ONCE GOD DECIDED TO GO TO A TEMPLE - A STORY ABOUT DEVOTION
There is a very nice story. Once God decided to go to a temple, which He rarely does. So He gave a dream to the priest. He said, “I’m coming into the temple tomorrow.” So the priest, for a change, started cleaning the temple.
If it’s a Hindu temple, it is a little messier than other temples. They throw water everywhere, prashad everywhere, here, there, and flowers will be lying down here and there and some dried flowers will be found. So he said, “Okay.” He kept cleaning. And he told all the people, “Today God is going to come to the temple.” Even the people who come to the temple did not believe. Say, “Oh, what has happened to the priest?” They felt sorry for him. “He may need a psychiatrist. Today he’s saying something very weird, like ‘God is going to come to the temple.'” They also had no faith.
Some people had compassion for him. Some people phoned a psychiatrist but somehow the priest made all the arrangements. He brought flowers. He arranged the temple. And then he waited, waited, waited, waited. After evening, five o’clock, six o’clock, seven o’clock…. There was another co-priest. He said, “Oh, you are crazy.” He started discouraging him. “What? What do you think? Has something gone wrong with you?” The first few moments people have some hope and then as time went by, everyone, even those one or two other crazy people who could accept his idea, also started discouraging him. And since everybody was so discouraging, he thought, “Maybe.” He started doubting himself. “Maybe I had a hallucination or an illusion. It’s not true.”
So he waited up till eleven o’clock. Somehow tried hard to keep awake, drank some Indian tea. So he kept awake up ’til twelve o’clock, then he fell asleep. And then in the middle of the night, he heard somebody knock on the door.
God is also afraid to come in the daytime. Somebody may arrest Him and punish Him, court-martial Him. “Why did You do this thing to me? Why did You do this thing to me?” A number of questions. So He preferred to come in the middle of the night. He heard a knock on the door. And then the priest wanted to get up and say,
“See, I hear a knock. Maybe God has come.” The co-priest who was with him there, sleeping in the same room, he just scolded him and made him go to bed again. Sleepy he said, “Just drop these funny ideas and go to sleep. If not, I’m going to call the mental hospital now. This is too much.”
So hearing this, the man slept. And in the morning when he opens the door of the temple, he finds the footprint and finds the wheel of the chariot. He was so sorry. God had really come and had really knocked and here he had missed.
He felt so sorry, so miserable. This is a nice story. That is what happens.
God is calling you every moment. He’s singing through you. He’s waking you up through those sounds of the birds, through that little, little animal, creature, its voice, see how beautiful, “Coo, coo,” something it says. It fills the whole atmosphere. If you listen to it, your heart starts glowing. Something happens in you. You start becoming more alive.
Love flows in your life. In the morning, have you heard the birds singing? He is singing in the voice of birds to you. He’s waking you up every morning. But we miss Him. We have missed in this crowd, in our mind, in our concepts, in our ideas.
We want God to fit into our costumes. Say, “You should come with such-and-such a costume.” Fit into our concepts, our ideas, what God should be doing. We are not ready to accept what is. In the very presence of a devotee…. See, God is omnipresent, but a devotee is rare.
Whether you want or not, God is all over. God is in the stone. God is in the flowers. God is in the garbage can. God is all over. But a devotee is not all over. So God runs behind His devotees. To God, devotees are very dear, so dear.
The ancestors rejoice when a person blossoms fully on this planet in Divine love. All the people who are dead and gone, their souls, their Beings, they are filled with joy and grace and happiness. They enjoy. Every drop of gratitude in you brings great joy to your ancestors.
Do you think about all those people who have gone? Your grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents. The whole family tree of yours rejoices when you experience, when you live this love, when you are a devotee. All of them are liberated. It says the seven generations in the past and the seven generations in the future get liberated, if you get liberated, if you become free.
- Gurudev Sri Sri Ravishankarji
