HomeIn the Mahabharata there is a story about Siva and Ganesh (the son of Siva) who have a conflict in which each acts in a way that brings about a temporary tragedy. In some ways it is the story of the conflict between duties and rights and between actions and understanding. That is, it is a story about our lives.
Good Morning.
For my inspiration this morning I have taken a story from the Mahabharata which may not be in the Mahabharata.
The Mahabharata is a grand epic, perhaps the largest in the world. It fills many volumes. There are several recensions of it, but even the shortest of these contains more than 5,000 verses. In a few recensions, there is a sort of preface added to the story, what is called an interpolation, in which Ganesh is approached and asked to write the story down, which he agrees to do. I have two greatly abridge translations of the epic, one of which contains the preface, the other of which does not. In the one that contains it, there is also the additional story of Ganesh losing his head. This apparently does not exist in any of the Indian versions of the epic, and is one of several stories about how Ganesh got his elephant head. How it got into the translation I do not know, but since it was in a version that I had, I feel justified in mistakenly saying that it was part of the epic but also feel obligated to let you know that, in fact, it is not.
In the story (which I read this morning) Ganesh and Siva enter into an avoidable conflict in which each believes that he is in the right. And in fact, each of them is correct in that belief. Ganesh is defending his home and his mother—imagine the audacity of some stranger attempting to enter your home. Siva is exercising his right to enter his own house—imagine the insolence of some stranger trying to keep you from going into your home. They were both right. But they were also both wrong.
The problem is that neither listens to the other, the conflict escalates and Ganesh ends up losing his head. I would note that the process of escalation is partly the insistence on the fact of one’s position of “rightness”. I am right, you are not, so stand aside (or go away). I say neither listens to the other because each has explained the reason for his position, but in each case the stated reason is dismissed by the other. In many arguments between human beings, that is a standard practice and problem.
It is interesting that in our culture we use that metaphor of “losing one’s head” to refer to deep anger or to falling in love or to an ecstatic religious experience. Each of these is a form of madness.
Rapturous moments, psalms and poems are common in religions throughout the world, and a mystic would say that we should lose our head over God and religion, that this is the right way to relate to the holy. And is there not some truth to that? Is the face of the glory, grandeur and awesomeness of God or the Cosmos, is not losing one’s head the appropriate response? The Muslim Rumi and other mystics say so and often use the language of love or madness to describe the relationship of the individual soul to the divine. From a poem of Rumi:
Lovers
share a sacred decree –
to seek the Beloved.
They roll head over heels,
rushing toward the Beautiful One
like a torrent of water.
In
truth, everyone is a shadow of the Beloved –
Our seeking is His seeking,
Our words are His words.
At times
we flow toward the Beloved
like a dancing stream.
At times we are still water
held in His pitcher.
At times we boil in a pot
turning to vapor –
that is the job of the Beloved.
Well, there are other views. In both Hinduism and Plato there is use of the simile of the chariot. The horses represent our emotions—emotions of all kinds. The charioteer represents human reason. Reason decides the goal of the ride, the pathway to get there and ensures that the emotions work together. Lose your head--lose your reason--and the horses run amok. As a Unitarian of many years, I am steeped in our heritage of insisting on the use of reason in religion. That has been part of our stance throughout our history. Emotionalism can bring a great deepening to the religious quest. It can also bring great dangers to individuals and to society. It was Christian emotionalism, whipped up by Passion Plays, which so often led to pogroms throughout Europe. And emotional movements can be manipulated to insane actions, like those of recent tragedies. There is, I think, much less danger from the individual mystic than from a corporate movement. But losing one’s head has dangers in either case.
But we should also remember that in the 1830’s Ralph Waldo Emerson attacked what he saw as the cold, spirit stifling intellectualism of the Unitarianism of his day.
The conflict between Ganesh and Siva is reminiscent of other father and son conflicts. In the Bible Absalom rebels against his father King David. A battle ensues in which Absalom is slain, so David has won the battle and kept his crown, but he cries out and weeps in despair for the death of this son, and says, “would that I had died instead of you”.
Ivan IV, Tsar of Russia, also called Ivan the Terrible, was a bit of a madman. He was much like his later successor Joseph Stalin. Ivan was paranoid and ruthless, and he had people killed on a whim. One day, in a confrontation, he struck his own son in a fit of rage and killed him. He, too, suffered deep remorse and despair. For them no elephant head to set right the damage they had done.
Think of that conflict, of the affect on either side of it: a son killed by his father or a father who has killed his son. That is a story often brought about by just that kind of insistence on rightness. It is a sad story that happens all too often, not just between fathers and sons, but between people.
The story of Ganesh and Siva need not mean physical death, the literal killing of a child. There are times when some become so locked into an argument with their children that they kill not the child but the relationship, all the while knowing that they are in the right. It need not be that a relationship dies entirely; it may be that just part of it does. We can kill trust by how we treat our children; we can kill their willingness to come to us when they are in trouble or to share with us when they are in pain by how we respond to them. And that can happen in any relationship.
The point of the story of Ganesh and Siva can be applied to many aspects of life, and to issues between individuals, between institutions, between groups and nations and even conflicts within one’s own self. It is the story of a conflict in which both are right. It is the story of someone trying to forge ahead in some way and of someone else trying to block that. Sometimes both are justified and sometimes each feels justified, which is different.
