Being Jairus

It was Sunday and like any other Sunday, I was in the church attending the mass. I wasn’t too involved with the prayers and the hymns. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t pray much. Life, with all its heaviness, had thrown itself on me, and I was struggling to stand up. In my sub conscious mind, I was trying to seek answers, I was trying to reason why things were the way they were.  I was arguing with the rationality that we often turn to, when confounded. And as usual, it stared back at me, silent, when my ears ached for it to speak. The silence with which rationality defended itself against the barrage of questions I had, spoke for its non-existence, establishing its triviality in matters all important to me.

It’s a thing not to ask, and it is another thing to ask, and not be heard, to question and not be answered. It’s a thing to be ignorant and another thing to be aware of what you want and forced to face a situation where you are think you would never have what u want. Its like seeing yourself through the eyes of a blind man who gets his vision, one day, and as he catches a glimpse of things around him, wonder struck by the marvels of the universe, his vision is seized away. In the “Cold Mountain”, Inman says, “You are mighty calm. Especially for a man that most would say has taken the little end of the horn all his life” to which, the blind man replies, “ It might have been worse had I ever been given a glimpse of the world and then lost it”. When something like this happens, you are forced to reconcile your present with a past that never came and if it indeed did come, it came just to go away. You need to placate mesmerizing hopes and colorful dreams with the realistic grey shades of life.

As I kept traversing through the futility of this whole exercise, feeling disoriented, the sermon started. It was the Gospel of Mark, the chapter on Jairus’s daughter and the woman who touched Jesus’s cloak. Jairus was an official and in those days, officials was treated with high regard and respect, and he was like a king who could order around, have things and luxuries at the snap of his finger. This man had a 12 year old daughter who got seriously ill. He goes to see Jesus, and when he sees him, he throws himself down at Jesus’s feet and begs him earnestly, “My daughter is very ill, please come and lay your hands on her so that she gets well.  After a while some messengers come from Jairus’ house and tell him, “Your daughter has died, why bother the teacher any longer?’ Jesus replies, Don’t be afraid, only believe”. The story goes on further to tell that Jesus goes to his house and when everyone is wailing and crying at the child’s death, he is subjected to ridicule when he says that the child is only sleeping. He then, places his hand on the child and the child comes back to life.

I am not going to write what the priest explained, but as he progressed on the story, I was struck by a sentence that relatively went unnoticed, and it was this “Your daughter has died, why bother the teacher any longer?” The answers lay there, the vivification of the turbulence lay in the mediocrity of those words. I do not intend to bring about any religious sentiments or explanations, I only attempt to probe a bit deeper in to the questions that most of us face at some point in life. When all the doors close and even when u know that when one door closes, several others will open, its hard to convince yourself, to look beyond the door, you always wanted to enter.

Knowledge, awareness, realization, hope….All of this is interlinked. When u become aware of what you want, you ask and when you ask, you ask with a hope of getting what you ask for. And when what you ask, stems from a deeper awareness and self-realization, the materiality of hopes become profound. Very often, we come across situations that look like a dead end, where no stretch or turn looks likely.  Most of us would hope and believe and have positive affirmations of our thoughts and beliefs, but when we find ourselves in situations that contravene the act of hoping, we feel “necessitated" to give up. Rationality exploits the objectivity of hoping and we are forced to act "practically". If I had to draw parallel to the story above, we would be like a Jairus, who believed, who came with a heart full of hope, the only difference being, when faced with a reality (in this case, death) that contradicts the purpose of asking, we would retreat ,self-defeated.  Questions like these would plague us “why did we not have our hopes fulfilled even when we believed”? Why did things go wrong? The how is not important, but the “why” needs to be answered? Else, we would float, like a log, in the shallow river of reasons that cannot be justified by a rational mind.

Finally, realization struck, and strangely, i found my answers in a sentence that appeared no more than a conversational statement. Like a Dan Brown Novel, the mystery revealed itself to me.

You are defeated by your hopes only when you stop hoping, the act of hoping is a constant state of the mind, and when the mind gives up, hope cannot sustain. It takes courage to believe that things that look like it is the end of all, is not really the end after all.

It takes a lot of grit to stand up and say, No matter what, there is still room for hope, no matter how bleak the road of my journey looks to be, someday, i will see the light.

It is about "Being Jairus". He believed, he hoped, and continued to hope, even when death hovered around his daughter. Death of his daughter didn’t deter him, even when the purpose of hoping was to save his daughter from this very "death". Jairus was bold enough to face the news of his daughter's death, bolder not to let death shake his hopes. The story would not have seen the end it saw, had he just left the place, cursing himself, or blaming his ill fortune.

In simple words, the mantra is to believe, have faith and hope even when the intent of hope itself looks defeated.

The universe is complicated and a mortal's desire to unravel it pales in comparison to the intricacy and mystification of the the universe.

I feel hope is nothing short of a miracle. It is about believing something to happen only because you believe. It is not about seeing, or understanding or deciphering, only realizing what you want and how badly you want. It’s about waiting for something to happen in spite of all odds that laugh at your face. It’s being stupid enough to believe something would happen only because you hoped for it to happen. It’s about insanely believing something to happen, against all the laws of rationality, all the probabilities of practicality. It’s about seeing a beginning from an end, a beginning of a rejuvenated, stronger hope, faith and belief.

When I turn away,
Dejected and sad
You are still there, waiting
For me to come back

To collect and unfold
Wonders that you could do
To tell me the tales of the dreams
That I choose to live

For you can work
Only when I allow you to
I am where I want to be
For u walk, my side, as long as I let u be

This is my ode to the greatest miracle of Life.