Skip to main content

God’s Grief


“It is God’s omniscience that helps Him to endure the sorrows of the world,” says the narrator of Francois Mauriac’s short story, A Man of Letters.  Why would any God endure this world of ours for so long had it not been for the empathetic understanding of the criminality that underlies the crown of His own creation?  The question begs a lot of other questions, of course.  Is there a God, did He (is it He really?) create the universe, was He aware of the evil that he was giving birth to while creating the human beings...? 

Michelangelo's The Pieta
Let us assume that some God created the universe for reasons similar to why Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment or Michelangelo carved the Pieta: a creative urge.  Not the whole of creation is under the control of the creator because there are unconscious motives which underlie every creation.  Sublimation of the darkness within the creator is one of the motives of creation. The human beings seem to be the darkness that lay within God.  Even God must have been baffled by the horror of the creation, the horror called man.

Yet that Creator, omnipotent and hence able to put an end to the creation, is enduring the horror and the concomitant grief because his omniscience makes him empathetic too.  That’s what Mauriac suggests.  The more you know, the more empathy you feel.  It’s like watching a movie.  You know why this character is behaving like this. Though you can’t accept the behaviour because it is not good according to your moral standards, you still feel empathy for the character because you know why he behaves thus.

The more you know, the greater your empathy.  No, it’s not merely knowledge.  It’s more about a refinement of the consciousness.  A refinement that can come from a greater awareness and understanding rather than from any religious rituals or platitudes.

If the terrorist can raise his consciousness level, he won’t be able to kill anyone even for his god.

The same logic is applicable to every criminal. 

Crime is born of ignorance.  Crime is a form of crudeness, a lack of sophistication of the mind, even if it is done for the sake of gods or morality or whatever.

God would have become Satan without that elevated level of consciousness.  With that consciousness, He must be enduring a lot.  Poor God.


PS. A poem I wrote about two decades ago on this theme:  God’s Love Song



Indian Bloggers

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniSeptember 29, 2016 at 11:09 AM

    Well written. On the hindsight of this concept, imagine if India tries to become the God(dess?) to her neighbours. She will be pelted with stones without the fear of retaliation.

    We want a god who can instill that consciousness on every being but as you said, with that consciousness he/she does become stagnant.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 29, 2016 at 7:08 PM

      But if all human beings raise their consciousness level, then there would be no need for endurance and suffering. People with higher level of consciousness don't inflict suffering on others.

      About India, I think you are being proved by what's happening now. Who knows what will happen? The next world war? Hope not.

      Delete
  2. Pranju chakrapaniSeptember 29, 2016 at 9:41 PM

    Does it not depend on the economy of the entire world? Capitalism might come in rescue, pun intended

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 30, 2016 at 7:39 AM

      Economy is one of the aspects or dimensions. Man does not live by money matters alone. Religions make use of that fact and exploit them with illusions whereas what man actually needs is confrontation with realities.

      Delete
  3. जितेन्द्र माथुरOctober 1, 2016 at 4:25 AM

    Wonderful thoughts Sir. Even your satires are thoroughly rational and to the point. There is nothing here for me to disagree.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
9 comments
Read more