Thirty-Six Million Gods or One?
Wisdom is found in all the world’s religions. Each religion spreads light on the human search for meaning. Religions are human expressions of our understanding of who we are.
Our depictions of gods are like looking in a mirror. Stories of gods open us to see who we might be and how we might live.
On our sabbatical leave last spring, Bill and I went to India where so many world religions began. We wanted to experience how other cultures speak to human fears, hopes, and dreams. If the Western approach is rational and literal, the Eastern approach is mythic and imaginative. The East seems less concerned about separating fact from myth, reality from imagination.
In Hinduism there's not just a strong mother god or a warm father god, there’s a three-faced god, a blue-skinned god, a monkey-god, an elephant-headed god, indeed, there are thirty-six million gods.
I want to share with you four experiences Bill and I had with Hinduism on our pilgrimage, our search for meaning.
A few miles outside the town of Mount Abu in Rajasthan, India, we climbed 365 steep steps up to the Adhar Devi temple. You stoop to enter into a dark cave.
Hindu temples are often on hilltops. The temple links heaven and earth and is called a garbha-griha or womb house, a place of spiritual rebirth. The worshipper makes a pilgrimage, crossing from the secular to the sacred to reach the hilltop. Next the worshipper moves from outer world to inner. Inside the temple is suppose to be dark, without natural light. In the dark, you can enter your depths and then emerge, born again into the light of day.
The temple is the physical manifestation of the religious pilgrimage, the human journey of inward and outward, toward growth, wholeness and new life.
Today we all made our ways up a hill, we entered into this sanctuary and through music, silence, and story we are invited into inner space. Then we emerge into the tree-filled atrium and from the terrace take in the wide expanse of the bay. Each Sunday is a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey.
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Outside the city of Chandigarh in Northern India where she lives with her mother, we were riding with our new friend Alka. Out of nowhere, winds raged into a wild dust storm. People pulled their clothes tightly around them, held on to their headgear. Then the rains came, a drenching downpour. The windshield wipers were going like crazy, but visibility was almost nil. Water flooded the streets. Lightning flashed. Thunder roared. Alka is a gutsy and skillful driver, but she stopped the car. She had no choice.
In cartoons, when the old man god wants your attention, he tosses down thunderbolts. Look out!
A few minutes later as suddenly as it began, the curtain of rain lifted and there was a brilliant, white tiered Hindu temple dazzling against the darkness.
Rainwater was pouring down the temple steps like marvelous, rushing waterfalls.
The temple is Durga's—Durga, fearless mother goddess, righter of wrongs. Beautiful, bold and deadly, she rides a powerful lion. Picture her. She has three eyes, the light of the moon, the sun, and fire. Her laughter causes earthquakes. She carries in her ten arms, weapons including sword, spear, bow and arrows, and a thunderbolt! but also a lotus flower, and other of her hands make meditative poses. One finger spins a discus signifying that the entire world is at her will. She sends that discus flying as a weapon to destroy evil.
She is fiercely compassionate, the remover of all miseries - physical, mental and spiritual. It is said, Durga came to life because none of the gods could destroy the buffalo demon. She defeats him and his whole army of demons. She saves the world.
Imagine being a young girl growing up with such a powerful imagine of the feminine divine. Imagine being a young boy growing up with such images.
Durga is a form of the goddess Kali who is depicted standing on a corpse. Her long tongue hangs out. She wears a garland of skulls. One hand holds a sword and another a severed head. Holy Cow! Exactly. Everything and anything, cows, the gruesome, the beautiful, creativity and destruction are all included in the Hindu concept of the divine.
Hinduism must be the most human of all the world religions because the gods have all the weaknesses and strengths, likes and dislikes of humans. The unacceptable aspects of life are included. Rather than repressing or denying what is unpleasant and hostile, Hinduism acknowledges them.
Like me, I’m guessing you’ve had the experience of trying to keep the unpleasant side of yourself hidden…pushed down in the cellar of your psyche... only to have it appear, kicking and screaming. Unacknowledged, it gains more power. Unacknowledged, we project, this part of our self we’re hiding, onto others. That very quality I find so unattractive in you is ready to erupt in me.
A spiritual practice is adding the phrase "just like I am" to your thought when you find yourself judging someone. "That Durga sure is ruthless... just like I am."
When the unpleasant side is acknowledged, brought into the light of day, you are better able to choose how to be. You are less likely to blame your behavior on others. "She annoyed and provoked me."
What you dislike in others is in you, what you admire is too. "That Durga sure is powerfully courageous and compassionate... just like I am."
