Sometimes, God just forgets
I go to temples for the same reason that most young people go to discotheques. It’s for the ambience. Some of the traditional temples have large open spaces, big halls with high roof and a pervasive smell of camphor; all together make it a pleasant place to be at, if there are not too many people around of course. On one of my aimless strolls one evening, I happened to come across an elegant looking temple on the way. I decided to rest for a while before I ramble some more. It was a nice place with not many people, except for a rotund priest and some very young children boisterously playing around. I sat down to watch the goings on and also trying to guess the sources of food and/or money of the temple priest that were helping him gain weight. ‘May be his son lives in the US’, I thought. It was also possible that some of the offerings meant for God find their way to the priest’s home or stomach. Not bad for the priest so long as God is not too concerned about his revenue assurance. ‘What about the devotees, would they mind?’, I wondered. May be not as they never know where their offerings go anyway. ‘How about the offering itself? Does it have a life and does it care about where it ends up?’, I started to think but quickly gave up as it was getting more complicated than what was suitable for the ambience.
The children became noisier and were running at dangerous speeds even as the priest tried to move about his heavy frame around to track the movements of the children. He had to move too much and too often and after sometime, his priestly demeanor just fell apart. He yelled at the children at the top of his voice. ‘Do you know God sleeps here?’, he stopped them in their tracks and asked. Some of them nodded in affirmative and some of them in the negative. Couple of really young ones just stared at the huge tummy of the priest in awe. ‘You are rogues to disturb God’s peace’ he told them. He shouted them out of the temple and came back to relax against one of the pillars. The children came back as quickly as they were shown out. This time they all went straight to the sanctum and stood there, waiting for the priest to come and give them ‘teertham’ and ‘prasadam’. The priest was in no mood to offer either to them. ‘You all must have eaten 3 times so far. I am not going to give it to you any more’, he said. One of the older kids started negotiating with the priest over how much they had to eat and how the distribution was not uniform among all the children. ‘If the young ones eat thrice then the older ones should eat four times’ he argued. The priest was in no mood to negotiate and chased them out of the temple one more time. All along, I was enjoying the show and was admiring the priest for his patience and the kids for their persistence.
Sometime later, as I walked out of the temple, I started to think about the priest and the children. What’s the relationship between them, I wondered. The children were very young and the priest seemed very old, so the relationship between them must be the one between young and old. But then, what’s the relationship between young and old? Young are just born, may be few years ago and old are born long time ago. One is closer to birth and the other closer to death. What’s the relationship between birth and death? Suddenly it dawned on me that the setting for the entire story was a temple and hence God by extension. The relationship between birth and death is God, I summarized. Was that the message I was supposed to arrive at that day? Was that the deeper meaning? It looked too simplistic to just stop with that conclusion. As I walked longer and spent more time dwelling on this, I decided that birth and death are two points that are connected by a road called life. Does it mean then, that Life is God? Didn’t make sense because, the road varied for every living being on this planet. God has to be definitive and the journey cannot be definitive for anyone. What are definitive, however, are the points themselves. Taking birth and then dying seem to be common across every living being.
So children come from God and the old are going to Him. Birth is the starting point and Death is the end point. In terms of time, let's say there is about 70 years between Birth and Death. If the total time between the two end points is 70 years, each year we all must be moving away from the starting point towards the end point. Children are thus closer to the God and they know it, as they are coming from God. Therefore the way children act and behave must be a lesson on how a pure form acts and behaves. However, as normal adults, we find it tough to accept the fact that our children probably come into this world with lot of Godly wisdom and hence provide an opportunity for all to learn the right ways from them. Couple of years ago, when I asked my daughter to get me a glass of water, she simply got it from a bucket nearby. It is a different question that the water was not pure, but what it taught me was that she had no filters on basis of which she could judge anything. Water was water. She unconditionally accepted everything and that was a great lesson in behavior for me.
But living in the kind of society and civilization that we have built, it becomes mandatory that we ‘teach’ our children to judge between good and bad, right and wrong and so on. The more we teach them, the more it becomes tough for them to retain their Godly wisdom. The God inside them finds it tough to continue manifesting Himself because there are way too many filters. Slowly and steadily, with the advent of years and more learning at the great institutions of human knowledge children shed their Godliness to become more and more human. Or God just stops talking through our children as they become more learned and worldly wise. At some point in time, they completely become humanized. May be in our civilization that is what we term as ‘maturity’.
The reverse happens as people get older. The more they try to differentiate themselves as mature adults, the more they start feeling that children, supposedly immature, seem to enjoy much more happiness than them. They realize that all the learning doesn't make too much sense if one day the journey is going to end somehow –which in a way is a great equalizer among all the living beings. So, they get back to the basics and try to re-learn what they have unlearned at school all those years ago. Thus the cycle goes from Learning to Unlearning to Relearning. We try to relearn what we unlearned - at school and in the process of becoming mature. And that which we re-acquire after going through years of grind at the mill of life is termed as ‘wisdom’.
