With this post, we’re taking the Mormon Lectionary Project into new territory, using the genre to write about figures without days in the Common Lectionary. Most of these will be LDS, but Gandhi comes first because of his death date, 30 Jan. 1948. Just as we’ve been adding LDS scripture to previous posts, it seemed appropriate to include the Qur’an and the Bhagavad Gita in this one.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Dan. 6:10-11, Matt. 5:38-42, 1 Cor. 13, Qur’an 4:256-57, Bhagavad Gita 2:55-57, Alma 24:20-27
Qur’an 4:256-57 – “There is no compulsion in religion: true guidance has become distinct from error, so whoever rejects false gods and believes in God has grasped the firmest hand-hold, one that will never break. God is all hearing and all knowing. God is the ally of those who believe: He brings them out of the depths of darkness and into the light.” (trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, Oxford World Classics, 2004)
Bhagavad Gita 2:55-57 – “They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them, who have renounced every selfish desire and sense craving tormenting the heart. Neither agitated by grief nor hankering after pleasure, they live free from lust and fear and anger. Established in meditation, they are truly wise. Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are neither elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad. Such are the seers.” (trans. Eknath Easwaran, Nilgiri Press, 1985)
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The Collect: O God, creator of all humanity, who lookest upon us thy children in our love of strife and division, bless us that we might see thy image in ourselves and in others, especially our enemies; and bless us that, so seeing, we might grow strong and thereby reconcile our manifold oppression and wrong through the all-encompassing love by which thou thyself art One God. Amen.
Life is hard. At a stake conference a few years back, I heard Pres. Eyring speak words to the effect that if you feel like you’re swimming upstream, you’re on the right path. Those words have encouraged me many times since, prompting me when life gets difficult in ways large or small to tack into the wind and keep on sailing.
This idea has a potential problem, though, in that it can quickly spill over into militaristic metaphor. Sailing into the wind risks being transmuted into swashbuckling. What’s the difference, and why does it matter? Why care what metaphor we use if enduring to the end is the outcome?
As Gandhi knew, something very fundamental is at stake here, and that is our valuation of life. Not just the lives of other people—though certainly that—but the messy complexity of our mortal existence itself. Do we love mortality, with all its challenges and flaws, or do we see it as an enemy to be subdued? How do we love something that often treats us so brutally, and that will kill us in the end?
More pointedly, can we really love God if we do not love this life, if we see mortality as something to be borne, simply gotten through, or conquered outright, rather than as a gift of God, a vital piece of the great plan of happiness? In the Church we use “the world” as a term of opprobrium, a catch-all for our perceptions of opposition and oppression. But how are we to handle opposition and oppression if we wish to be more like God, who so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten Son (John 3:16)?
I suspect that Gandhi would have appreciated the story in Alma 24 of the Lamanite converts who knelt to be slaughtered rather than raise weapons against those whom the text terms “their brethren.” Certainly the situation was oppressive, but this was the only way they knew how to face oppression while remaining true to the values of a recently embraced Gospel. And their dignified deaths struck many of the murderers to the quick, with the result that more came to God that day than went to God.
Nonviolence sounds like weakness, but as this episode illustrates, Gandhian satyagraha is a hard-edged doctrine. It does not mean going with the flow, letting evil have its way. Rather, it means meeting evil with love. This may sound all Kumbaya—but tell that to the more than a thousand Lamanites who preferred dying to killing.
The story of Daniel, who continued to pray even after he knew that the decree forbidding it had been signed, does reveal continued devotion to God, but it also tells us something about his attitudes to other people, especially those who use power in acts of targeted oppression. Daniel went to his window in order to pray, not to rail against the new law or those who had effected it. To do that would have been to become a politician among politicians, just another participant in the Machiavellian ordo saeclorum.
By praying, Daniel instead acted in accordance with the Gita, detaching himself from fear and anger. His was an act of bhakti yoga—devotion through love. Doing this connected him to the universal Self that pervades Creation. Having abandoned fear, the choice of whether to fear God or fear man vanishes. There is no similar Manichaean choice in love: if we love God, we will love each other, and if we love each other, we will love God.
Or at least we should. Love sounds so easy, but when someone strikes your cheek, will you let him strike the other? Will you carry the military gear used to oppress you for a second mile beyond the compulsory first? How will you talk to the soldier who is complicit in making your life hell? Such questions reduce so many easy words of love to tinkling brass and clanging cymbals.
It seems that unless we sail the rough waters of loving others, we cannot really love ourselves. Our dignity as children of God comes at the price of loving our enemies. Daniel knew this. By praying in visible defiance of an unjust decree, he retained a dignity for which there would have been no room if he had given his heart over to hatred. As the main character Kanji says in Akira Kurosawa’s masterwork Ikiru, “I can’t afford to hate people. I don’t have that kind of time.”
Gandhi knew this, too (which explains his love for the Daniel story), but he also knew that choosing dignity isn’t always in our nature. Sometimes we prefer the rousing comforts of nationalism, or whatever other -ism gets our blood pumping. No wonder an -ism killed him, in a Hindu nationalist’s bullet. We like -isms because they (falsely) promise to preserve our dignity against existential threats, but really the existential threat to human dignity lies in our refusing to treat our enemies as though they have it—which they do. There is nothing more powerful in them to which we might appeal.
