WHEN APATHY TAKES THE NAME 'RELIGION' AND REDUCES RELIGION TO A SHAM

WHEN APATHY TAKES THE NAME 'RELIGION' AND REDUCES RELIGION TO A SHAM

The living gods and goddesses. These buds must be allowed to bloom. Do you feel for them? Do you feel they are your children, grandchildren, your very selves? 

Charity is not an executive function. It is feeling that is at the heart of it. "Feel like Buddha and you will be a Buddha; feel like Christ and you will be a Christ. Do you feel?" These words were bled out from the heart of the Swami Vivekananda. These vibrations roll on through the corridors of human consciousness, transforming brutes into men and men into gods.

But these babies are gods already. Serve them, my friends, you who have fathered them, mothered them, without being conscious of your blood-bond, your kinship with these unfolding buds that must blossom into fragrant flora. How can you yet rationalise, reason your emotions in transaction terms when the vast mass of humanity in this holiest of lands, Bharatvarsha, suffer grinding poverty, ignorance, destitution and death, courtesy, your unconcern for your own kith and kin? It is sympathy, bleeding sympathy for the suffering that is needed, love, all-encompassing, charity that is worshipful service, not in words but in deeds, bold and brave, that are the crying call of the hour.

In vain is our so-called reverence for Thakur-Ma-Swamiji when in real terms we cannot give them our whole lot, choosing to reject them in the visible, moving mass of humanity. I call my God omnipresent and, yet, fail to see Him in the millions that crowd the cottages in the rural greens. What worth is my devotion to such a God? If my God in a million garbs starves, do I starve, too? If my God struggles for light, for life, for bare subsistence, do I struggle, too, to alleviate His misery in the masses? Ask yourself these questions before you next feel inflated with your own charity or its lack of it, before you cast around your apathetic attitude even after witnessing these horrific living conditions of the fairest flowers of humanity, now subjected to human exploitative tyranny that is daily reducing them to beasts of burden. Gods and goddesses they are but they live like animals despite such theoretically ascribed exalted status. Will you watch in vain?

Written by Sugata Bose 

Courtesy, Ramakrishna Math, Mekhliganj, a branch centre of Belur Math.