ON BUILDING RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

      How can we build a relationship with God, who is not strictly a ‘person’? If he is not a ‘person’, then why bother about a relationship with him? If there is no relationship, he as well does not exist for me. But I ‘believe’, though do not ‘know’, that his existence and mine run into each other. If I have to support what I ‘believe’, I must have a working relationship with him. And the relationship has to be personal. Therefore, I have to build a ‘person’ in God. Besides, he has to be a person I have a reason to relate to. This reason can’t be ‘because’ or ‘therefore’. If this reason has a reason to exist, it can also have a reason not to exist. Neither will have any impact on my life. If God existing, or not existing is like a thousand others existing or not existing, like a well-paid job in Minnesota, like a certain person called Ramesh in Mumbai or Chennai, my life can go on, or stop, irrespective of God. He becomes either a pastime, an idle curiosity, an idea, or a showpiece in my collection! We don’t build a relationship with the unessential.

           Therefore, if I have to relate to him, I have to divest him of his ‘unessential’ dress, and give him an ‘essential’ robe, which has to be stitched to need, not a branded robe fashioned by habit, custom, tradition, or convenience. This relationship doesn’t have to be ‘justified’, or regarded as a protection. It has to be part of my living reality, not religious reality. My relation with God need not be defined by my religion, which can change by a conversion. Just as I am more than what others think I am, or what I would believe I am, my relationship with him too will be more than a relationship manual might suggest. So, we come the same conclusion, God has to be a person, a very special person. We are made for each other, ‘mere to Giridhar Gopal’.

             God has to be a person, like you and me, like my neighbour, or my enemy, for me to relate to him. There can be another worrying question here: if I relate to God, because it is my existential need, does God need this relationship as well? Does God need me as much as I need him? A bridge cannot be built on one side of the river. If God does not need to relate to me, my need cannot draw any response from him. But why should he need me? He is self-sufficient.

             I once saw a 60 year old man crying over the death of his 80 year old mother. He was wailing that he was orphaned. Surely, he did not ‘need’ his mother, like a child needs a mother for sustenance. He was used to see the old lady around for years, and now, when she is gone, he feels he would miss her as a familiar face, one of the many faces which have built his family. He might feel an emotional void when she is gone. Then I began to ask myself, can there be a relationship which is not need based? We relate to God generally because we can depend on him, we believe, for our needs of a difficult cure, of escaping a financial breakdown, of resetting a relationship gone haywire etc.  Can we relate to God without expecting a needed intervention from him? Can we relate to him on the basis of love? Love is not asking anything of each other, but giving each to the other. Swami said very beautifully, “Love does not ask for anything except itself”.

             Therefore, instead of asking, ‘Does God need me?’, I should ask, ‘Does God love me?’ Swami has also said, “There is no reason for love, no season for love”. He points out that the most secure relationship does not hunt for a ‘reason’, or a ‘season’, it is spontaneous, it does not recognize boundaries (’expansion is my life’), it is self-effacing. Avatars accept human limitations, human pains and sufferings to relate to the human predicament on the human level. Sri Rama’s life had been a long saga of denial and suffering not because he wanted to justify that he was God, and nothing really affected him, but to live a life of limitations and denial so that we can, out of our love for him, do the same thing. Swami also reiterated several times he has come ‘to love, and be loved’. Therefore, a love-based relationship with God is very much possible.

           In our spiritual manuals nine types of relationship with God are described, and all of them are listed under ‘Bhakti’, loosely translated as devotion. Beginning with ‘sravanam’, listening to the stories of God’s exploits, to ‘atmanivedanam’, merging your identity in God, bhakti covers all aspects of relating to God. Relating to God can be similar to any type of human relationships, a friend, a servant, parent, a lover, an enemy, a seeker of wealth or wisdom, on any level we can relate to God, and all these relationships are equally acceptable to him. Even birds and beasts are not denied access to him. It looks like he is hungry to relate to all that exists, and be part of it. He is so open minded that even Kamsa and Sishupala were allowed fierce relationships, and were redeemed. Sri Ramakrishna had ‘theatre star’ bhakta called Girish Chandra Ghosh. He alone was allowed to come to him with a bottle of liquor. When Ramakrishna’s devotees complained about it, he said, “He is a veera bhakta; now he drinks wine, but when he drinks the wine of God, he will throw it away”. And this happened. This means that God has no bias towards our relating to him. He has kept all doors of his house open for anyone’s entry, a gale or gaana, a whirlwind, or a song. Swami even says, ‘just keep your doors unlocked, I will enter your home uninvited’. Even a loving relationship is not a precondition.

            This might create a little confusion in our minds: we started wondering how to build a relationship with God, as if it is our sole responsibility. Here we notice that God is more eager to relate to us, and whichever way we do that it is okay for him. Even an indifference, or a denial he takes with a smile, for, denial or acceptance are our vocabulary, not his. We cannot run away from relationship with people or things around; so also, God is inescapable. We of course notice that our relation with people or things has a single dimension; a parent can only be a parent, a son only a son, a lover only a lover, but with God it is multi dimension, roughly nine dimensions. But the beauty of it that these relationships have no defined boundaries. They have animated boundaries, merging in each other, and breaking away to confront another next moment. God as a friend in one moment can become a teacher next moment, a lover a little later, or the all-pervading God in a while. Arjuna has demonstrated that. He fulfills all our needs of various ways we relate to people.

            I may face a difficulty here; maybe there are nine or ninety ways to connect with God, but I cannot go on experimenting with all of them. I must know which relationship will work best for me. If I connect with God as a friend, and after some time feel I want to see him as a parent, or a teacher, or when I am utterly lonely, want him replace my lost love, or get angry with him because he is not responding to me, what will happen to me? But that can happen with a human friend too, he can walk with me, joke with me, stand by me when I feel lost, serve me as a nurse when I am sick, advise me like a teacher, and when I get angry with him, and throw things at him, he can pretend he has left me, while hiding in the next room. Then I know he does not deserve this hurt, and call out to God to return him to me. God too is playing this game with us. The basic relationship is love and intimacy with him irrespective of his many faces. 

           Now I come to the last part of the proposition I started with, that we have to build a relationship with God. It has to be personal, and with no boundaries. He is my own, closer than anybody else, because he has come for me, he is connected to me all the time, not as an outside agent, but as part of myself. He accepts to suffer for me, deny himself all that he naturally is, complete and full, to show me how I can wade through my own incompleteness, my own incompetence in order that I can face life, my unwillingness to restructure myself. I may deny him, he will not deny me; I may hurt him, he will not hurt me; I may try to run away from him, he will not run away from me. Everyone else might desert me, he will not desert me. Can we have a purer basis, a surer incentive for building a relationship with him?

 

 In fact, I don’t have to build a relationship with God, I have only to recognize that it pre-exists, and post-exists me. I have only to realise that I don’t have to find a ‘reason’, a ‘way’ to connect with him; the relationship is only a recognition of whatever exists forever.

                                                                                                                    - Oct, 22

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