God As Physician

 

God As Physician

Personally, I believe in the efficacy of both medication and meditation.  My conviction is that a sick body needs quick and effective medication to get rid of any organic malady and resume its normal functionality. There are multiple forms of medication, and one has to choose from amongst them according to one’s individual constitution. Medicine-less treatments like fasting, relaxing, walking, talking, singing, dancing, reading, writing, travelling, socialising is also effective in many cases.  Love, with all its varieties, is another drugless healer. Religiously, confession of one’s guilts and seeking pardon by repentance, purifies the mind which, in turn, throws out the physical causes of illness.

According to Lord Buddha the path that leads to the annihilation of suffering consists of right views, right decision right speech, right action, right living, right struggling, right thoughts and right meditation.            

I am motivated in choosing the title of this write-up by a song of Mira Bai, a 16^th century mystic poet and Bhakti saint of Rajasthan. She was a most passionate devotee of Lord Krishna and had decided to remain so since her very childhood. However, her boundless love for her divine Lord, had also wounded her heart on which no other physician than God Himself could put the soothing balm.

Her song, as translated into English (1935) , by a Gita Press author, Bankey Behari   reads as follows:

“O friend, I am mad with love: none knows my anguish. There, on the point of the pike lies my bed, how can I sleep! The bed of the Dear One is spread in heaven, how can I meet Him. Only he who has had a wound can understand the condition of the wounded, or else who has dealt the blow. Only a jeweller can know the secrets of a jeweller or else the jewel itself. Smitten with pain I roam about the forest, physician I have found none. The pain of Mira will vanish, O Lord when You act the physician.”  

My personal belief is that during any period of illness, more so in the current period of Corona pandemic, medication should be strengthened by meditation to achieve perfect   and speedy. After all, we are the children of God, and who, better than He, can relieve us from our physical, mental and emotional sufferings.

The very word ‘God’. says America clergy Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87), suggests care, kindness, goodness; and the idea of God in His infinity, is infinite care, infinite kindness, infinite goodness. -----We give God the name of good: it is only by shortening it that it becomes God.             

Let us, therefore, remember God, both when we are sick and healthy

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29^th September 2020                                                              G.R.Kanwal