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

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
10 comments
Read more

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...
13 comments
Read more