Q: — What other conception can be better than the Father-hood of God-head? It is only Jesus who has taught us to call God as ‘Father.” No other feeling can there be better in the religious world than the love that arises in the mind when God is called ‘O God, Thou the Great Father.’
A: — Yes, it is true that the Father-hood of God is a special feature of Christianity. Why in Christianity alone, the Parent-hood of God is found in some Indian religious conceptions too. But if we consider with a scrutinising scientific analysis, we can find that this Parent-hood has been attributed to God from the inductive standpoint of view, i.e., out of gratitude to God whose kindly presence we admit on the analogy of the worldly father or from some desire to get some worldly benefit from Him. There is only to be traced the attitude of gratefulness of a being or that of an indifferent spirit of his, when the different religions of India too call Him as the ‘Creator’, ‘Sustainer of the Universe’, ‘Protector of the World’, ‘Controller of the Universe’, ‘Great Father’, etc., from the angle of vision of the attributes of Nature on the one hand, or Brahman, etc., from an angle contrary thereto, on the other. And so such conceptions are only indirect or secondary instead of being the principal or chief ones. But in the indirect conception there is no attachment or love. This point has rather got to be understood carefully.
Though there is no connection between the attributes of Nature and the Names of God like “Narayana’, ‘Vasudeva’, ‘Hrishikesa’, etc., as prevalent in the Vaishnava Philosophy, yet they are indicative of His Majesty. There is a spirit of regard and reverence behind these. But where there is no such restriction of reverence, rather where, in spite of some reference to His Supreme Majesty, there is a want of the rise of such reverential spirit, the innate loving spirit remains steady and does not become slackened. The conception of Son-ship of God has its basis on the feeling of such sweetness of the highest Love.
Vasudeva and Devaki were told by Krishna: “I reveal My Majesty before you that you may know Me to be God; or else you would have known Me as a human being.” God told Arjuna too: “Just see My Majestic Form.” Vasudeva told Krishna: “You are not our son, but the Over-Lord of Divine Spirit and Nature.” Arjune in the Gita [1] asked pardon of Krishna for having called Him his Friend, etc. In both these examples God’s Majesty has been indicated. But such was not the conception of Nanda and the ladies of Braja. They regarded even that God as their Son and Lover, as the case might be, whose Lotus-Feet are adored by all the scriptures, by deities like Brahma, Shiva, etc., men, gandarbhas, etc., and worshipped with low salutations. Nanda, Yasoda, etc., did not look upon Krishna as the Supreme Father or the Highest God. If a person becomes the overlord of the wealthiest millionaire of the world, his parents do not stand like other people before him with folded palms in awe and reverence, offering prayers and expressing gratitude, nor do his friends hesitate to be jocular as ever in his presence, nor does his wife deal with him with special veneration like the people of the outside world and stay at a respectable distance. When the cow-herd boys, His friends, reported to mother Yasoda, that He had put some earth into His Mouth, she rebuked Him. She could not do so, if she had the idea that Krishna, the Supreme Father, was the object of her reprimand. She was able to regard the Highest Entity as her own object of so close and affectionate love that due to the depth of that love she could chide or even beat Him and think of the Sole Maintainer of all maintainers as worth maintenance and nourishment at her hands. This is not intelligible to the mere theorists of gratefulness who are foreigners to affectionate love towards God. When chidden [sic] by his mother, Krishna, afraid, as it were, of her, opened His Mouth to prove His innocence; and she saw the limitless universe within It. Yet her feeling towards Him as her son was not removed, such was the depth of her affectionate love for God.
[1] Vide XI.41
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In his book Small Is Beautiful, noted British economist E. F. Schumacher wrote:
Insights of wisdom … enable us to see the hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends, to the neglect of the spiritual. Such a life necessarily sets man against man and nation against nation, because man’s needs are infinite and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material.*
It is a fact that no matter how much sense gratification a person gets, he will never be satisfied. Material food, material things, material sense gratification cannot satisfy the atma (spirit soul). Just as the body needs material food, so the spirit soul needs spiritual food. To try to satisfy one’s spiritual craving with material things leads to endless consumption, greed, envy, violence, and war. Western people have as much sense gratification as one could ever want, yet they are not satisfied. Why? Because they are spiritually empty.
Science of Identity Foundation - Siddhaswarupananda
* E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 38.
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