Confrontations around the world between ethnic or religious groups, minorities seeking justice, majorities seeking democracy, individuals seeking their personal rights, and those barring the way telling themselves that they are struggling for law and order or traditional values, morality or religious commandments, or tell themselves that inequality is equality, and therefore convinced that they are in the right.
In the armed conflict that shook Northern Ireland for decades, each side believed it was right. The Irish Republican Army and its allied groups pointed to the facts that justice is a human right and that a peaceful civil rights movement had been met with violence and they could therefore argue that violence was the only remaining means to achieve their goals; the Protestant militias could point to the need to defend their community against terrorism; and the British could point to the need for the rule of law and the establishment of order. They were all right in some way. All too often we human beings allow our being right in some way to lead us to ignore the rights of others and to use means that undermine our moral claims.
I must say, however, that my sympathies will always lie with those whose goal is equality and justice; they are always more justified in their actions than those whose goal is to impose or maintain a system of injustice; or perhaps I should say their actions are less unjustified. Violence for freedom is understandable even when unnecessary. But the point is that violence should never have come to pass. Catholics in Northern Ireland should not have been oppressed, and when they called for justice that call should have been heeded.
The Protestants and the British were standing in the doorway blocking Catholic access to equality. They should have stood aside. The result of their not doing so was an escalating conflagration, and in that conflict of each side believing it was in the right, each side reacted with rage and violence and thousands died.
Fifty years ago this fall a mob of people blocked a doorway and tried to keep nine students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. They were determined to keep their traditions alive; traditions of injustice. Those nine black students showed incredible bravery and fortitude, and I take nothing away from them when I say that the mob failed to recognize that it was not just those nine students knocking on the door of that school; it was the awakening conscience of the nation insisting that the door be opened; it was justice demanding to enter in; it was the tide of history that they were trying to block. In later years others would stand in doorways--George Wallace, for one--blocking justice and equality.
Today other people stand in other doorways trying to justice and equality. Around the world, people are blocking women, gays and lesbians, transgendered people or religious minorities from entering in. It is justice that they are blocking, and they ought not succeed; and I believe they shall not succeed. Fifty years from now, one hopes that Episcopalians will ordain gay Bishops not only here in the United States, but around the world, including in Africa. Siva had a right to enter into his own home. All people have a right to enter into human society and be treated equally. Let them do so, but let them do so with love.
In this year among the candidates running for President of the United States there are a woman, a black man, an Italian American and a Mormon, each of whom would be the first of their “group” to be elected to the Presidency and each of them a major candidate with a genuine chance to win. In that fact, we see living proof that the doorway to justice can and does get pried open, even if it sometimes takes a while. Sometimes discrimination ends.
In our private inner lives we can sometimes be like Ganesh. If we are honest with ourselves--or at least, if I am honest with myself—we will acknowledge that sometimes it is we who block the door to something or someone that ought to be allowed in.
Sometimes it is our own emotions. We can stand in the doorway of our heart and try to keep out fear, grief or shame. But when we do, they linger there outside that door, waiting for it to open. Grief comes knocking and we say, “Go away”. But like Shiva it answers, “I shall not go away, because, at least for now, this heart is my rightful home”. To refuse to let it in is actually impossible; it is already there. And it will eat at us until we welcome it in and make it feel at home.
It isn’t only the so-called negative emotions we block. Sometimes it is connection or love or hope that we try to keep out. Often in relationships one person feels that the other is blocking them out, shutting the door, closing off. Each of those is a metaphor that speaks right to the heart of this story; and right to the heart of relationship.
Another line of thought here: the one whom Ganesh keeping out of the house is Siva, a god of the Hindu Trinity. Hinduism has Brahma the creator, Vishnu the sustainer, and Siva the destroyer. When it is time for the universe to end, Siva dances and all things are destroyed, though it is only in that destruction that the possibility of a new beginning exists.
So Ganesh is keeping out God or fate. Sometimes it is not emotions that come knocking and that we ourselves block, but rather God, the Cosmos, the call to unveil our higher self or some other metaphor for the Holy.
Some of us--especially those of us who have been hurt by religion in the past--may bar the way to any thought or feeling of the Divine or sacred. Jonah did that. In the Biblical story he was called to do one thing but he took off in a different direction. The problem was that he couldn’t escape from either God or himself. If the sacred—however named—knocks on the door of your soul, do you let it in; or do you try to keep it out?
Where in my life am I Ganesh, striving to block the entry of that which has a right or a need to enter? Where in my life am I Siva, pushing ahead over the claimed rights of others? Where am I allowing my rightness or my portion of rightness to deny the claimed rightness of others? Where am I allowing my “rightness” to destroy relationship? Or, internally, what part of me denies the claimed rightness of some other part of me? To insist on that fact--the fact that I am in some way right—often leads only to heartbreak. Where in my life is that happening to me now?
May we each find the path of genuine rightness: the path that leads not to violence but to reconciliation; not to a shattering of human society or human hearts but to wholeness; yet that also leads not to acquiescence, but to justice.
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