Vacation Darsan Stumbling around back home, jet-laggy and filled with images from the last two weeks in Europe. Paris, London, Edinburgh. Guiding our children (and ourselves) through history, hurtling back centuries as we turn every corner. In California, things are old at 70 years. At Stonehenge, the birth of Jesus Christ is yesterday. My professor Diana Eck wrote a book about darsan, an idea I hold close to my heart. In her book Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, she explains: A common sight in India is a crowd of people gathered in the courtyard of a temple or at a doorway of a streetside shrine for the darsan of the deity. Darsan means seeing. In the Hindu ritual tradition it refers especially to religious seeing, or the visual perception of the sacred. When Hindus go to a temple, they do not commonly say, I am going to worship, but rather, I am going for darsan. I am a Hindu at heart. I look for the divine everywhere, or at least try to stay open to it (if I can crawl out of my petty, crabby, menopausal brain long enough.) I am the child of a Jewish mother who was, along with her agnostic Anglo husband, baptized at age 30. I was raised in a Congregational Church, majored in Indo-Tibetan religion in college, and now attend an Episcopal church. I follow the bread crumbs of enlightenment in whatever form they may appear. I’m either flaky or extremely open-minded. So here are some scribbles, written before the memories disappear, of some moments of darsan in unlikely places.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 19:15:57 +0000
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