The differences in the whole!

The front to the chapel at the CMC Vellore campus is historically known as sunken garden, because it has a pond and a garden which maintains the symmetry of the chapel. It is during the season of the college and the graduation days, it looks most impressive. 

As I watched this garden on the college day morning last week, I noticed the asymmetry in the growth of the plants on either side of the foot path leading to the chapel entrance. I know the gardener who has been tending the garden for about thirty years now, who has a high order of aesthetic sense and takes every effort while trimming the plants, to have it done symmetrically. He once told me that they do not keep symmetry in their growth, making it difficult to trim it symmetrically. 

It is the two palms trees that tell this story of growing differently even more! They were planted on the same day and time; watered and manured similarly and the soil conditions are alike. There is no tall trees on either side to obstruct the growth upwards.Yet it grows at its own pace. The one factor that makes them different is that  they come from two different seedlings, which could affect its tallness and rate of growth. The other factor is that the short palm may have suffered from a sickness that  slowed its growth.

To me it has a message of some significance for an academia institution. We receive students from different backgrounds and they behave, grow, respond and express differently. It is true of students coming to study medicine as well. Some students need help and care when they drift from their focus which compromise their performance. 

It is significant that these differences that can exist are portrayed in nature symbolically outside the chapel. All those who come to the chapel are different and yet they find a common home in God’s presence during the worship and prayer at the chapel. We are brought together into a family of seekers of God, no matter how different we are individually. God uses our differences to make a mosaic that display the created order of richness in diversity. 

During my 15 years of being in the faculty of CMC Vellore, I have noticed that at the end of five years of medical studies, most students are drawn by the motto of the institution, 'not to be ministered unto but to minister'. Each one is different but leaves the institution with a call to live a life of service! The differences in them are natural; but what they become is conditioned by how we nurture them and allow them to blossom!

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)