Control the Fire: Let Your Fire not Harm You

Fire prepares its path,
yet, uncontrolled fire is dangerous.
Fire in us must give us a vision,
a vision guided and guarded by prudence.

Zeal is a fire,
yet, it must be given sight by reflection.
Zeal is fruitful,
only when it embodies wisdom.

Zealous, but no prudence,
pious but no conviction,
ambitious but no vision,...
See, the fire playing foul..

However devotional flavour they may have,
only prudent steps can be potentially fruitful and creative.

Devotion and piety alone do not necessitate growth,
they may be simply emotional expressions in spiritual disguise.

Pray from 'your' Heart

Prayer for a moment or for a year,
Prayer alone or with many,
Prayer for oneself or for others,
Must be from the heart,
from our trust in God.
Raise our hearts to God,
what we are, how we move ahead, how we struggle
God knows what we need.
May this genuineness of prayer be kept alive.

Fear and hope,
just as they function in faith,
also work in politics.
A call for prayer, hence, might also serve political purposes.
(politics involves gaining or losing power, gathering people after a common feeling, a strong sense of identity in the group ...)
A true prayer cannot be made from a consciousness created after disastrous syndrome,
because it cannot see the reality correctly.

Someone calls for prayer, does your heart feel that prayer?
Does that concern 'our' community, system, believes...only
How does this intention serve the humanity at large?
Does the attempt term some others as enemy?
Defence, protection, being with, joining so and so ....
can be terms with wrong motivation, and self oriented intention.

Real issues, but wrongly interpreted...
when prayer, sacrifices, and penances are suggested as solutions,
sympathy, solidarity, pity ... about our side; fear, insecurity... concerning others
along with prayer, it also conditions our ways of understanding the issue,
and become blind to what is real.

Is everything spiritual that we could give spiritual answers for everything?
If everything is spiritual why the worldly-spiritual distinction?

Let there be peace everywhere,
Let there be goodness everywhere,
May we possess a good will,
what else shall we pray?

Religious Pessimism - Religious Culture - Religious Extremism - Secularism

Are we led to a religious pessimism (human life is in a difficult condition, everywhere there are traps of evil, faith is in crisis, a nearing apocalypse, ..) The solution often suggested is a religious culture, some form of devotions and practices, upholding traditions and rituals ... which are projected to be the sign of believing in God. It is such kind of empty religious culture that drained the sacred out of people's lives. Outcome is atheist secularism or religious extremism depending on the stimulants.

Scientific Progress, Spirituality, and the Devil

Energy, field, magnetism, consciousness etc., are not words that we hear just in the area of science, but they are very much used in spiritual discourses today. Spiritual narratives often blame science that it has not yet arrived at the true meaning of these terms.

It is at the same time scientific progress and technological advancement boast of knowledge and rationality, we also see the extreme form of religiosity and most absurd forms of superstitions. The phenomenon is not new. 

We know that any social or cultural change bring a struggle till the system gradually adapts to it. It is not an apparent harm that threatens, but it is the whole question of placing ourselves somewhere in the 'new' world (eg., industrial world or computer age today). The feeling of insecurity and existential perplexity form a sense of displacement from the living reality. The question of uncertainty and inability to adjust to a new situation make a feeling of a suspicious presence in the world which alters the normal or traditional patterns. It is also the time a fascination to narrations involving devils and multiple forms of witchcraft begin to rise. Because, the calculations and patterns in magic seem to parallel the scientific rationale. The devil and the vampires give a personified figure to our own fears and shattered self.

Time  to time we have historical contexts when the human capacities find helpless, and cannot even name what really happens (it could be some phenomena, or cultural conflicts of values, morals and systems). This unnamable and undesired reality may appear in various forms according to different contexts. We seem to have 'identified' the source when we blame it on the 'devil.' But what happens here is that we escape from our responsibility to 'identify' the human, socio-cultural dimensions that create the situation.

