Tag: faith

Guilt and Unlearning – East of Eden

Last week I met somebody who made me grateful and appreciative of life again. I think all of us meet people who, sometimes even unbeknownst to them, play such roles in our life, in whatever small ways. And of course it’s subjective.

Maybe you meet someone who dances like a dream and stretches your imagination, maybe someone by their demeanor evokes a warmth in you like no other, maybe someone is just really kind and restores your faith in humanity after your brief but very personal rift with mankind. My point being, it’s as much about you as it is about them.

And while I’ve been shocked / disappointed / impressed / amused by both people and circumstances during in my time in Atlanta and even in this country, this was the first time I’d met someone like this person. The details are irrelevant. But the fact is everything immutable in our life, we usually accept because we have to. Also because denial doesn’t help and one can only fight reality for so long before you have to move forward with it.

I do not know when it was drilled into my brain that one must be grateful for everything life gives you, that one must be grateful for all parts of life and not just some of it. But I can accept everything and everyone life gives me, sure, but gratefulness I might scrape for at the bottom of my barrel and still not find any for some things. And that’s okay. I wish whoever taught me that lesson years ago knows this, cos otherwise it’s a long, tiring battle with oneself. Uncovering and unlearning old lessons has been my recent pastime. I maybe wrong but life’s hard enough and faith shouldn’t make it harder.

Life’s also too short to fight with oneself, especially if your mind and body are united in the fight and when those are two things to be grateful for everyday. Our loads needn’t be heavier than what we already carry.

This is put together from East of Eden which I’m reading currently :

“Don’t you see?” he cried. “The American Standard translation ‘Do thou rule over him (sin)’ orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt rule over him,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest rule over him’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?

Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’!

It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there. 

East of Eden, John Steinback

I’m not Christian and I haven’t read the Bible to attest to the accuracy of what’s quoted from it or their varied interpretations, but all three of these are lessons I’ve heard from my own people at different times in life – sometimes imparted to me, all of them held in high regard in different contexts. Even the vastly unrealistic Thou shalt rule over sin is a take at least a few people I know still uphold in adulthood, and I myself have battled with them way too many times. If not in these definite terms then surely they’ve been the moral backbone of many a mental strife I’ve had. So it was a joy to read this passage in East of Eden and I had to pause for a bit.

To me, the biggest takeaway from this is that free will exists. I’m sure what you take away from any reading depends on your state of mind and your own internal monologues at the time, but the agency of choice means that while you are allowed to fight to overcome sin, you may also take credit for whatever you do accomplish – it is yours to take and celebrate, for you chose it. On the other hand, the lack of it being an order also means one doesn’t have to be so bogged down by the goal that life becomes too heavy to bear. That life is worth living even if you fail to overcome evil, whatever evil may mean to you.

Like I said I had to stop reading after the chapter, this book has been such a joy to read so far.

Faith – at 25

I needed to believe in something larger than life, larger than anything I knew.
And it’s how I survived. (Also, this article may be summarized as Paalam kadakkuvolam narayana.)

Jab kahi pe kuchi nahi bhi nahi tha
Wahi tha wahi tha
Wahi tha wahi tha.

(When there was nothing,
He was the one,
the only one.)
– Kun Faya Kun (2011)

Time is a great equalizer, maybe the only one?

How do you measure sadness, how much is too much? Do you need to be so sad that you find no joy in life, or is it when you somehow cannot force yourself to smile?

Who has seen the most sorrow? Can a child’s sad story be considered sad enough? Or do you have to be broken after you’ve built that adult threshold for grief?

By the time you’re 25, everyone has had that experience, from life or from people. Everyone has lain on their beds numb one night having cried their eyes out, thinking of how alone they are, of how right those were that left everything and everyone, of how they were brave, of how helpless we are by ourselves. Sat on the floor and bawled at this cruel world of those that hurt us.
Defenceless, alone, but above all, innocent.

That’s the sad, but also the beautiful way we’re all equals at 25. How time is an equalizer, maybe the only one.

This isn’t about being 25 though.

Nobody is more sympathetic to our younger selves than us, I think.

Last month I was sitting on a bench outside DO class when two students approached me, said they’re from the Theology department doing a survey, and asked if I believe in God or a higher power. (My better guess is they were two friends in conversation looking for a random person’s perspective, but yea).

