Learning to see God in every Creature and Acting Accordingly

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking and reading about Hinduism with my World Religions students at the college where I teach. For Hindus, the essence of life, our ultimate purpose, is to unite with the Infinite. Our life is a journey to reconnect with God, with what they call Brahman.

There are all kinds of things I like about Hinduism and Hindu thought, but perhaps my favorite is their contention that what we humans most want and need is God – union with God. But an even more compelling tenet of Hinduism is that we already have it. Huston Smith calls this “the most starting claim of Hindu anthropology.” “That which we most truly want, we can have. As if that were not enough, though, the anthropology adds: you already have it.” (The World’s Religions, Harper One, 1991)

           

Hindus believe that there is a slice of God - the Atman - that resides in the human soul – in every human soul. But over the course of our lives, that Atman, that presence of God in us, gets buried, it gets covered up by all sorts of things. The Atman gets buried by our domestication, our upbringing, our attachment to material things, and the countless distractions that an overly technological world throws our way.

But what is so vital to understand – and this is the good news from Hinduism’s perspective – is that the Atman, the real presence of God, never goes away. It is always there in all of us, all the time. We can think of it as a coal, a burning ember that is buried under the cumulative ash in our souls. But it is still lit! Our job is to uncover it, to clear away the ash, and to fan that ever-burning flame, that living presence of God in us.

This powerful, compelling Hindu concept should not be foreign to Christians. Christianity contends that the Holy Spirit is God’s living presence within us, a strikingly similar notion. Shortly before his death, Jesus told his disciples that it was to their benefit that he leave, so that a “counselor” could come, one that would live within them forever. In fact, Jesus’s final words prior to his ascension, “And remember I am with you always,” are verified by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Picking up on this theme, the Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, wrote that, “nothing can ever separate us from the love of God,” not “famine, hunger, nakedness, nor sword nor anything else in all creation!”

But if you are at all like me, that Atman, that indwelling Spirit of God, can get awfully hard to believe in at times. It can feel as though the divine presence has been snuffed out by the ash of life. And so the question becomes, what can we do to uncover it, to clean out the ash from the fireplace of our souls and fan that flickering flame?

For Hindus, the central practices of yoga, meditation, and contemplation of the Vedas are all designed to clear away whatever is covering up the Atman. Similarly, Christians turn to prayer, to the scriptures, to silent meditation, to contemplation, and even to service to the least of these to reconnect with the God within. The spiritual disciplines in all religions can be understood as the tools we use to get the light of God shining fully in our lives again.

But no matter what we do, no matter what spiritual discipline or practice we use to fan the flames of God’s spirit, what is most important is realizing that God’s Spirit, the Atman, is always there. God’s real presence, God’s spirit is eternally there, or, perhaps more accurately, here! No matter where we are, no matter what we have done or left undone, no matter how far we have fallen or how abandoned we may feel, that Atman is still here, deep within us. That counselor, that slice of the Spirit, that God presence is still right here, abiding within us, as close as our very next breath. We cannot extinguish that flame. We cannot snuff out that coal. Cover it up? Perhaps. Lose sight of it in the clutter of our soul’s closet? Maybe. But we cannot ever extinguish it. We cannot separate ourselves from the loving, in-dwelling presence of God.

The writer of the epistles of John put it this way: “See what great love the Father has for us, that we should be called Children of God. And that is what we are.” That is what we are. And there is nothing we can do to change or lose that.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that the essence of Hinduism is “to learn to see God in every creature and then to act accordingly.” I’m not sure the message of Jesus is all that different.

And so may we – each and every one of us – know that the Atman does, indeed, reside in us. May we always remember that a very real slice of the Living God abides within us. It always has and it always will. May we actively tend to that flame, that often dimly burning coal. May we clear away the ash to expose its warm and loving glow. May each of us learn to see God in ourselves and in every living creature…and then act accordingly. Amen.