Dating : Befriending God

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Somewhere during mid-adolescence, I started growing skeptic regarding the presence of God. With time, my belief in this mystical entity who’s supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent — in other words, the super being — only started getting all the more vague and hesitant. I couldn’t imagine beings so pure (who kept themselves veiled in myths and legends that were probably almost as old as humanity itself) whose main purpose of existence was to reward or punish the very organisms that they themselves created. If so, God appeared to be quite similar to my brother who I sometimes watch playing civilization-building video games — creating industries, employing farmhands, waging wars for expansion — all while practically sitting on his chair and watching tiny humans and animals mechanically going on about their lives from above. Are we too, mechanical creatures being played by some pseudonym-clad player from above?

Being brought up in a devout Hindu household and having studied for quite a significant amount of time in a Convent School, I had been basically showering in the rain of the Almighty’s name and praise all my life. I couldn’t just sign him off that easily. So my on-and-off relationship with God continued as did my skepticism.

In tumultuous teenage, I often visited the wrecked remains of an old Naamghor (temple) near the hostel where I was staying in at that time. It was falling apart in places, with rotting walls whitewashed once upon a time but now with a yellowed shroudy appearance. The tin roof was rusty and cracked in places from where slivers of afternoon sunbeams sneaked in, blinking every now and then like a little truant craving attention. The floor was tiled with fallen leaves and covered in dust and dry mud and deceased insects. In midnight, it could very well be imagined as something straight-out of a horror flick. The altar was almost pitch dark from a distance but if you went in closer, you could see a little saki (Diya or earthen lamp) flickering in its heart.

I thought it looked a lot like the condition of my own heart at that time and so I was tempted to stay there for a while observing. As I sat there in the silent sad surroundings, I discovered to my pleasant surprise that those were the most calming thirty minutes in my entire experience in high-school so far. You say nothing, you do nothing; you just stay there, immersing yourself completely in your surroundings. Silence is a much needed element in the unrelenting chaos that constantly surrounds our existence. A certain tired Naamghor gave me that and I was grateful for it.

I continued to visit it often, going out for my afternoon tuition at least an hour in advance to be able to sit there alone for some time. Twenty minutes before class, I’d walk the half-mile to a close friend’s house to walk together to our teacher’s home a couple of miles away.

High-School soon passed by like any other nightmare. Surprisingly, the naamghor and a little black dog that went by the name of either Tun Tun or Lily and with an appetite that would put Kumbhkaran to shame — would be the two things that I would end up treasuring the most. I still miss them a lot.

Moving back to the topic in hand, my relationship with God somehow continued even with the frequent doubts that stuck onto it like persistent hiccups that just won’t go away that easily. I said my prayers in the altar of my home every evening with the rest of my family, and tried to believe that if I simply kept showing up to pray every day, one day I might start having a reason to believe in God with the kind of unshakable devotion that my mother has. What makes her believe in God?

I did ask her that to which she said that in her own life, she had found evidence of the interconnection between karma, fate and prayer and that it all added up to the supreme being. Okay, so I had to wait for that realization to show up some time in my life too. Maybe then I could honestly believe in God and not feel as guilty of my doubts as I do now. Patience was the key.

The realization came when an old truth that I had practiced back in the ruins of the temple knocked at my doors once again.

I found somewhere that praying is something that one must do if they care enough for their peace of mind. To believe or not to believe in God was a different matter altogether. Praying could simply mean being with yourself for a few minutes every day, preferably in silence, not doing anything but simply closing your eyes and listening to the world around you. To some people, praying may be a synonym for introspection. It was what I did sitting alone in the silence of the temple in soothing idleness in surroundings that seemed to be struggling just like me and yet with a tiny flicker of faith in the darkness of my soul, when, if I had courage enough, what I really wanted to do was to die in my stuffy room with one last bitter laugh directed at the piles and piles of unfinished schoolwork and emotional pressure.

I still hadn’t reached a conclusion on the God issue, but I had to admit that I could now pray earnestly even without having to believe in a mystic entity.

