Skip to main content

Prayer

Devotees at Chottanikkaram Makam
Image from Mathrubhumi


Today’s newspapers in Kerala carried images of devotees at the Chottanikkara Temple. The best image was the one in Malayala Manorama in which a young girl was shown praying to the deity with tears streaming down her cheeks. I couldn’t get that image online because of Manorama’s copyright possessiveness.  The intensity of the fervour in the eyes of that devotee struck a chord with me. I am not a devotee of any deity and I can’t stand crowds even in places of worship. But the image made me question the meaning of prayer.

I guess prayer means a whole range of different things to different people. Most devotees must be praying in order to influence the deity, to make the deity change his/her mind, to alter the existing unpleasant reality. Most devotees expect miracles, I’m quite sure, though the degree of the miracle may vary widely from getting a good spouse to curing someone’s incurable ailment.

Can we really influence a deity that way? Can our prayers make a deity change his/her mind? Logically that sounds quite bizarre. The fish prays to god to save it from the fisherman’s net and the fisherman prays to the same god to give him a good catch of fish. What will the god do? Whose prayer deserves to be answered? How does god judge that? Pretty tough job, I should say, being a god.

I don’t think there is any god sitting up there listening to any of these, anyway. Who can be so callous as to watch all the agony of his/her creatures and yet be so indifferent in spite of being supposedly omnipotent? There are too many unanswerable questions when we reach that milieu. Then the religious friend tells me that I should take it on faith. Faith is a problem for me; it refuses to be faithful. So I have quit that arena.

But prayer has its uses, I’m sure. I find myself praying almost every morning. Not to any god but to the mystery out there that is cracking through the eastern sky with the stars fading away into the dark infinity. I pray to let goodness prevail. I pray to enable me to bring in as much goodness as possible at wherever I will be during the day. I pray to keep myself good in spite of all the evil I may encounter today.

Prayer, for me, is an exercise in self-improvement. All the rest are just wishes placed before mute and blind deities with the faith that they will hear and see one day.


Featured post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरFebruary 20, 2019 at 10:21 AM

    You are absolutely correct Sir.

    ReplyDelete
  2. dee NambiarFebruary 20, 2019 at 11:38 PM

    These are some of the questions that have been on my mind for a very long time. True, prayers mean different things to different people. I've come to understand that it is healthy if you see it as something that soothes you and gives you the confidence to go on. And if it is your way to be thankful for each day and for all that you have.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 21, 2019 at 6:41 AM

      Spirituality is a personal affair. The outcome is what really matters. If it helps one to be a better human being, the process doesn't matter as long as no harm is done to others.

      Delete
  3. Sonal's PalletteFebruary 21, 2019 at 9:49 AM

    Faith with knowledge is good. But mindless faith and ignorance, are not. I feel as long as prayer soothes the mind and helps us be a good human everyday, it is okay. But then again as you said, Prayer means a whole range of different things to different people.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 21, 2019 at 10:54 AM

      I know many people for whom religion is the ultimate solace. They use it as a balm or a drug, an illusory oasis in life's desert. The resultant joy compensates for the illusion! I won't dare to question such faith.

      Delete
  4. voicesFebruary 24, 2019 at 1:47 PM

    Faith in oneself also could result in a prayer. Very thought provoking as prayer is only wishing for the best or asking some force to bestow the best or thanksgiving

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 24, 2019 at 5:04 PM

      Goodness all around should be the natural outcome of good prayers.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 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
44 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more