Remembering God . . . in these pestilential times
God is absent on the streets of evil and in the woodlands of hate. God is in the warble of birds, in the frolic of animals in the forest, in the gurgling waters of the streams, in the blossoming flowers across our world
These are dark, dangerous times. These are moments when we need to think back on religion, to go back to the Lord of the Universe.
Aeons ago, indeed more than the billions of years ago that our limited intelligence can conceive of, the Almighty was there. He has been there through our wars and our pestilences and our parochialism and our hates and our prejudices and our pretenses and our pretensions.
His munificence gave us the universe, gave us the small world we call Earth to inhabit even as all the other planets we know of have remained defined by the desolation we call the absence of life. Our pettiness, through the centuries and through the generations we have inhabited this planet, has laid our bountiful world to waste.
There have, indeed, been those flickering moments when men of unsurpassable goodness and enduring brilliance have shown us the path to light, in all the luminosity that came touched with the grandeur of God.
Our religious scholars across the frontiers of the many faiths we have pursued --- and not pursued --- have sustained us through their prayers, through their intercession with the Almighty on our behalf, through reminding us at every bend down the river and at every fork on the road, that Allah or God or Jehovah or Bhagwan watches over us all, that he rewards us all as long as the hearts in us remain pure, and punishes us when evil seeps its way into our thoughts.
These are times to get back to God.
These are times to reflect, as we must, on the many ways in which we have transgressed in our behaviour through pretending to be gods ourselves. No army, no medicine, no politics is today in a position to roll back the pestilence that has descended on us in the sinister form of coronavirus.
It is an ailment that sweeps across countries, across continents and seas, claiming lives, destroying economies and pulverizing human ambitions. As the malady runs riot all over Earth, the air becomes grim, the birds fall silent; no man or woman knows if he or she will be alive on the morrow.
Fear in its many dark manifestations shadows the thousands who stay confined in their homes, who join the long processions of people looking for safety in the putative security of rural climes.
All politics has fallen deafeningly silent. All arrogance has been blown apart. Vanity has gone fugitive, the streets have succumbed to eerie silence, homes have become enmeshed in deep, dark gloom.
As the young and the aged struggle for breath, as healthy men and women are laid to eternal rest in their untimely graves, it is time to recall the wrath of God.
We will see the light of the sun one day. We will once more seek poetry in the brilliance of the stars. We will laugh and dance when this terrifying darkness passes. All of these aspirations will come to pass with a renewed faith in the majesty of the Almighty.
All of these hopes will be replenished through our prayers, bathed in our cascading tears, in the mosques, temples, churches and synagogues we have long neglected or looked upon as fences keeping us apart from one another. Those fences need to go and the fraternity of man must once again take over.
God is absent on the streets of evil and in the woodlands of hate. God is in the warble of birds, in the frolic of animals in the forest, in the gurgling waters of the streams, in the blossoming flowers across our world.
God needs to be back in our souls. We need to go back to Him, to do penance, to pledge to Him that we will be far better human beings than we have been thus far. We must go back home to God.