Thursday, October 3, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Kumbh Mela
Why do you hound me as though you were divine, and insatiably prey upon me?
In 2019 more than twelve million people gathered in India at Prayagraj for the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu celebration at the convergence of three rivers: the Ganges, Yamuna and Sarasvati. This was the largest peaceful gathering of human beings ever recorded.
This pilgrimage and festival, held at one of four alternating sites, populates the highways and rivers every twelve years. These holy walks and dips in sacred waters represent both devotion and fear in those who participate. Worship and rituals (like church services for Christians) raise God up and revere him as creator. God is love, and out of his love come all things, all experience, all emotion, all life. This is how religion declaims our reliance on works to please and placate God.
But loving your neighbor as yourself (a morality common to most religions) requires the building of hospitals, feeding the hungry, reaching out with a $5 bill to a highwayman seeking a handout. “Anything helps.” “I’m pregnant and have four children at home.” “God bless you.” “Veteran, hard on his luck.” Our son-in-law returns from a mission trip to Congo tomorrow. Our friend Diane is on her way today to a mission to immigrants at the Mexican border, a trip she takes often.
Who is this God we serve? Hindu stories abound about the escapades of the gods. They regularly seek power over each other, and of course we watch and listen, and follow their example – if not Hindu, then Greek or Roman gods, who harass each other every kind of way.
Job’s wife despaired of any goodness in God after she lost all she had. “Curse God and die,” she yelled at her husband. Job, refused. As God predicted in the first chapter, Job did not turn on Him.
Would that my words could be cut in the rock forever. As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the end he will stand on the earth.
How could Job withstand the terrible tribulation brought by Satan? I think he chose to worship rather than work for God. He chose to be, as Jesus said, a child before his Father. His pilgrimage started with God and ended with God. On that road what he gained and what he lost became like dust.
After my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God – I myself will see him with my own eyes, I and not another. Oh, how my heart yearns within me!
The parallel paths of faith (embracing worship, meditation, pilgrimage, festivals, church services) and works (building hospitals, filling Christmas bags for African children, donating $5 or $5 million to a good cause or to a needy man or woman) challenge each other, but the friction that results creates warmth. The conflict within myself or with others comes only if I decide one path matters most. Because both ways matter most.
Still, I cannot be a servant first, not before I know God (who is love) is my Father, and I am his beloved child.
One day I walk a mile in meditation, or begin the journey of a thousand steps toward a holy destination. Christianity can be seen, like other religions as well, as a religion of the road. I spend time in the temple to recover from the road, so I can head out again. Does the road take me away from building hospitals, from planting roots in one place so I can eventually give out of my abundance? I don’t always go home again.
But without the worship and rituals, the wandering and searching and singing, I gradually become trapped in the false self telling myself that I am creator, no longer child or servant, and that God appreciates me so much that he wants to serve me. God asks humbly, “What do you need from Me?”
I tell God what I want, but in this conversation I run a great risk of changing allegiance, believing my plan and my work is primary. If I am king, where does that leave God?
I am confident of this, I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
(Job 19, Psalm 27, Mark 1, Luke 10)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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