Religion and Meaning

Maggie [my wife] and a friend at Badrinath

In the post-graduate course in psychology I did a decade ago, there were dozens of theories and corresponding practical approaches for dealing with psychological problems. Religion was not mentioned anywhere in those theories or their practical approaches. Yet religion remains the most common refuge of people from their day-to-day trials and tribulations. Millions of people rely on religion for making sense of their life. Moreover, religion has been coeval with homo sapiens. We cannot obviously ignore religion when we discuss people’s search for life’s meaning.

My mother was an example of a typical religious believer. Hers was a simple faith which accepted the given dogmas and rituals without a question. The Bible was the ultimate source of truth for her though she never cared to study it systematically. In fact, she knew nothing more of the Bible than what the priests preached from various pulpits. If anyone pointed out the contradictions within the sacred scriptures, she would dismiss them as immaterial matters. Knowledge, intellect and reason had nothing to do with religious faith, as far as she was concerned.

She offered endless prayers to God. She attended the church regularly and devoutly. She prayed for miracles when the going got tough and beyond her control. If something good turned out, she believed that God had answered her prayers. If nothing good came, she consoled herself that it was God’s wish. Her suffering was not a fraction of what Jesus went through in his last days, she would say. 

Her faith kept her relatively happier and healthier. She was no saint, however. She possessed the normal human foibles and vices. That made her scared of hell. She was sure that she had to pass through some period of purgation before being eligible to meet her God after death. She believed that prayer had the power to reduce her soul’s suffering in purgatory and get her a seat in heaven more quickly. So she prayed a lot more in her last days. She hoped that her children would pray for her redemption after her death.

If her God really existed, I’m sure He would be quite pleased by her simplistic faith and religious practices. The biblical God is not so magnanimous, however. But my mother’s faith lay in the average believer’s grey realms rather than the biblical God’s clearly demarcated black-and-white morality. My mother would have found the thirteenth-century mystic Rumi’s god more in harmony with her genes and inclinations.

In one of Rumi’s poems, Moses overhears a shepherd speaking to God. The shepherd tells God that he wants to wash God’s clothes, pick the lice off, and kiss His hands and feet at bedtime. He admits that he does not know how to pray. “All I can say, remembering You, is ayyyy and ahhhhhh,” he tells God.

Moses is horrified. He thinks that the shepherd is talking to God as if He were his old uncle. He rebukes the shepherd who repents his sin and wanders disconsolately off into the desert.

God rebukes Moses. “What seems wrong to you is right for him,” God tells Moses. “Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better or worse than one another.” Rumi’s God goes on, “Hindus do Hindu things / The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do. / It’s all praise, and it’s all right.” God tells Moses that the heart of the believer is what matters, not the words he uses in his prayer.

Religion offers the meaning of life to the believer when he internalises his religion in his own way. My mother did that. Rumi’s shepherd did that. Most ordinary believers do that.

These ordinary believers belong to somewhere in the middle of the religious continuum at either end of which stands the fundamentalist/terrorist and the saint. The fundamentalist and the saint too give shape to their lives with the help of religion. Both take religion to the extremes: opposite extremes. One extreme generates hatred while the other generates compassion.

Both the fundamentalist and the saint have certain serious psychological problems. Both are unhappy with themselves as well as the world. They find it difficult to accept the flaws, whether in themselves or outside.

The fundamentalist projects his indignation and unhappiness to god. He remoulds god in his image and thus reduces god to less than himself. God becomes subservient to the fundamentalist’s redemptive vision for the world. God becomes the certificate of merit for the heinous deeds perpetrated by the fundamentalist.

The saint, on the other hand, places himself at the feet of god in absolute humility. He accepts responsibility for his imperfections and also the imperfections of the reality around him. The saint’s vision is rooted in a compassionate acknowledgement of the imperfections as much as the fundamentalist’s is in hateful rejection. The fundamentalist brings the bomb to dispel the darkness while the saint brings light. The fundamentalist brings the sword to snip hatred while the saint brings love.

The fundamentalist transmutes religion into a horror. The saint is usually perceived and tolerated as an innocuous oddity until his death and venerated thereafter. The average person continues to make more practical use of religion.

 

A church near Kottayam

I am taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s #MyFriendAlexa

This post is the 2^nd in a series on Meaning of Life.

The 1^st was: What is the meaning of life?

The 3^rd will be: Career and Meaning