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:

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

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Kailasnath the Paradox

AI-generated illustration It wasn’t easy to discern whether he was a friend or merely an amused onlooker. He was my colleague at the college, though from another department. When my life had entered a slippery slope because of certain unresolved psychological problems, he didn’t choose to shun me as most others did. However, when he did condescend to join me in the college canteen sipping tea and smoking a cigarette, I wasn’t ever sure whether he was befriending me or mocking me. Kailasnath was a bundle of paradoxes. He appeared to be an alpha male, so self-assured and lord of all that he surveyed. Yet if you cared to observe deeply, you would find too many chinks in his armour. Beneath all those domineering words and gestures lay ample signs of frailty. The tall, elegantly slim and precisely erect stature would draw anyone’s attention quickly. Kailasnath was always attractively dressed though never unduly stylish. Everything about him exuded an air of chic confidence. But the wa
9 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
16 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more