Ganesh Chaturthi and the Universal Call of the Divine

“Ganpati Bappa Morya!” “Jai Ganesh, Jai Ganesh Deva!” The voices of young Indian students filled the hall at Boston University during a Ganesh Chaturthi celebration. Boys and girls had gathered in substantial numbers, chanting enthusiastically and celebrating together. I happened to be visiting Boston at the time and had been invited to speak at the event, which had been organized by a Hindu student group. For nearly three decades as a monk and traveling speaker, I have spoken to large gatherings of young people and participated in many energetic youth kirtans. So neither the size of the gathering nor the enthusiasm of the chanting was particularly new to me. What struck me was the spontaneity. In ISKCON, youth outreach is often systematic and intentional. Devotees reach out to young people, develop relationships with them, discuss spiritual topics with them, answer their questions, and gradually many become inspired to explore spiritual life more seriously. But here was something different. These students had come together voluntarily. Nobody seemed to have needed to persuade them to attend a devotional gathering or celebrate a sacred festival. Looking around the hall at so many young faces, hearing their voices rise together in chants familiar from India, I was struck by what had brought them there. Something already within them—or within the culture they had inherited—had drawn them together. Far from home and with the freedom to spend their evening exploring Boston or enjoying its nightlife, they didn’t have to be there. And yet there they were, enthusiastically chanting the names of Ganesh. I found myself wondering: What are they experiencing? What is drawing them? That question stayed somewhere within me. A Joy I Had Almost Forgotten I come from a Brahmin family in Maharashtra, where Ganesh worship was a natural part of the religious and cultural atmosphere in which I grew up. One particular scene from my childhood came back to me. It was Ganesh Chaturthi. My mother had cooked modaks and carefully arranged the offering before the altar. My father was performing the arati. My younger brother, about two and a half years old, was sitting on a nearby chair and clapping. And all of us were singing the praises of Ganesh together. What came back to me was not merely the visual scene. It was the feeling. There was a simplicity to that devotion, and there was joy in it. I remember experiencing something peaceful, happy, and somehow higher than ordinary life. Perhaps what I experienced in my childhood was not entirely different from what those students in Boston were experiencing. Their circumstances were different, and their individual feelings may have varied, but something had brought them together in a sacred atmosphere. As I pondered what that experience might have been, my mind went to the words of Bhagavad-gita 7.21. Krishna states that when a person desires to worship a particular divine form with faith, He makes that person’s faith steady. Even if the seeker’s conception of the Divine is not precise, Krishna is not uninvolved in that person’s evolving faith or personal spiritual journey. Those words help me look back at my own journey with *greater appreciation*. Through the religious forms that were natural to my family and culture, I was beginning to experience the call of the Divine even when I knew little of the philosophy of the Bhagavad-gita. I was learning that there is something beyond the visible and the mundane—something sacred that can be approached with reverence, celebrated with song, and experienced with joy. Years later, my spiritual search has taken me further. It has brought me to Krishna, and Krishna bhakti has become not merely one part of my life but its organizing center. Looking back now, I can see those childhood experiences differently from how I could have understood them then. What was simply a natural and joyful part of family and religious life for me as a child, I can now recognize as part of my spiritual preparation. In ways I could not then have understood, the Divine was calling me through those earlier experiences, preparing me for the path that would eventually become my own. Beyond the Specifics to the Universal That childhood memory helped me understand what had touched me about those students in Boston. Their experience was surely not identical to mine. I could not know what was happening in each person’s heart. For some, the festival may have evoked home and family. For others, Indian culture and community. For still others, perhaps a more explicit experience of devotion. Yet beneath those different experiences, I sensed something universal. The Divine calls us, often through what is already familiar to us, and something within the human heart responds. That calling and responding can begin in many ways. Sometimes it begins through philosophy. Sometimes through a spiritual teacher. Sometimes through an existential crisis or a deep inner longing. And sometimes it begins much more simply—through what our parents did at home, through a festival we loved as children, through sweets arranged before an altar, through the flame of an arati lamp, through a two-year-old clapping, or through a song that somehow made the world feel sacred. The specifics matter. They shape our understanding, our practices, and ultimately the direction in which our spiritual journey develops. My own journey has led me to Krishna, and faithfulness to Krishna bhakti is precious to me. But faithfulness to where I have arrived need not make me unappreciative of the ways in which the Divine may have accompanied me on the journey there. Arjuna expresses something of the limits of our conceptions when he tells Krishna, “You alone know yourself by yourself” (Bhagavad-gita 10.15). The Divine is always greater than my ability to conceive Him. Perhaps that is what the students in Boston, the Ganesh worship I encountered in Toronto, and my childhood memory in Maharashtra have together reminded me. I don’t have to choose between openness and faithfulness. I can be open enough to appreciate the many ways in which people turn toward the Divine, and the many ways in which the Divine may be drawing them onward. And I can be faithful enough to keep walking deeply and wholeheartedly on the path through which Krishna has drawn me toward Himself. I pray: “My dear Lord, grant me openness and faithfulness: openness to appreciate the many ways in which You reach out to human hearts and they reach out toward You; openness to the universal presence of Your call, and faithfulness to the specific path through which You have drawn my heart to You. May appreciation of the many ways You call us humans deepen, not dilute, my dedication to following Your calling in my life.” *** 10.15 Indeed, You alone know Yourself by Your own internal potency, O Supreme Person, origin of all, Lord of all beings, God of gods, Lord of the universe! The post Ganesh Chaturthi and the Universal Call of the Divine first appeared on Chaitanya Charan Das, Bhagavad Gita ISKCON .