Devali Service

Rema Undavia and Atul Rao

14 November 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

For this service the front of the sanctuary was decorated with images of Hindu deities: Ganesh, the elephant headed God; Lakshmi, the Goddess of prosperity; Krishna, the flute-playing incarnation of the God Vishnu; and the characters from The Ramayana story which is at the center of the Devali celebration – Rama, Sita, Laxman, and Hanuman. Elements of a typical Hindu worship ritual or puja, were arranged on a table in front of the deities: flowers, fruit, sweets, water, fire – all good gifts which are offered to the deities for their blessings.

An Introduction to Devali:

Rema Undavia

Devali is the Hindu Festival of Light. The celebration is in honor of the return of Rama and Sita to their kingdom after fourteen years of exile, a story from the beloved Indian epic, The Ramayana. It is also a celebration of light over darkness. During Devali people offer prayers to the Goddess Lakshmi and place rows of lights called diyas to welcome her into every home. The name Devali means lights. Devali marks the new year so people pay off debts, get new clothes, clean their houses, and make beautiful patterns with colored powders on the ground at their door, called rangoli, to receive the blessings of Lakshmi. Many times there are fireworks and parties and people give sweets for the new year to everyone.

PRAYER: Gayatri Mantra

O God,

thou art the giver of life,

the remover of pain and sorrow,

the bestower of happiness;

O Creator of the Universe,

may we receive your supreme,

sin-destroying light;

may you guide our intellect

in the right direction.

Amen

SERMON: Reflections on Devali

by Victoria Shepherd Rao

As you may already know, I lived in India for almost two years before coming to Austin. We lived in the extreme south of the subcontinent on the western shores in a small state called Kerala. Kerala is semi-tropical. Its a coastline state on the Arabian Sea. Very very verdant, there are coconut trees everywhere. Its a beautiful, hot, humid place to be. It is one of the most densely populated areas of India. This sari that I am wearing today is from Kerala and is typical of their traditional wear for the women – the very fine, unbleached cotton with gold threads woven through. This one was given to me by friends in Kerala and it has the motif of the lotus flower woven into it with the gold thread.

So, today I wanted to talk a little about how we can recognize God, sometimes even in the very foreign ways of other cultures, and also why we might consider joining in on the celebration of Devali this year, even if it is just to send our blessings along to our merrymaking neighbors.

I was very happy that I was invited by one of the book discussion groups in the last little while to visit with them as they read a book by Diana Eck, called Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras. Eck is a professor of Comparative Religion at Harvard University and I highly recommend this book. In it she talks about her experience of pluralism – that is this experience of recognizing God in the rituals and ways of others’ religions, and so by extension, recognizing the legitimacy and the validity of these other religions as paths to the numinous.

Eck was studying Indian pilgrimage when she went to the place where we lived in India, a city called Trivandrum, or Tiruvananthapuram. There is a major temple there, very very old, called Padmanabhaswamy Temple. I couldn’t pronounce it at all the whole time we were there. She went to this temple and she writes about it in this book. As a preface to that, I’ll just say that she is asserting that recognizing God is not an easy task, “It is not the simple affirmation that all these visions of God are the same. They are not.” Eck admits as a Christian that there are lots of places where she does not recognize God. But what I am going to read you now is about her visit to this temple where she attended a puja ceremony in the inner sanctum where the main deity is installed – in this case, an eighteen foot long statue of the God Vishnu reclining on a multi-headed snake. There are three doorways that open up from the inner sanctum and offer partial views to this long figure of the God. These are Eck’s words:

I lined up with the other women at the north door of the central shrine as the time approached for the arati, the evening offering of oil lamps. The drums began to beat and the bells clang; the reedy nadaswaram so typical of South Indian temples began to whine. The attendant drew back the bar and we all seemed to move en masse, propelled by the surge of a wave of bodies, into the inner sanctum. As the bells rang with an increasing sense of crescendo, suddenly the central pair of doors to Vishnu’s chamber were flung open to reveal part of the huge reclining image. Then the pair of doors to the left were flung open, revealing the upper portion of Vishnu; then the doors to the right, revealing his feet.

I could not see the image very well at all, but as the many different multi-wicked lamps of arati were waved to honor Vishnu, I could see the suggestion of his presence there. It was a sense of enormous presence, dimly seen, illumined for a moment by oil lamps and by the intermediary grace of the priest who moved the soft light before the long body of the Lord.

Seeing that tryptich in the temple in Trivandrum, with its three glimpses of a God larger than one could fully comprehend, was a moment of recognition for me, and the experience of God’s presence there was describable only as worship. My experience as a Christian was surely different from that of the Hindus pressed against me on either side. But we shared the sense of delight and revelation as the doors were opened, and perhaps some sense of both the majesty and mystery of the Divine. — Pg. 77,79 Encountering God

When I was in India and visiting many beautiful temples, I learned that my own way of worship is quite “western.” I have a strong preference for coming into a place where order prevails, where I can choose a seat, and I can sit still, and I can have some privacy in that sitting still. And I can have this privacy to pray or worship in the way that I need to and I can be happy because I have friends and familiar faces around me and they are doing the same thing too. At least I think they are. So, I had a hard time settling down when I went to visit temples and worship was very difficult for me to settle into there. But I still loved observing it.

