Skip to main content

My Romantic God

 



When I was a kid I was taught that God was a mystery. God’s mysteriousness was the ultimate answer to all questions which had otherwise no sensible answers. Why did God create the graceful deer and at the same time the murderous tiger? Answer: God’s ways are inscrutable, boy.

I grew up and found it impossible to accept that answer. Like William Blake, I was buffeted time and again by the question whether the same god created both the tiger and the lamb. “What immortal hand or eye / Could frame (the tiger’s) fearful symmetry?” “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

The poet sees God in the lamb too. “He (God) is called by thy name,” the poet tells the lamb. “He is meek and he is mild.”

Who is the real god now? The fearful symmetry of the tiger or the gentle meekness of the lamb: which is the real face of god?

Are the terrorists who keep killing ordinary people in the name of certain gods the real men of god? Is the boy who chopped off the head of his teacher for the sake of a god the really religious person? Are those who erect gigantic temples the real representatives of god? Is the God of the Tiger the only real God?

Mystery, my mother answers. She is no more. I can hear her but. When I gave up her answers long ago as a young man, she collapsed. Her blood pressure had shot up. Her veins couldn’t absorb my mounting rebellion against god. Her God was the meek and mild god of the lamb. Her god was the lamb who sacrificed itself on a cross with a pathetic cry: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” For me that god who died on the cross was the wretched antithesis of the Old Testament’s capricious autocrat.

Neither the god of the tiger nor that of the lamb makes sense to me as long as both exist. The capricious autocrat of the Old Testament would make some sense because this world of ours seems to be his creation going by all the cruelty, gloom and utter nonsense that characterise it. None but a sadist could have created this. Lambs are meant to be eaten by tigers.

But I hate that god. I can stand and admire the meekness of the lamb and the gracefulness of the gazelle. Even the tiger’s fearful symmetry is admirable. But I prefer the former. My favourite lines in the Bible belong to Solomon.

Behold, you are beautiful, my love, behold, you are beautiful!

Your eyes are doves behind your veil….

Your lips are like a scarlet thread, and your mouth is lovely.

Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil….

Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle,

that graze among the lilies…

I would love a romantic goddess, not the dour old man who goes by whims and fancies, gives commandments like governments giving UAPA and stuff at one moment and then issues sops at the next or mounts a cross and laments helplessly like a universal martyr. I can admire the mystery of the rose and the worm that is eating into its virgin beauty. I can admire the mystery of the lily of a day that is “fairer far in May”. But God, I’d rather have him face-to-face and heart-to-heart like Solomon’s gazelle “springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills…” with joy in the eyes and love in the heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

  1. Deliciously AliveNovember 5, 2020 at 11:40 AM

    Your writing is very thought provoking and very brave, Tomichan.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 5, 2020 at 11:52 AM

      Thanks for saying that. Sometimes such endorsements become necessary.

      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
47 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more