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. 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. 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
  2. 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. 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
  3. 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. 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

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...

Modi’s Art of Censorship

One of the infinite ironies about Narendra Modi’s India is its flagrant censorship while claiming to be the most tolerant civilisation. A Guardian report today informs us that Arundhati Roy’s 2020 book, Azadi , is banned in Kashmir for promoting a “false narrative and secessionism.” Being a fan of Ms Roy’s rebellious spirit, I buy her books as they are published. I had reviewed this book ( Azadi ) back in 2020 when it was published. The Congress government that ruled India for a very long period, before Modi’s rhetoric mesmerised the Indian electorate, was highly flawed. Corruption ran in its every single vein. Yet it was far better than what Modi brought in its place. The glaring hypocrisy of the Congress was a glue that held India together, Ms Roy says in this censored book of hers. What she means to say is that though secularism was not practised sincerely or consistently the pretence of it acted as a binding force that maintained a kind of social and political equilibrium. T...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Solzhenitsyn’s Many Disillusionments

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died a sad and disillusioned man. Solzhenitsyn was a genuine socialist in the beginning. He fought for the Red Army in WWII. He was a committed Soviet patriot. Equality, justice, and dignity of the workers were his ideals, his dreams. However, Stalin became a brutal dictator and Solzhenitsyn became his vocal critic. As a result, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to the Gulag: a network of inhuman labour camps. Hundreds of Russians were tortured and killed in those camps and Solzhenitsyn was disillusioned with socialism. The Russian Revolution was supposed to have liberated the common citizens from imperial oppressions. However, the new government under Stalin was far more ruthless, unjust, and oppressive than the empire. The socialist ideology became a kind of deity for which everything else was sacrificed, including truth. Writing the story of his life in the camp in The Gulag Archipelago , Solzhenitsyn warned that such systems coul...