Saturday, December 29th, 2012

Another Wedding

Markham, Ontario

Another wedding got underway; this time it was a young couple, a Croatian fellow and his young bride Pranesvari from India. We wish them well.

As a service I am asked to say a few words at such a ceremony. I always feel empowered with a Gita in my hands when I open to a page of magic and wonder. The verse is sometimes random that I select, but this morning at this wedding, I was choosy, being inspired by the early reading from verse 7.14.

Daivi hi esa guna mayi… explains that the three modes of material nature as goodness, passion and ignorance are categorized as the divine energy of God. They are not listed as mundane, but as divine. This struck a curiosity in me upon my first reading and I’m sure it does others who read this passage. It’s easy to comprehend that a good walk is divine, but how can death, a feature of this world, be divine? Can a heap of garbage be divine? Can a devastating war be considered divine? Ultimately, yes, because the source of this all is divine. There is something sacred behind everything. This concept is a very interesting one to explore.

Of course, the wedding is a divine or spiritual event, specifically, because Krishna is the chosen center of this relationship (and by now I guess you could pick up that we are using the word divine as a synonym to the word spiritual).

With this logic “everything is divine because it’s source is divine”, Can we then label everything as such? In one sense you can, because what is not linked to the absolute? Perhaps we can settle for the terminology, ‘divine’ and ‘more divine’.

For the evening I partook in another more divine event – a satsang, gathering of chanters in Markham, in the home of Dwarka. What I like about the lead singer Ajamil is that he keeps to traditional melodies. That’s a rarity. These melodies invoke the right mood or spirit.

8 KM