Claudia Martins Gaspar

Sikhs have always known the power and the purpose of prayer. People are now awakening to the fact that our relationship with God sometimes has been a bit too cold and a bit too domesticated; we yearn to sing to God, to let our souls fly flee. And we feel that through prayer we can rediscover our inner selves, and tie ourselves to the Guru.

There is nothing surprising about this. Prayer is an irrepressible expression of the human spirit, and the Sikhs appeared on the historical scene as a praying people. Yes, we know how hard prayer is. We know that moments of true inspiration are rare; we do not expect that with every Shabad Keertan we will leave the Gurdwara personally transformed. But we do expect that our prayers will make us feel closer to God.

We need a Sikhism that welcomes exuberance and song as well as ideas, and celebrates the cerebral but still pulsates with emotion. Sikhism has always prescribed two paths to tradition: the path of mind and the path of the heart. Studying the Sri Guru Granth Sahib is the way of thinking, and prayer the way of feeling. And even though these paths are parallel, Sikhs have always been required to walk them both. Therefore, a Sikh must be both a studying Sikh and a praying Sikh. We must make our Gurdwaras worship our foremost concern.

The prayer revolution will require an accurate understanding of what Sikhs mean by tradition. The heart of the prayer tradition is the order, language and raag that has become standardized over the last five centuries. However, everything else - the chanting styles, the music, the aesthetics - has been ever-changing. In fact, much of what is referred to as tradition is a reflection of 16th through 19th-century Punjabi culture.

Communal prayer requires recognizable constants that bind a worshiper to another worshiper and a congregation to another congregation, but Sikhs need not be bound by cultural precedents that no longer resonate. And just as people reject nostalgia disguised as tradition, so too do many Sikhs reject contemporary worship that is faddish or trendy. There is no Sikh worship without age-old prayers and time-honored chants. In short, there is no need to choose between "traditional" worship and the "contemporary" worship. Sikhism must insist on the best of both worlds: continuity with tradition and constant reformation.

Finding the right balance requires both innovators and conservators - those who push the envelope and those who hold back. At this moment, it is the innovators we need most. Sikh leaders must have the freedom to develop new forms of communal prayer.

What will be the single most important key to the success or failure of communal prayer? It is music. Sikh leaders must invite people to join in song because singing makes a person feel welcome, accepted and empowered. Ritual music touches us in a way that words cannot. Music transforms the ordinary into the miraculous, and an individual into a community oriented person. Music will enable overly intellectual Sikhs to rest their minds and open their hearts.

All Sikhs must join together in creating a Gurdwara that is a center of the Sikh life in all its sweep and scope, but that is first and foremost a center of worship, reverence and awe. And we should do this because absence of a meaningful prayer represents a life without God.

Voice of God

God is revealed to us in the Aad Guru Granth Sahib. And we, who are reflections and part of God, are therefore revealed to ourselves. This theme is picked up in a variety of ways by Sikh tradition and its contemporary interpreters.

We often use sensory metaphors to convey moments of understanding, apprehension and connection. For instance, people remark: "I see what you're saying" or "I can hear your exhaustion" or "That speech really touched me" or "It was the sweet smell of success" or "The finish line was so close, I could taste it." Humans can "see" God's presence and hear the divine voice in the same way by experiencing the presence and the truth of that Voice within ourselves. Those who got this experience could see, taste, hear, smell, and feel the Divine Truth. They can understand God with all that they have.

Personal revelations come to us in the same mysterious way. In moments of Truth, we experience ourselves simultaneously receiving a gift from outside and discovering something that always has been a part of us. The Truth of God's revelation is experienced like the Truth of falling in love, like the Truth of a breakthrough moment in therapy, like the Truth of figuring out what we're meant to do with our lives.

All are gifts received from outside which have, paradoxically, been waiting to be discovered within us all along. People who recognize this Truth do not need “to believe” in the Divine Will (Hukam) because they have experienced it. They already recognize the Truth.

With the ten Gurus, the voice of Akal Purakh came to bear the voice of God within them. We, who believe that revelation is not a onetime event but an ongoing process, must, with fear and trembling, with deep humility, and "holy audacity," allow our voices too to become bearers of that voice. The sound of Waheguru is a 'great voice that never ceased.' Today it needs us to be its trumpet.

Finding the correct combination of humility and "holy audacity", necessary in becoming God’s instrument (trumpets), may be the central task and the most difficult challenge of religious living. But how desperately the world (and God) needs us to bear this responsibility is our blessed gift in life. This is the revelation.

The way of God

The first thing is that God is the first being; and that He existed before anything or anyone else, and will continue to exist after everything and everyone is gone.

Were we to someway or another, appear out of nowhere and come upon reality for the first time, the first being we would notice is the most obvious and preeminent Being, simply because we hadn't yet had a chance to take His presence for granted, and hadn't yet been waylaid by all the other things that would have us overlook Him.

God will eventually prove to have existed before everything else. But it will come later, after we'd have withstood the shock and stun of catching sight of His presence in the first place. Again, we're also told that He will continue to exist after everything and everyone is gone. Why would we need to know this?

God's ineffable presence defines reality and gives it it's heft. And that, by being the first and last, He is the better part of the whole. God - and God alone - created and maintains everything. Simply put, it comes to deny the power of anything or anyone to truly and utterly create out of the blue (despite our own personal fantasies and vainglory). And it comes to underscore the fact that God not only created us, he also maintains our beings moment by moment.

The fundamental purpose of life is the search for truth. Although not encouraging proselytism, Sikhs have the universal commitment of propagating the Truth contained in the Sri Guru Granth Sahib.

Why not bring its sublime message to Brazil, a country with 165 million people? Like in other countries, we too are living in a growing violent society where the hope horizons are going far away.

I believe the Sikh community can start this project, of sharing the Guru's message with the people of my country, even in the midst of perceived difficulties. The effort will bear fruit largely because it is my belief that the Guru Granth Sahib has the potential to transform people and society, promote peace, justice, and inner enlightenment.


Copyright ©2002 Claudia Martins Gaspar. About the author