Renaissance

Faith is a concept I’ve been toying around with for a while now. I’ve been trying to find peace and God in temples and Churches, in the stone archways and ancient caves. But I have to admit, a temple once meant a museum of sorts to me, with ancient and modern carvings that adorned the walls and the high ceilings, the heavy brass bells I had to stand on the tips of my toes to touch, and the rather eerily jeweled idols of a few among a thousand Hindu deities resting in the inner chambers. Running a hand on the dusty railings of the staircases that led to the main hallway and tuning my ears to the knell of the temple bells drawing ever closer, I would feel the concrete burning hot beneath my feet in the scorching sun of the summer. While my grandma knelt down and prayed, her lips moving soundlessly offering a muted prayer or a silenced chant, I would sit on the cool tiled floor, the frills of my dress sprawled about me, watching the water fall in lazy drops on the flower-laden Shivalingam. I would try to imagine Lord Shiva, meditating somewhere on the far-away mountain of Kailasa, listening to grandma’s prayers and would quickly say a short prayer myself just in case He was actually listening. Faith and spirituality came to be entwined as one.

For years faith or spirituality was to me a string of Hindu festivals and ‘customized’ rituals to suit every occasion right from the birth of a child into the family to the funeral of ‘those who were called away by God.’ Faith was never a matter of choice. It was something I was born with. But here’s the catch: faith was never even a matter of personal perception. It was, and remains to be, a grave sin to experiment with it, to examine its constituents. To fall out of faith is seen as sin of gravest proportions, so grave that faithless equals Godless. During the early years of my teenage, when I started resisting participating in the customary rituals of idol worship, my resistance was met with sharp whiplashes, though thankfully not in the literal sense of the word. My schooling in a Catholic Convent School was frowned upon as the reason for ‘polluting my sense of faith and spirituality.’ It is true that going to that school made me believe there’s only one God and we are His children, as opposed to the concept of a thousand different Gods- One for each purpose! Suit yourselves, dear devotees! 

As the Newtonian theory goes, every action is met by an equal and opposite reaction. The more they tried to teach me their version of spirituality, the more my desire to experiment with the notion of spirituality grew until I decided to go ahead and read up on religion and science and spirituality, and base my faith on my own first-hand experiences. Hence ensued my journey of reading about the aforesaid and examining the religious and spiritual beliefs of people I met and places I visited. I have read Hindu texts, documents validating or refuting Biblical entries, research materials on new sects of Buddhism, and a few things from the Holy Quran. Frankly, I have no clue if reading would ever help lift the fog of ignorance, but one thing is certain- that the more I read, the more my will to know more grows and pushes me to read more, reason more and criticize more. 

Spirituality is here. It is now. It cannot be understood or defined or shaped based on some ancient texts or mythical tales. But what we feed into our cerebrum helps shape the way we look at things. As euphemism is a cynic’s red bull, so are facts and knowledge a believer’s. Belief is a child of reason. To me it is. And reason is one faculty that keeps me going in the quest to rediscover my spirituality. Faith and spirituality are two different concepts. I have yet to find my spirituality, untangled and reasoned. But I have already rediscovered my faith. I had lost it somewhere on my way to ‘Here’ but I found it again deep inside me, waiting to wake from a brittle slumber. The fact that I can question my conceptions and give myself a chance to correct myself, that I can stumble and catch myself, that I can feel hurt and treated unjustly and yet love,  affirms that I have faith. Faith in myself. Faith in justness. Faith that someday I will find my spirituality in some new dimensions of belief. Faith that I can go on and paint the world red. ‘Til then, the next stop on my scavenger hunt is Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archives in the little town of Dharamsala perched atop the northern hills of India!