Ancient Mother, I Hear You Calling

Ah, India. The place of my childhood, where I lived the first fifteen years of my life.

It was here I first experienced the living Hindu faith,

the only place where the Divine as Feminine is still revered in Her Feminine form,

the cradle of the Easter

wisdom that has come West with such luminaries as Emerson, T.S. Eliot, Beatrice Bruteau, and many more.

India is known as a Hindu country. But both India and Hinduism are enormously diverse. In India many languages are spoken, many tribes and races lives side by side, and many other religions have taken root.

In fact, Hinduism itself is not really one cohesive, coherent, clearly differentiated religion, as Islam, for instance, certainly is. It holds within itself many ways of understanding the nature of the Divine, human nature, human life and it's purpose, and how to live wisely and well.

Although the more philosophically sophisticated understand the underlying Oneness of the Hindu vision of God, that Oneness is expressed in an enormous diversity of deities and forms of worship. Still, the sages of India have captured this seeming paradox well in their well known saying: "One God, many Names."

India also has many sacred scriptures, and one expert has said one could define a Hindu as someone who believes those scriptures to be divinely inspired and authoritative for faith and life. These scriptures include

the ancient Vedas (believed to be more than three thousand years old), the Upanishads, which are believed to be from the first millenium before the Christian era, and the Bhagvad Gita, or Song of God, which also predates Christianity. I will be drawing from these scriptures in the readings I share with you and put into my book "Flowers from Gardens of Faith." I will also include, as I did for Islam, some poetry by highly revered Hindu poets.

But before I launch into these treasures of faith, let me share with you a bit of my experience growing up in Hindu India as well as Muslim Pakistan. I lived there from 1941-1955, which were the turbulent years of the struggle for independence led by Gandhi, and the partition of India into India and Pakistan. As a child, a great deal of this was "over my head." The memories I have which relate to this blog are not political, but very personal and spiritual.

I remember vividly the garlands of brilliant yellow and orange marigolds which were so often hung around the necks of people who were being honored. Flowers were always blooming everywhere in profusion, and they were used daily for prayer offerings in the Hindu temples and shrines that dotted the landscape. And there were shrines as well in every Hindu home I ever entered; in taxi cabs in the form of flowers and a picture of a favorite deity or two on the dashboard; and on streets in the villages and cities. The impression was of a people who were incurably religious, deeply spiritual, addicted to God in multiple forms.

There were frequent colorful, musical religious festivals with parades to delight a child's heart. The boarding school I attended for a few years was very near a major pilgrimage route to the source of the Ganges, which was an especially auspicious place for pilgrims to go, since the Ganges is considered a very holy river. We often watched as pilgrims passed by, some chanting, some using prayer beads, others talking and laughing. Everywhere, even poor women wore brightly colored saris that flowed as they walked, and were like human flowers brightening even the grungiest city streets.

Always, I saw Hindus greeting each other with a bow as they clasped their hands in front of their hearts and said "Namaste" which means, "the divine in me greets the divine in you." When I wondered as a child about those red dots in the middle of the foreheads of so many Indians, I was told it was a sign of the third eye, the eye of God, the eye with which we can see God in all.

Our fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Ziegler, read aloud the great epic stories of India about Ram and Sita, Krishna and Arjuna, Hannuman the monkey God, Ganesha the elephant god, and many more. Those stories still echo in my mind, right along with the western Greek stories of Ulysses and Theseus and Jason's search for the Golden Fleece.

Finally, there are the memories of groups of Indians gathered under a spreading banyan tree, with someone playing the tablas (drums) and someone else a harmonium, while the rest sang and sang devotional songs and chants called bhajans, with their faces lit up with loving fervor.

And weaving through it all, the smells and tastes of Indian curries, and Indian sweets, which were an integral part of Indian daily and devotional life.

It is with all this in my heart that I share with you the Flowers of Faith from the Garden of Hinduism planted and tended by Mother India.