Germany was good. Well, the Narasimha Festival was good, great even, attracting around 350 devotees from Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. And a few hardy souls from the British Isles.
This year I took my son Mali, 12, and he enjoyed it very much. It rained most of the time, so we felt quite at home there, and Mali got up early every morning and stoically fasted all day on the caturdasi. And he wore his white cotton dhoti most of the time, thereby scoring maximum points on the pilgrim-ometer.
Mali hasn’t been on a plane very much at all since he was a baby, so for him to be flying above the clouds was a real novelty. He was fascinated and thrilled by it. He said he couldn’t remember our family trip to India, but it was when he was four, so no surprise. The thrill of flying will, I expect, be linked in his mind with travelling to a religious festival which can only be a good thing. When doing things for spiritual progress is made fun, such things get done again and again, and that’s good for the soul. It’s specially important for children that religion is fun. Parents have to practise the Mary Poppins Principle:
For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun, you find the fun and…SNAP!…the job’s a game! (Cue Julie Andrews singing Spoonful of Sugar)
Not that religion is a job, but it’s not always children’s idea of fun either.
However, on the Vaishnava path I would venture to say that if you approach it in the right way, it’s all fun – even the physically challenging stuff like fasting. Srila Prabhupada said that Krishna consciousness was ‘recreation’ since most of the time it simply involves singing, dancing, feasting, theatre, painting – and a little philosophy from time to time.
That’s why I can confidently take my 12 year-old to a major religious event knowing full well that he’ll have a good time. Highlights for him were a childrens play about Nrsimhadeva all spoken in German (something new for him), the 3 hours long abhisheka (ceremonial bathing of the Deity) which featured some items that made him smile – such as the Deity being completely covered in bananas!
Another highlight – curiously enough – was the four hours that father and son took to make up just a small dish of sandalwood paste. We sat peacefully together in a small room surrounded by small household deities of Narasimha and countless shaligram-shilas brought there by what seemed like all of Germany’s brahmanas. Taking a piece of sandalwood about eight inches long (or whatever the German metric equivalent is) and rubbing it on a large, flat circular stone, adding rosewater, camphor crystals and saffron, was a task guaranteed to help a person experience eternity. Only a few drops of precious sandal paste was created after many minutes of rubbing.
Yet far from being a hellish torment, this was devotional service, bhakti, and we both knew that this fragrant yellowish paste was going to applied to the black body of Narasimha the following day. And that somehow, by this simple act of devotion, God might be pleased. Certainly father and son came out of that small room smiling.
And we smiled the next day when we sang in kirtan and Dad tried to jump around like the twenty-somethings, and we smiled when Dad got splashed all over with bright yellow turmeric water while bathing the Lord on the altar. And then we smiled on the last day when the sun finally shone but it was time to come home. We might have missed that evening’s torchlight procession with fireworks but it was more than enough fun for four days.
My grateful thanks to Gail Staveacre of UK and Manoj Kumar of Australia for kindly sponsoring a portion of the abhisheka.
Here are some pictures:
The evening before the main festival, the Deity’s body is covered with 108 coloured silken ropes. This is known as Pavitra-Puja
Yellow turmeric, a leafy garland of forest flowers, lemons, and garlands of German doughnuts
The ‘Butter Outfit’ with dried fruit decorations: figs, dates, prunes, and apricots
2 Comments
June 18, 2009 at 5:13 pm
I agree-why can’t religion be fun? Who said it had to be so bloody miserable?
John Wesley and equivalents seem to have caused a lot of grimness….
June 19, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Thanks Laurie. Of course, the Church of England was even grimmer before John Wesley came along. With his brother Charles writing those great hymns, people singing outdoors, the stirring sermons, and the Sunday schools, it was what was needed at the right time.
But the foundational theological premise that we are existentially sinners, and that God Himself has to come down and die in pain for our sins, well, that tends to put a certain grimness on the life of a Christian.
If however you start from the point that the soul is by nature blissful, full of knowledge, and already eternal, but merely forgetful, then you have a religion that tends much more towards joy. All that must be done to regain that inner joy – the very inner nature of the self – is to conquer over forgetfulness of the self and the Supreme.