The more we know ourselves, the more we can consciously choose how to be, the more authentic we can be. I am not complete until I am conscious of the shadow side of my person as much as the bright side. I create and I destroy.
I’m imperfect... accepting myself, and you, with our imperfections, I can build relationships.
Hinduism invites us to acknowledge our capacity for great good and horrendous evil. Knowing this we can be whole with the full force of who we are, like Durga.
Around the Durga temple in niches are statutes of other gods. The divine is too great to be identified with any single image. Each form shows certain characteristics of the divine. The millions of gods illustrate the complexity of the divine, and of humans.
People are different. We have different personalities and life stories. We are in different stages on our journeys. Hinduism offers many forms so surely we can find one form, one story with which to identify.he gods around the Durga temple are dressed in fine clothing. Their clothes change with the seasons. Little beds are beside them. Meals are placed before them. Globs of rice are stuck on their mouths. Throughout the day, every day of the week, men, women and children stop by for a moment and offer the gods sweet fresh fruit, coconut, milk, honey, water, and rice.
By feeding the gods, people are tending to the god’s particular strengths in themselves.
What gods are you feeding? The god of fear? of haste and waste? The god of despair? The god of gratitude? Courage? Justice? Compassion? Hinduism teaches that what we feed grows.
Our experience of India was deepened by being with Indian families in their homes. We celebrated with Alka’s family the festival of Rama Navami, the birth of Rama. Children arrived. Alka’s mother Rajmohini sang prayers and washed the children’s feet. She told the children their presence blessed her, through them she sees the divine. She prepared delicious homemade sweets and fed the children the first bites.
Wouldn’t it be great to begin life with adults feeding the divine in you?
I want our children to know we see the divine in them, to know by the way we look at them, listen and speak, that we feel blessed by their presence. Through them, we see the young, growing God, eager to know, easily delighted.
* * *
Across the bay from Mumbai is the island of Elephanta, site of cave temples to the god Shiva. You get to the temple via an hour long passage, crossing the water by boat. Leaving behind the city for the spaciousness of the water, ceaselessly rising and falling, you are tossed about, anticipating arriving somewhere. You are preparing for whatever will come. From watery instability, you dock at the island, a still point in the churning world. A long path leads from shore to mountain top where you still must climb many steps to reach the cave temple.
The pilgrim enters the cave to discover sculptures and the stories and wisdom they portray.
The sculptures are in paired opposites—husband and wife gods Shiva and Paravati in their mountain abode at Kailasa where all is well, opposite the devilish Ravana shaking the foundations of their mountain home;
Shiva as the master yogi seated still and calm in meditation paired with Shiva in constant motion, dancing, creating the universe; the idyllic marriage scene of Shiva and Paravati paired with the wrathful Shiva striking out against evil.
After the paired sculptures is the three-faced Shiva: as destroyer, creator, and preserver.
You finish your journey facing the most powerful image of Shiva. As you look closely, you see androgyny Shiva, half-male, half-female. The female half sways to one side, the male side rests his arm on a bull. Shiva is perfectly at ease in him/her self.
This oldest of continuous religions, thousands of years old, presents as the ultimate—integration, the harmony of opposites, male, female, creator, destroyer, rest and activity, dynamism and peace.
Imagine living your life and reaching this image, this mirror of yourself. You are the union of all the dimensions of your personality, inner and outer, union with all, no illusion of separation, no other, the one and the many. Who we are is the all of everything.
This is the fulfillment of pilgrimage. Great, living God, never fully known, yet closer than breathing, our everlasting home.
A Hindu saying goes, "The Truth is One, but different sages call it by different names."
This is the view of The Rev. Dr. Forrest Church who served for nearly 30 years as minister of our Unitarian Universalist congregation, All Souls, in New York City. Forrest Church died Thursday after a three-year battle with esophageal cancer. He was 61 years old. Forrest will be remembered as a loving pastor, an inspiring preacher, and a spiritual leader to Unitarian Universalists worldwide. Forrest Church was this congregation’s Lawrence Lecturer in 1986 and 2007.
He often spoke of "the cathedral of the world where there are millions of windows... Every religious, philosophical, even scientific worldview has a window, or many windows, through which the one Light shines…bringing illumination to worshipers and seekers… The windows are not the Light,” Forrest would say, “only where the Light shines through."
In India, there are more than thirty-six million windows through which the one Light shines.
We, who are blessed with light from many sources to illumine our way, must take up the pilgrim path, to quest for wholeness, and search for our essential unity.
Copyright © 2009, Rev. Barbara Hamilton-Holway, All Rights Reserved.
Thirty Six Million Gods or One? from UU Church of Berkeley on Vimeo.
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