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 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

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more