I do, I say.
They ask me their theological question which isn’t relevant in this story, but they took me back to this phase I had almost forgotten I had.

I don’t have an adjective to describe it though, it’s just a vulnerable 19 year old me and an overflowing heart. There’s people, there’s college, there’s lots more people. But they’re somehow neatly tucked away like we belonged in parallel stories, in separate worlds.

Amma and I visited Padmanabha Swamy temple every month back then on my asking. It was the one place where I took peace in return for surrendering all that that plagued me, where I didn’t have to fight and was finally at ease. And I never wanted to leave.

Everything the temple housed was alive to me – oil that dripped to floors from large hanging lamps, flowers from prasadam that were gently squeezed to the back of aunties’ hair, the constant humming breeze to which untrimmed bushes swayed. Alive and sacred. They were glimpses, or rather a beckoning at a life sans desperation, a life that was elusive yet very much existed, that I was allowed to be a part of for the short while that I was there.  

I saw beauty in every person, I could see only kind faces that reflected back at me the serene in passing, as if they all knew why I was there, as if they all said a prayer for me.

I saw old ladies seated on a mandapam reciting chants and that’s when I knew I could sit with them and cry my heart out if only I had learnt those songs that Amma knew. I wondered how they did not break into fits of weeping every time they sang them. I envied what devotion (and in all likelihood old-age) gifted them. They were already at peace and singing a prayer for me and others like me, just like the solitary cobweb floating on a high corner I chanced upon seemed to be.

Every time after going around the whole temple, Amma and I sat on the parapet facing the sands on my asking, watching the towering gopuram in the orange lights.

It was almost always 7pm by then, and I wondered how there were no pictures of that one angle of it bathed in shadows and light against the dark sky, one you can see only from the inside. How whoever constructed it back then saw the quiet splendor that I was looking at, or probably much more.

Of how somebody had known humans would house worries bigger than themselves to look for comfort in things larger than life.

I wondered if there were others who visited the place to absolve of all that taxed them, who marveled at its massiveness and felt the same empty light heartedness I felt then.

I watched a classical recital in the temple once, and I watched others who sat listening – silent, smiling, dissolving. I could only see pointlessness in my suffering then, how what I bore was boundless to my trivial self yet how the world was much bigger than any of it. And yet I knew I’d soon walk past the doors of the temple out into the world only to be overwhelmed by my own reality.
It makes sense that I never wanted to leave.

I remember thinking Gopika was lucky for getting to visit so often, for staying so close by. I wondered what one did if you had no troubles to hand over, if you had no turbulent mind to begin with, and I couldn’t imagine much more. Looking back, what’s funny is I was either not in my elements while I was there, or it was the only place where I was. The lines are blurred and there’s no way I can tell now.

Jab kahi pe kuchi nahi bhi nahi tha,
Wahi tha wahi tha,
Wahi tha wahi tha.
(When there was nothing,
He was the one,
the only one.)

There is a story of how when we were kids my brothers and I played in the sand inside the temple for hours, and I have listened to it being retold as many times as I’ve been there. I once asked Amma about why the place felt so positive, and she mentioned something unappealingly scientific about energy flow, unobstructed pathways and open spaces.

Every time I have gone back, I have still seen magnificence but in the “open spaces, positive energy” way.
I’ve smiled at how I once looked to its huge corridors* and pillars to be a part of me, how I felt lighter with every step I took around the temple, how even the cheli of wet footprints had brought me peace. How I held on to this one place because I found nobody and nothing else to turn to.
I’ve wondered at how young I was, how innocent I was, how I didn’t deserve any of it. Like we all do, I guess.

Yet I’ve not felt the same submission nor seen the surreal there since. I see beautiful faces, sure, but also the regular lives that go on behind them and the chanting. I see pottis and that solitary cobweb on the high corner, but they’re no longer conferring a hurried blessing upon the mortal me. And yet I had seen all of it there, the same way we seek comfort in music or art, but cannot go back once we’ve made it through.
Like the Room of Requirement lending itself only to those that need (ask and you shall receive?).

Faith to me was hope. I needed mine to be larger than life, larger than anything I knew.
It was, and it’s how I survived.

(You’re right, this article may be summarized as Paalam kadakkuvolam narayana).

Because a little faith goes a long way – 2014

* I meant pradakshina paatha but I’ve only ever called it chuttunna vazhi and hence.