I was born with a reverent soul. Always searching, always chasing that feeling of joy that as a very little child I labeled that “Jesus-y feeling” because I had no other frame of reference. As I’ve detailed, my love affair with Christianity, if not with Jesus, ended with the death of a friend who my Christian friends determined to have gone to hell.
But still, I yearned for that sparkly feeling of holy connection, that sacred buzz.
When I was a 17-year-old student at the performing arts magnet school in Dallas, I became embroiled with a boy whose family was Hare Krishna. With him I went to the Krishna temple and to Kalachandji’s, the attached vegetarian restaurant that had nightly crowds out the door — the food was that good.
My love for the temple and for the gods it served, Krishna and his consort Radha, long outlasted my romance with the boy.
The Temple & the Joys Therein
I’d never been anywhere like the Hare Krishna temple before. I’d just moved to Dallas from a hick town and it was 1989 — one didn’t know such things existed. Immediately upon walking into the sanctuary, I was overwhelmed.
The building had been a Christian church, and the chapel and been repurposed into a temple for the ecstatic worship of idols. And ecstatically worship we did.
The ceiling had been painted sky blue and was festooned with drifting clouds.
The walls had been painted with nearly life-sized scenes from the life of Krishna, with a special focus on his relationship with the beautiful milkmaid Radha.
The pews had been removed. When worshipping Krishna & Company, one chants, one dances, one may even laugh or cry, but one does not simply sit silently in a row with others and get lectured as one’s mind wanders.
Therefore, the stage area became an elaborate tableau of various deities in beautiful, colorful costumes that had been lovingly sewn by devotees over the course of days and weeks.
I fell madly in love with the place and became a devotee myself.
Long Story Short
I have no bad words for the Hare Krishna community, and if I did I wouldn’t share them here as it’s not the point of this article. I’m grateful for the time I spent learning to see the world in a completely different way, learning to conceive of a world beyond monotheism. I’m grateful for the introduction to Hinduism, and to Krishna and Radha, of whom I’m still deeply fond. Suffice it to say I became disillusioned with organized religion, full stop.
But here are some lessons that have stayed with me from my time as a Hare Krishna (I’m not an expert — this was how it was explained to me at the time).
★ As humans, we don’t have the capacity to understand the true nature of the universe. God/the Gods/Consciousness understands that, and appreciates our puny efforts, as long as they’re sincere.
★ That’s the rationale behind deity worship. If you put all the love and devotion you feel for God, whatever that means to you, into an act, God will understand and appreciate it.
★ The deities are thus treated like precious children; bathed and sung to and carefully clothed. They’re “fed” with the first serving of lovingly prepared food, which is then consecrated by the god. In that way, the food is transformed into “prasad,” special food which is enjoyed together by the assembled devotees.
It’s all quite beautiful and joyous, and definitely instilled in me that sought-after Jesus-y feeling of yore.
How it Stays With Me
Having learned in my formative years to think of things so differently than what I’d been accustomed to has definitely served me well.
Besides still being a vegetarian and embracing a belief in reincarnation, the theme of deities - and all religion and religious symbolism through the ages -as metaphors for the incomprehensible is what sticks with me most.
“Metaphor is a way of using one thing to mean another. It pervades our lives in often unconscious ways,” Roo Benjamin writes in his article Change Your Metaphor, Change Your Life. “Metaphor is little more than an attempt to simplify complex information through an often-visual representation using something familiar,” Benjamin writes.
To simplify complex information. What’s more complex than the nature of the universe? Benjamin goes on, “English astronomer Fred Hoyle originally coined the term ‘Big Bang’ as a way of mocking and rejecting what he saw as a simplification and absurd rendering of the origins of the universe.”
But the term Big Bang works so well!
And so it is with our ideas of divinity, isn’t it? When the man in the gift shop of the Hare Krishna temple told me 30 years ago that “whatever divinity is, our human minds aren’t capable of comprehending it,” all kinds of bells went off in my head — and it wasn’t from the cacophony of ecstatic worship in the adjacent sanctuary. I think that even then, there was a quiet place in my soul that knew — that was the lesson I was in this place to learn.
I’m nearing 50 now, and I’ve settled into a version of the spiritual path I embarked on as a child. My practice could be termed “eclectic,” but for me, it’s just the truth as I know it. It doesn’t bother me at all for people to disagree with me, and I don’t have a problem with people following any religion that doesn’t aggressively try to force their beliefs on or otherwise persecute others.
What’s true for me is that I don’t have all the answers, nor does anyone else. It’s simply not possible. That’s why I encourage my clients and students to find ways of being that bring them joy and help them become better versions of themselves. I encourage them to find the metaphors that work for them and use them until they don’t anymore, then to find new ones, never mistaking the metaphor for the thing it symbolizes.
Because, as Benjamin writes, “The universe’s origins were far more complex than a singular event. Ironically [the term ‘Big Bang’] became the ubiquitous shorthand for explaining what most people can’t get their heads around. It works as a metaphor because of its visual simplicity.”
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