Keeping the faith

Today is Pancake Tuesday. The day when all old food is cleaned out of the house to make way for a period of austerity and piety called Lent, which begins tomorrow, with Ash Wednesday. I used to know all this, since close family friends that became my home for a period of time when I was in college observed all the customs and traditions associated with the religion that I was peripherally familiar with and had watched with interest ever since I was very young. It was perhaps at that time that I seriously started thinking about faith and its observance, the way different people in different countries and decided that I liked a little of each and would ‘talk’ to whoever or whatever I believed to be divine rather than do it the conventional way via prayer, rite and ritual.

And, for me, it has worked. It makes sense to be somewhat like Akbar’s own brand of religion, the Din-e-Ilahi was said to be in my history textbooks, but more so. Where the Mughal emperor tried to blend the best of what he considered to be faith in Hinduism and Islam, for me God – of the godhead – was wherever I wanted it to be, from a temple to a mosque to a church to a synagogue and a gurudwara, wherever the spirit, in a matter of speaking, beckoned to me and I followed. It was not a God, never one figure to whom I addressed whatever I ‘said’. It was a wild combination of various entities that all embodied one aspect of belief: the faith in something that was clean, true, honest and, most of all, supportive.

For a while now my ‘God’ has been paying little attention to me, or so it seems. I love and it is taken away when I want and need it most. I trust and that trust is shattered. I believe and my beliefs are destroyed by everything from humans to circumstances that are beyond any conceivable human control. And whenever I think about loving, trusting or believing again, that nasty little voice inside my head asks me whether I really want to replay my own history and live through that same trauma once more.

But then I think about it and my own native, natural, internal sense of logic kicks in. Faith is about believing in oneself first, about trusting in oneself before in anyone else, in loving oneself and then spreading that love. I have all that. I have it coming into me and going out of me. I have a home, a life, comfort, support, security. So what am I complaining about? Everything in human existence has a shelf life, all faiths say that. I need to just accept that all that I am is also here for now. As for tomorrow…God knows!