to ignore its dark and destructive side. It is, rather, that I have always been struck by the deep harmony between the practices of faith, the cycles of nature and the human mapping of history. Sometimes that harmony is palpable – as in a religion like Hinduism, which is so much bound up with the land. Sometimes one struggles to discern its life-giving rhythms – as in the prophetic religions of the Middle East that seem more concerned to dominate the world rather than live at peace with it. But in both – and in all the vast array of religious phenomena that it would be possible to quote – religious practice and ‘ordinary life’ are intimately related, part of a single, complex and mysterious tapestry.