Then there are people who are abnormal, those who just don’t seem to grow up and become mature over time. Those who are ‘mentally challenged’ because they cannot differentiate too well between good and bad or right and wrong. What about them? I was at my daughter's school once, listening to the principal talk about how important the early phases of life are for a kid. Living in the kind of civilization we have, I am sure she was right. After the principal spoke, the school had some sports arranged for all the young kids. Towards the end, they had a race for all the 'special' kids, like they call those kids who have not really out grown their childlike innocence despite the advent of years. As I was listening to the sympathetic commentary in the background about the special kids, I realized that despite moving away from the starting point for quite some years, God has not stopped manifesting Himself in them yet. It was a good feeling to realize that. It is possible that sometimes, God just forgets.
Niren
The children became noisier and were running at dangerous speeds even as the priest tried to move about his heavy frame around to track the movements of the children. He had to move too much and too often and after sometime, his priestly demeanor just fell apart. He yelled at the children at the top of his voice. ‘Do you know God sleeps here?’, he stopped them in their tracks and asked. Some of them nodded in affirmative and some of them in the negative. Couple of really young ones just stared at the huge tummy of the priest in awe. ‘You are rogues to disturb God’s peace’ he told them. He shouted them out of the temple and came back to relax against one of the pillars. The children came back as quickly as they were shown out. This time they all went straight to the sanctum and stood there, waiting for the priest to come and give them ‘teertham’ and ‘prasadam’. The priest was in no mood to offer either to them. ‘You all must have eaten 3 times so far. I am not going to give it to you any more’, he said. One of the older kids started negotiating with the priest over how much they had to eat and how the distribution was not uniform among all the children. ‘If the young ones eat thrice then the older ones should eat four times’ he argued. The priest was in no mood to negotiate and chased them out of the temple one more time. All along, I was enjoying the show and was admiring the priest for his patience and the kids for their persistence.
Sometime later, as I walked out of the temple, I started to think about the priest and the children. What’s the relationship between them, I wondered. The children were very young and the priest seemed very old, so the relationship between them must be the one between young and old. But then, what’s the relationship between young and old? Young are just born, may be few years ago and old are born long time ago. One is closer to birth and the other closer to death. What’s the relationship between birth and death? Suddenly it dawned on me that the setting for the entire story was a temple and hence God by extension. The relationship between birth and death is God, I summarized. Was that the message I was supposed to arrive at that day? Was that the deeper meaning? It looked too simplistic to just stop with that conclusion. As I walked longer and spent more time dwelling on this, I decided that birth and death are two points that are connected by a road called life. Does it mean then, that Life is God? Didn’t make sense because, the road varied for every living being on this planet. God has to be definitive and the journey cannot be definitive for anyone. What are definitive, however, are the points themselves. Taking birth and then dying seem to be common across every living being.
So children come from God and the old are going to Him. Birth is the starting point and Death is the end point. In terms of time, let's say there is about 70 years between Birth and Death. If the total time between the two end points is 70 years, each year we all must be moving away from the starting point towards the end point. Children are thus closer to the God and they know it, as they are coming from God. Therefore the way children act and behave must be a lesson on how a pure form acts and behaves. However, as normal adults, we find it tough to accept the fact that our children probably come into this world with lot of Godly wisdom and hence provide an opportunity for all to learn the right ways from them. Couple of years ago, when I asked my daughter to get me a glass of water, she simply got it from a bucket nearby. It is a different question that the water was not pure, but what it taught me was that she had no filters on basis of which she could judge anything. Water was water. She unconditionally accepted everything and that was a great lesson in behavior for me.
But living in the kind of society and civilization that we have built, it becomes mandatory that we ‘teach’ our children to judge between good and bad, right and wrong and so on. The more we teach them, the more it becomes tough for them to retain their Godly wisdom. The God inside them finds it tough to continue manifesting Himself because there are way too many filters. Slowly and steadily, with the advent of years and more learning at the great institutions of human knowledge children shed their Godliness to become more and more human. Or God just stops talking through our children as they become more learned and worldly wise. At some point in time, they completely become humanized. May be in our civilization that is what we term as ‘maturity’.
The reverse happens as people get older. The more they try to differentiate themselves as mature adults, the more they start feeling that children, supposedly immature, seem to enjoy much more happiness than them. They realize that all the learning doesn't make too much sense if one day the journey is going to end somehow –which in a way is a great equalizer among all the living beings. So, they get back to the basics and try to re-learn what they have unlearned at school all those years ago. Thus the cycle goes from Learning to Unlearning to Relearning. We try to relearn what we unlearned - at school and in the process of becoming mature. And that which we re-acquire after going through years of grind at the mill of life is termed as ‘wisdom’.
Then there are people who are abnormal, those who just don’t seem to grow up and become mature over time. Those who are ‘mentally challenged’ because they cannot differentiate too well between good and bad or right and wrong. What about them? I was at my daughter's school once, listening to the principal talk about how important the early phases of life are for a kid. Living in the kind of civilization we have, I am sure she was right. After the principal spoke, the school had some sports arranged for all the young kids. Towards the end, they had a race for all the 'special' kids, like they call those kids who have not really out grown their childlike innocence despite the advent of years. As I was listening to the sympathetic commentary in the background about the special kids, I realized that despite moving away from the starting point for quite some years, God has not stopped manifesting Himself in them yet. It was a good feeling to realize that. It is possible that sometimes, God just forgets.
Niren
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