Slowly my mind started growing more comfortable; my thoughts became less hostile to my heart, they didn’t petrify me to flee and seek shelter in some rabbit hole anymore. And in the safety of my own head (which is saying a lot because I hardly ever considered my head to be a safe place) I started becoming more self-aware. I started noticing my flaws and learned to forgive myself and accept them if there was nothing much I could do about them. I noticed the things that were unique to me, the things that made me optimistic on any grey day and finally, to start loving myself for who I was. The funny thing was that even though ‘I’m in love with myself!’ first made me sound like some selfish self-patronizing human, loving myself actually made room in my small heart to love others better, to respect them and their struggle, to accept them as they were.

The God issue was finally resolved when I realized that the most probable reason why I struggled to believe in God was because I couldn’t imagine such a flawless being to exist.

I remember making dolls out of clay when I was little. I would have them leading their lives, maintaining their households, going off to far-off countries to travel; I would make my clay girls suitable clay grooms to marry, have kids, and grow to a ripe old age. But playing with dolls isn’t all there is to life. The life of a living soul is made up of a hundred other elements. If God was a living soul and even if we were all dolls that he created out of love and clay, God had to have other things going on in his life too.

In case you’re wondering about complex figurines and model houses, your doubts are justified. Since I can hardly call myself a master sculptor, the lives of my dolls happened not in complicated clay models but in paper, with a pencil. And an eraser. Life would have ended in a single mistake if it wasn’t for the blessed eraser. I love the eraser. It’s my soul-mate.

Wasn’t God supposed to be our friend? And if God is our friend, doesn’t that make us his friends as well? It would suck to be a kind of hedonistic friend who only keeps asking for things with no care whatsoever about how the other friend is doing. And yet that was precisely what I had been doing most of my life before I started getting skeptic of the presence of my friend or to put it bluntly — started thinking that this particular buddy couldn’t give me the things (physical or abstract) that I wanted after all:

Dear God, please give me the indomitable strength of mind to conquer procrastination.

Dear God, I really need a pretty dress to go to my friend’s uncle’s daughter’s cousin’s wedding. Please make the law of attraction attract that dress to me.

I will work really hard, dear God, please oh please make work feel less boring.

Dear God, couldn’t you make me an incredibly nice person that everybody likes?

Dear God, please make my heart a little more comfortable. It’s been aching awfully hard lately.

Needless to say, I was embarrassed. I felt like the most selfish brat in the multiverse. Exactly what kind of friend does that?

Hey, can you loan me a ten-rupee note? I’ll pay you back together with the fifty that I borrowed yesterday. See, I remember.

Buddy! Let’s go out to play today, your work can wait.

Won’t you help me out in my home-work; I promise I won’t write it exactly like yours. Ma’am wouldn’t know.

That’s right, the kind of friend that nobody wants in their life. The ones who are unfortunate to have them curse their presence all the time even if tinged with guilt. But that’s almost like the kind of friend I had been to God.

Once I started thinking of God less like a divine soul who’s entire world revolves around us and instead started thinking of them as a divine soul but probably with their own worries, with their own joys, with their own lives that we ought to respect if we claim to love them — what happened is that I found a new friend and a soothing, even if silent listener, a genuine friend that I had to get to know.

The next time I sat down in the silence of the altar to close my eyes and pray, instead of asking God to give me things or ranting out about my countless troubles, I really talked to him and told him stories — the kind of conversation I would have with any good friend:

Hello God, how are you doing?

How is life?

Yesterday, I saw this little black spider with five legs crawling on my table. The little guy seemed quite unfazed by his handicap and strolled about in a normal gait, hopping now and then to keep balance. Watching him made me want to thank you for my health and my limbs.

I really appreciate it, God, thank you so much.

To a spectator, it might sound like a one-sided monologue, but once you let yourself be unbiased and to be fully present in the moment, you might realize to your sweet surprise that the soul does provide answers and it does indeed feel as if you’re conversing with an entity who can speak in the language of silence and is as easy to believe in as are sunrises, twilight and sunsets.