“I bow to God, Who lives in this world with us; whoever calls Him by any name, by that name does He come.”1
This line is from William Buck’s rendering of Mahabharata. I would probably rephrase it slightly – Whoever calls Spirit by any name, by that name does Spirit come.
I wonder whether Buck understood the significance of what he wrote, when he condensed his text into that brief line. It is surprisingly profound. It explains much.
Whatever we give our hearts to, is our God. What we attend to, what we spend our time, our resources, our energy on – that is the God we believe in and truly worship. And that is the God that replies to us. This may not be the God we want to believe in, or the one we profess. But it is the God we truly worship.
This, more than anything, is why we so often think we fail to hear from God. It’s not that God is not answering. It is that we’re not recognizing which gods we’re addressing. We’re always hearing back from the gods we worship, but these gods are not often the ones we think we worship. Therein lies the problem.
The God we imagine, the one we go to church to worship, or the one we pray to or affirm during our daily practice – this is our ideal, the God we imagine we ought to be worshiping. This is the one we are hoping will answer us, but it’s not the one we’re talking to. The gods we are talking to are the ones we’re constantly thinking about, striving for, all day long, and not just for a few hours a week. We may go to a church and spend an hour or two trying to have uplifting, holy thoughts. We may spend some time each day meditating, praying, affirming, or otherwise communing with an idealized God of some sort. But the rest of the time we are giving ourselves to lesser gods, and it is from those that we hear.
We want to hear from our idealized God, and of course are disappointed when this doesn’t happen. We often conclude that God doesn’t speak to us, or that He is capricious about it. Not so. We are hearing from our gods, from those lesser deities to which we give the bulk of our attention.
So we may want to worship the idealized God who is the source of all good things; but in the meantime we’ve got a job, we have a family, we want security, food, pleasure. We may be running after money, thinking that will bring us happiness; or it may be pleasure, drugs, gambling, sports, etc. Usually it is several things that claim our attention, a combination of activities we engage in. These are the things that speak to us, then.
It’s not wrong to seek an idealized God, or to try to worship it. Doing so may lead us to elevate our lives, to change our viewpoints. Seeking this impossible goal is what leads us to make progress. We need to keep in mind, though, that the ideal is not what we’re going to hear from. It is not what speaks to us. What speaks to us is what we speak to.
1 Mahabharata, William Buck, Translator. Meridian, New York, 1987