Is your god with you?

“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads!” Rabindranath Tagore admonished the bhakts long ago. We seek god in wrong places. That’s what the poet implied. We look for him in some “lonely dark corner of a temple.” But God is “there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path-maker is breaking stones.” The poet bluntly tells the bhakt to put off his “holy mantle”, “leave aside [his] flowers and incense” and meet god in the “toil and sweat of [his] brow.”

God is not an abstract entity waiting somewhere beyond galaxies to allot fortunes to us after measuring the flattery we send to him in the form of prayers and rituals. God is the sweat of your brows, the blood in your veins, the love in your heart. God is the work you do, work which adds to the beauty and goodness in the world around you. God is the soil beneath your feet and the air you breathe. God is the person next to you. God is you.

As long as you don’t rise to that level of religion, your god is likely to be a mass of granite or a Plaster of Paris figurine with a mind that you have imposed on it, a mind that you think you can manipulate with your prayers and rituals.

“Strike, strike at the root of penury in my heart,” Tagore prayed to his god in another poem. “When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy,” he sang in yet another.  

Today, a century after Tagore’s collection of poems won the Nobel Prize, his country has become quite the opposite of what he dreamed particularly because of religion. Will Tagore bow his head in shame if he visits his country today and witness the religious frenzy that has gripped the nation like a malady?

PS. All the quotes above are from Tagore’s Gitanjali.