Now this morning, you’ve seen pictures of the deities and all these elements of the puja. You’ve had sort of a smorgasbord, or a sampler of Hindu worship, and I just wanted to address the question you may be sitting on’ which is why?

How does foreign festival follow fascism? Who was here last week and heard Davidson preach on fascism? A lot of people. So, last week you heard your minister had a very heavy prophetic message for all of us. The times do seem bleak. This time after the election has half the country ebullient and half the country quite depressed. I have heard people say that they have felt hatred when they have seen bumper stickers for “the other guys” and there is a sense of worry, wondering how its going to be in another four years.

Veterans’ Day was also difficult. My son’s school had a whole week of celebration and it was a glorification of the armed services if not war. My son and all the kids in that school listened as their principal told them that all these armed services folk were “over there” fighting for their freedom. I hope, for the sake of all the people who have died, and had their lives torn apart, Iraqis and Americans, I hope there is some element of truth in that assertion. But the heaviness is real and the gloom is felt. So why are we celebrating Devali?

Devali is a new year celebration. It is a new year based on a lunar calendar, an ancient Indian calendar that is still used for worship, but we know about celebrating new years and maybe we need to be reminded of it. New years- its about hope. It is about letting go of those things you need to let go of from the last period of time and starting over. Celebrating with raised spirits or celebrating because we need to raise our spirits and be reminded of our highest aspirations. Right now, I think we all need some of that.

Devali is about light- candlelight, lamplight. The lights we put out to guide our loved ones home. The lights we put out to give cheer. We know about this too. It is Christmas lights- especially when they came out just once a year. They raise our spirits, don’t they?

Devali is also about the celebration of light over darkness. I think we could all use some stories about how that happens. In fact, I think we should all collect such stories and tell them to each other whenever we meet. The story of Rama and Sita, as it is told in the Ramayana, is the story of good overcoming evil but it is also a story that is filled with tragedy. So, even as we celebrate the light, let us not forget that tragedy is a part of life, and let’s try to not be too afraid of it.

In the Ramayana, Rama slays this terrible and powerful demon who has robbed the world, and beyond!, of all the riches and has enslaved countless people, besides kidnapping Rama’s wife, Sita. So Rama is up against a very formidable foe. He is terrifying and masterful and poor Rama is at his lowest point. He has a broken heart from missing his beloved wife and he’s sick with worry over her. But he has righteousness going for him, and he also has some very loyal friends. Fine possessions, really. His army is almost dead from the battles, but as it ends up, Rama’s arrow kills the demon and rescues the whole world from the darkness and enslavement which were mere reflections of this demon’s reign. It all disappears at once. Now, isn’t that a good story for us right now? It is a good story and it has been a good story for people to hear for all time and that’s why it has been told since at least the 4th century BCE all over India in every conceivable form of art.

Rama is the model being. He is dutiful to his parents, devoted to his brother, in love with his wife. He is not a fearless leader but he is a true leader. That is, he has the love and the trust of his followers. Don’t we need such a vision of leadership to capture the popular imagination of this world, this nation? It is not our story but it is a good story and maybe we could find some sustenance in it. I recommend the retelling of the Ramayana by R.K. Narayan for any who are undaunted by a five hundred page read.

Finally, when we lived in India, there was one small religious ritual that always touched me very deeply every time I saw it. We had a whole series of drivers when we were living there. They were all Hindu and they were all natives of Kerala. Some of them would have little deities on the dashboards of their cars and they would adorn them with flowers and sandlewood paste. And on many days, they would show that they had been to the temple with the sandlewood paste markings on their foreheads and necks. But the thing that would always touch me though was that when they were driving and we would go by a temple, no matter how big or how small, and some of the roadside shrines were very small, they would always keep what they were doing, keep watching the road, keep in conversation, but they would always touch their heart. They would very lightly take their hand and touch the tips of their fingers to their chests and this moved me. This moved me because what I saw was that there was always a part of their consciousness that stayed steadily on God, and remained with her or remembered to return to her. And that was more impressive to me than almost anything else. Just that gesture, that small private gesture, connecting the person to the source of all creation.

When we, whenever we, remember that we are connected to all living creation, we are. There may be no physical change caused by our remembering, there may be no metaphysical change. It is just a realization of connection that can reorient us. And we must remember to remember that we are connected, constantly, “prayer without ceasing” as St. Paul said. Every time we pass a temple, or a church, or the Town Lake, or a tree, let us remember to remember.

So let me draw the ends together. We seek to recognize God, or our highest truths, and we have our own familiar ways to do that. And when we see the different ways of others, sometimes we may find our own Gods, our own high truths, there in the ritual and worship of another tradition or culture. Staying open to this as a possibility is adopting a genuinely pluralistic attitude. Devali, with its affirmation of the power of goodness to prevail against great odds, is a celebration of a universal theme – the eternal hope in the capacity of the human soul to stand against tyranny. It is a theme that is relevant for us today. And so there is a good reason for us to devote our worship today to join Hindus in India, all over the world, and especially in our midst, in this celebration of light. So, Happy Devali.

Rema offers us this Sanskrit prayer as our benediction:

May God protect us.

May God nourish us.

May we work together with great vigor.

May we acquire brilliance from our study.

May we not hate each other.

Let there be peace.

Let there be peace, peace, peace.

Amen