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“Everywhere O Bharata, faith is in accordance with one’s nature. A person’s faith is according to his nature.” [Bhagwad Gita, Chapter 17, Verse 3]

Everyone tells me there is One God. That we are all actually are worshipping that One God by different names. That it is the different names that are the cause of all the strife in our world.

I find that the thousand names we give to God come to mean very little as time passes. The names turn into pictures, and the pictures remain just that. At one place God is split into a thousand pieces and splattered all over a geographical mass, known by a thousand names and given a thousand faces. At another place, God is crushed into a singularity so unforgiving that he cannot mean anything more than what he is allowed to mean.

In either scenario, He ends up non-existent for all practical purposes. His presence means little to anyone feeling a little lost by the faith-powered tornados that ravage our world.

Where then does he live? I am an agnostic who errs(?) in favour of faith whenever he has to. I have stark raving atheists in my family as well as devout faithful. Either kind is hard to reason with. But I would be making a mistake if I generalise here. None of them are alike.

No two believers, no two non-believers are alike.

Every one of us worships a different God. Even those who claim to worship none. God is inescapable.

None of us can make a move if the God within us doesn’t allow it. Everything around us is His doing. The hope or the lack thereof, the destruction, the anger and frustration, the sparks of creativity and the beauty all around us, is his work. It is a different Him at work each time, working through us.

He is each of us, literally. The tolerant worship a tolerant God. The bus-burning types are not godless either. Their God sees nothing wrong with burning buses (He probably encourages it). Same for the selfish, the sacrificing, the thieving, and the virtuous. There are as many Gods as there are people in the world. He is as simplistic, or as complicated as we are.

Each of us is Him, quite literally. We exercise a manner of control over our surroundings that we often fail to notice. Our wills accomplish all sorts of things in our respective worlds. Working together, we make more of an impact. Colliding wills cause conflicts. All of us exercise God’s will.

I feel that giving God’s will an image, as if it is something outside us, robs it of all meaning. It sounds like something external, meant to be read out to us and something we all are meant to obey. I feel God’s will is what we are living, dos and don’ts included.

My God is prudent and takes care of me. He chastises me severely when I don’t think before I speak. He keeps warning me about losing my faith in myself. My God has a sense of humour. He can be reasoned with and he always listens, no matter how rambling my rants. He helps me put my words together when I stutter.

To Him and to You: Namaskar!

Posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 6:13 pm and filed under faith, essays.

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