Gandhi’s favorite Bible verse was Philippians 4:6: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (NRSV). This doesn’t mean pretending that threats are mere phantasms of our perception. The Lamanite martyrs chose to love their enemies, but that didn’t make the enemies go away. Rather, it means acknowledging the existence of those who mean us harm, and loving them anyway. It means not worrying that evil might win, because love is more powerful. The weak things of the world will overcome. It is a sea that only those who are rooted in God, their minds still as the flame of a candle in a windless place, can sail, and even then it is hard not to founder.
In remembering Gandhi today, then, let us tack once more into the wind and open our hearts wide as eternity to love the world, no matter how difficult life in it too often is. For it is only in doing so that we can grasp “the firmest hand-hold, one that will never break.”
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To keep this appropriately Anglican, here is the choir of King’s College Cambridge singing one of Gandhi’s favorite hymns, Isaac Watts’ “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”
And then there’s this beautiful Shaker hymn. (HT Kristine—who else?)
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Note: I drew on this article in learning about Gandhi’s use of the Bible.
By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog 
This really enriched my soul this morning. Thank you for putting the effort into creating this one from scratch, as the first official Mormon Lectionary Project departure from the Common Lectionary.
Your application of Gandhi’s experience, in connection with uniquely Mormon scriptural insights, makes a real contribution here. I especially appreciated your evaluation of Daniel’s rejection of the temptation to become a politician among politicians, and of the -isms that poison religious devotion, in our Church as much as in any other religion.
Thanks, John. I owe the reading of Daniel to learning that Gandhi loved that story. One of the advantages of the lectionary format is the way that it invites me to look at familiar stories from a new angle.
Beautiful post. I listened to the songs while I read it, and that made it even better, if such a thing is possible. Thank you.
Jason, this is deeply moving. Thank you very much.
This. This!
As the wife of an Indian man, a person who has always felt that the people who best understood the gospel of Jesus Christ in all of scripture are the Anti-Nephi-Lehies of Alma 24, and a Latter-day Saint who is troubled by militaristic metaphors in our scripture, hymns, and rhetoric, dhanyavad.
Namaste, bhaiya-ji.
“can we really love God if we do not love this life”
A lot of Christians would say yes, especially Medieval Catholics. Denial of self, viewing this life as a transitory burden — these are motifs that run pretty deeply in certain strains of worship. You can even see this in our own scriptures — see for examples Jacob’s last chapter in the Book of Mormon. It is problematic, I think, to wander too far in either direction: whether to be convinced that life is little more than a necessary burden, or conversely, to be so focused on the here-and-now to forget that there are greater things to come. But — excellent post, and excellent ideas, and I do not mean to detract from them.
Leona: thank you, and namaste. (Also: J. and lisajha.)
Steve: Well, yes, the post is quite at odds with a broad swath of Christian asceticism–but then the whole series is premised in High Church Anglicanism, which generally avoids accusations of asceticism.
Beyond that, as I understand the Bhagavad Gita–which was Gandhi’s foundational text, however much he loved the Bible and the Qur’an–it’s suggesting that the dichotomy between “[being] convinced that life is little more than a necessary burden, or conversely, [being] so focused on the here-and-now to forget that there are greater things to come” can be a false one. The Gita opens up the possibility that everyday life is suffused with God, if we will but perceive it so, such that attention to small quotidian things is precisely a gateway to awareness of the divine big picture, although the extremes you mention might represent different ways of missing the point, thereby staying trapped in the cycle of samsara. Gandhi was an ascetic in his own way, of course, but having too much stuff can get in the way of appreciating simple, everyday life.
Adam Miller seems to be thinking in a similar vein when he talks about grace in Rube Goldberg Machines. If I’m going to invoke Miller, though, I also have to admit that this post is just another Rube Goldberg Machine, written basically for fun and therefore not to be taken too seriously. I mean, blogging is gratuitous, right? Isn’t that part of what makes it great? And commenting is fun because we get to try and see what happens if we deflect the flying hamster (which was launched after the deflating balloon released a lever) from ever reaching the net in that lacrosse stick over there. (Like when Armand Mauss did a Mr.-Miyagi chopstick-grab of the hamster on the Sherlock Holmes post the other day.)
All of this is to say that I see some value in the Gita’s suggestion that we should be detached from the results of our actions. I write in full conviction, but I’m not terribly invested in being right–or at least I hope I’m not.
“grab of the hamster”
Explain.
That would be when he pointed out that both WVS and Ardis had been scooped on their Doyle-Mormonism stuff while admitting to his own grumpiness–as though the post were just humming happily along until he jumped in and said “Nope.” It was a beautiful moment. And Kristine, with her “I <3 grumpy Armand" comment, seemed to appreciate what had just happened, too. All due sympathy to WVS and Ardis, of course.
Or maybe it’s just my overfondness for elaborate metaphor, I dunno.
This post has inspired peace and magnanimity in my soul, where prior was a bleak wasteland, so go ahead and indulge in your fondnessess and gratuitous blogging, Jason K. I’ll happily be among the reading masses.
And please, what can I do to encourage more music like the above as accompaniment?
Thank you, MDearest. We intend to make music a regular part of these Lectionary posts, and Kristine has of course been posting fantastic music to BCC for a long time, so you might look back over her posts whenever you need a musical pick-me-up (be sure to read the posts, too, as she’s excellent on the peace and magnanimity front).
I have been a long time lurker and I just wanted to thank you for these kinds of posts. I send a lot of my struggling friends to your blog so they can see there are many who are open minded in the church. I also thank you for writing inspiring words. I hope to comment more but anyway thanks.
You’re welcome. The most that we can hope is to make room for those who feel shut out. That these posts might be serving this cause makes me very happy.