Miscellaneous - Religion   

Glory of God

CHENNAI: Even scriptures claim that the experience of God lies beyond all that is attainable through the senses and the mind. To get a smattering of this, one has to look into the lives of saints and the devout and their hymns that try to give expression to this unique experience. What becomes clear is its special quality arising from the personal rapport that is established between each one of them and God. Posterity is indebted to such saints for revealing this ultimate joy, which, once tasted, easily renders all other joys of this world insignificant.

Sri K. Sivakumar pointed out in a lecture that the greatness of Saint Manikkavasakar’s Tiruvachagam lies in its ability to evoke the unique joy of experiencing the glory of God even as it extols His boundless compassion in rapturous terms. The saint is overwhelmed because God undertook to dispel the ignorance that gets attached to the soul through various births. When God brought about the inner awakening in him, it became clear that God is infinite, without beginning or end, and though engaged in the acts of creation, protection and dissolution, is also simultaneously the guiding force in the several forms of life assigned to the beings in creation.

In trying to describe the climax in his life when Lord Siva revealed His divine presence and placed His feet on his head, he finds himself at a loss to express adequately the fullness of this unique experience. In a verse he claims that Tamil language has only helped a little bit to reveal God’s greatness and that he is unable to transmit the true nature of what he felt and experienced, thereby alluding to the gap that exists between words and experience.

Yet he attempts to describe the nature of God’s presence in the minds of the devout (Sivanadiyars) as the fragrance that inheres in flowers and as the taste of milk that is enriched with honey and ghee. Such people steeped in thoughts of the Lord begin to feel His grace even as flowers secrete honey when they begin to bloom and savour the soothing flow of His grace pervading their inner self and experience. One has to seek His grace earnestly for the same God remains distant to those who do not seek Him.

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