To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Thursday, December 20, 2018
 
In Dubai! This is the time I usually visit my family, and my family for all intents and purposes has moved to Dubai for now… so here I am!

Would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas… seems a bit of an apt occasion for a ‘religious’ post… and though this post is not exactly that, it’s probably as close as I will ever get…
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Be like the sparrow! 

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” ~ Matthew 10:29-31

I have many a times written about how I find it difficult to blindly ‘believe’ or have ‘faith’ like many do. I do not have confidence in the existence of God (though I would very much like to) but I cannot say that I reject his existence outright. As they say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I have not seen or met or heard God, and it is also difficult for me to accept that the Bible is written by the hand of God. In fact, I think it’s better that it is not because the way the Bible portrays God—particularly in the Old Testament—is not how I would like to imagine a loving and caring God to be, if he were to exist. One could say that the Bible symbolises those times but this would be illogical to me because then it would mean it was written by man like many other historical documents and not directed by the hand of God. If God is the creator of times himself, he would surely say things or make man say things that would transcend time. He would not, I would imagine, have human limitations. Well, you see why it’s difficult for me to believe…

But I was trying to make a point from the opposite camp. The reason I shared the introductory quote is because oddly it has had a powerful effect on me. Not as a quote but as an idea that got passed on to me at Sunday school (a religious class for Catholic kids) and somehow vaguely stayed afloat in my consciousness. It is only fairly recently that I actually verbalised this idea to myself when I decided to embark on a particularly risky venture as it seemed to me (but I find most ventures risky!) in the words “be like the sparrow!” It has an emotive as well as action element to it when put this way and what I impress upon myself through this imperative phrase is that if sparrows can go about their business without a care for the future seeing as God looks after them, I very well can… because he very well looks after me too! I need to throw caution to the winds and “be like the sparrow”. Sometimes when I am overthinking about what might happen in a dire situation or when am not sure what action to take because I don’t know what would be the outcome, this phrase just pops into my head. This doesn’t mean that the next minute I simply do what I am not sure about doing but it gives me some comfort, to be honest… that things will be alright… just trust yourself and go ahead.

I know… it might seem strange that given what I said about my lack of confidence and faith, I invoke a trust and faith in God in moments when things are not in my control. I cannot really explain it except that it feels good to think that someone up there will take care of me as much as he takes care of the little sparrows. It affords me an inner strength that comes from having a psychological safety net in a largely unpredictable world. Come to think of it, isn’t that how religions were born… as Voltaire said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” … I very much agree.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 5:47 pm 2 comments
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