God, society, and grace together need to approach these patterns of the 'devil.' Only a mature faithful community can stand against the apparent crisis it faces. Instead, manipulative leaders tend to form a pseudo religiosity and false images of spirituality. They might interpret the crisis in a very meaningful manner, but cannot solve because they often do not attempt to understand it other than describing them in their own fictitious forms of  palatable beliefs. We might attempt to condemn and expel the devil, but at the same time within the frames of pseudo-religiosity we chain ourselves to 'good' magic which are easy tools to escape the crisis.

Only in ways we can find an encounter between ourselves and God in the new phase of cultural and social changes, we gracefully face the newness (apparently a crisis). Until then we wander chasing and cursing the devil.

What is suggested here is to analyse our times and changes with the tools of history and cultural hermeneutics. Then, we can spiritualise them in our approach of the issue in a life of grace.

It may be interesting to do a brief study on the witchcraft in early modern Europe, witch hunting, and we will be surprised to know that it was more related to immature ways of religion to deal with the then 'scientific' language and method and religious adaptation.
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Please see also Romanticising the Demons

Why did I Pay When It Was Free? Are we in a (religious) super market?

Shopping gradually becomes a data driven decision making. Companies analyse our interests, expectations, preferences etc. 

Does religion become such marketisation? 

How do the Malls attract people so do the Hero prophetism..

Window-shopping, cafeteria, flash-mobs, make a try ...

Are there parallels?

Mind it, there is no exchange offer nor replacement in religious market. While the time one realises the product is not worth, the vendors will have disappeared. 

Though the longing could take different faces, the worth thing that one looks for in a human journey is a life with God. Before someone could analyse our data, let us try to understand it fully, or get help of someone who could genuinely help us to do it. Remember at the sales counter they told us that we must buy 'it' and we bought what they said to be the best. Instead we are left with bags of sparkling wrappers. Did that make our journey well? 

If we have not made our choices well, and chose to believe what fascinated us, we are carrying broken pots. Shocking it is that we take pride in these pots we carry. Sometime we decorate it, some time we dance around it, and sometime we worship it. 

Instead of doing a data analysis and making 'itself' applicable, if religions could understand the human situation in cultural and social changes, we could see the signs where god was part of the journey.

But, how could we believe when they said we must 'spend' for it? The thing that we really needed would be 'given' to us if we knew who we were! 

Imagine the payment methods we tried ........

Owner was very happy, big crowd in the shop and lot of money

the manager has applied some crowd pulling strategies...

Owner was shocked another day, the shop is empty

people found that they were given cheap products, they just neglected the shop.

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Perhaps we have believed hero prophets without any reflection. 

Did they connect us with God, or ordered do's and don'ts that favours the god imageries they presented?

Did we search for what was worth, or stopped our search when we were given 'wonderful' offers?

If we realise we made wrong choice, why don't we dare to make the real choice, breaking our bonds with powerful pillars of the Malls, because it is not about finance, it is the worth of our life.

If these things were not appealing, let us just think that the above things are about others, not the prophets whom we might like. But let us also reflect, what is the usual emphasis our preferred prophet make?

A Malayalam version വിശ്വാസിയോ ആത്മീയ ഉപഭോക്താവോ?

Paid for Work, not for Life and Sacrifice

When we are in a in a business company or a corporate hospital, it is wise to recognise the impersonal and inhuman expectations . Prudence suggests that we do just what we are to do when it is a business system. We might develop a false humility where actually it may be a slavish submission from a situation where one feels 'no escape,' or helplessness. Business pays for our work, not for our life and sacrifice. We may be doing all good works for other people, even doing the works of others. Actually what we deny there is our own due for rest and leisure. Unless wisely we make sure of these, no system will ensure them for us. We need to do justice to ourselves too. Avoidance of it is not a sacrifice, but negligence.

As we deal with persons, a patient, colleague, or an assistant, as persons surely a human response is due.