How is your God concept?

The feeling that is God, the answer that is God, or the tradition that is God.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Let us start with what is your God concept. Is it a visceral feeling, an answer to existential questions, or an accepted tradition? Is it an ongoing inquiry, something you deem irrelevant, or another human being you gift your faith to? I’ll leave you to mull on that for a few moments.

I believe the texture of the concept has a bigger role to play than its label. If I dare pose such a rich question to the reader, it’s only fair that I explore mine. How is my God-concept? I was born and raised in a Hindu Kayasth family in Northern India to a religious father who was a devotee but never forced his faith on anyone else and a mother with mostly neutral views who took part in ceremonies for the sake of family traditions. Consequentially, religion’s appeal remained fairly low to me, but the concepts embedded in my culture were very much a part of my psyche and how I perceived matters of God, fate, and life. One of those universally known concepts is that of ‘karma’, and I had a rather tumultuous relationship with it.

I vehemently rejected it, primarily due to being a close observer of my mother’s pain. Even as a child with a limited vocabulary to express her feelings about these much-advertised definitions of karma and dukkha, I could never wrap my head around the validity of it.

As an adult, I have begun to understand this in a different light. Still, I’m certain all things related to religious beliefs (which were the same as God-belief to my younger self) have been coloured by this deep confusion. Later, in my adult years, I had a series of events that re-affirmed my rejection and therefore kept me away from the faith, despite strong visceral feeling in favor of it. 

To put it succinctly, my God-concept has either been absent on the surface (I used to describe myself as agnostic) or disabling. I, like many of us accepted dictations made by the culture and society as God-ordained rules. It wouldn’t be false to state that for many of us, religion is anything that gets us acceptance and our prayer is adherence. 

One thing I always stuck to is that faith is personal, a relationship with God, whatever we define that as, is one-on-one. Religion and associated festivities are for community needs and in the absence of occasional ugly manifestations, are palatable. In my view, it’s quite futile to try to understand this in a group. It’s a matter of self-reflection if anything. 

It was not until recently that I discovered how the nature of how we believe God to be (authentically, not necessarily something we would say aloud) profoundly impacts the quality of our experiences. It’s interesting to see how everything from the culture we are surrounded with to our personal unexamined but strongly held narratives colour how we interpret this mystical force. Even agnostics have a God concept that they carry in the background of their life’s ups and downs.

From how we cope with adversity to how our intentions are synthesized, from how optimistic or pessimistic we usually are, from the quality of goals we dare to make to what we tell ourselves when we fall short - all of this can be transformed with a slight difference affected in our relationship with the creator.

A lot of us have a scary god story, as someone who is out to get us or a hard-to-please authoritarian. It’s not rocket science to decipher how similar the story would be to how we were treated or perceived to be treated by one or both of our parents. As our adult relationships carry such a heavy influence from our parental bonds, it wouldn’t be strange if they also affect our relationship with the creator in addition to other socio-cultural factors.

What’s most striking to me is that most of us have not even tapped into that viewpoint, it’s almost weird to us to examine such a belief. What we profess in public is all that is in our active awareness, leading us to not even be authentic in our prayers. In the absence of this kind of radical honesty and authenticity, are our prayers not just theatrical? 

We believe God knows everything, including what we won’t admit to ourselves. Still, we also believe that the creator doesn’t like or care about a good chunk of what we are, our needs and desires. I’ll leave you with a more important inquiry, is the God concept dynamic? Can it evolve as we evolve? If it’s true that our surroundings and our experiences have synthesized this concept, can the vice-versa be true, can a change in the texture of our god concept affect change in the texture of our experiences? Or, is it forbidden, the rules of prayers set in a stone found only inside a sacred place?

Thank you for pondering over this. Your concept has perhaps, already been altered.

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