When
God manifests himself through any material manifestation, the divinity
of that manifestation is demonstrated not by its potency to
break material laws, but by its potency to bring about spiritual
transformation among the sincerely devoted.
To understand this,
let’s consider another material manifestation of the divine: the
scriptures. Many of those who object to the practice of Deity worship
still consider the scriptures sacred. Frequently they even worship those
sacred texts as if they were divine. Yet can those sacred texts not be
torn or burnt by the faithless? Obviously, they can be. But does this
make them any less divine? Not at all. The divinity of these texts
cannot be experienced by defiantly tearing them apart to check whether
they miraculously save themselves. Their divinity can be experienced
only by reading them with a devotional service attitude. The same
principle applies to the Deity.
Can the Deity not wave away the
fly? He can, but he doesn’t. Why? Because the Lord does not manifest
himself as the Deity to prove his omnipotence. In fact, the Lord
generally does not manifest his omnipotence in this material world. Why?
Because this world is provided as a facility for those souls who want
to enjoy separate from God. All of us were originally with God in his
eternal spiritual kingdom, but we wanted to enjoy by imitating
him instead of serving him. By this desire, we exiled ourselves to
this material
world to play out our fantasies of becoming the best –
of becoming God. But God being supreme is eternally the best in
everything. If he were to manifest his omnipotence in this word, then
nobody would have any chance to play God. So, he graciously facilitates
our desire to enjoy separate from him by not directly manifesting his
omnipotence here.
God waits patiently for us to learn our
lessons. He wants us to realize for ourselves that, no matter how big
and powerful we become, we can never be happy without loving him. So, he
allows us to love whatever we want. But he also tirelessly waits for us
to turn to him. As soon as we get the slightest such desire, He starts
providing us facilities to love him again. One of the most important of
such facilities is the Deity. The Deity offers us what no other divine
manifestation does: the opportunity to serve God personally by
beholding, bowing down, praying, touching, bathing, dressing,
decorating and offering food.
At the ordinary levels of
religion – the levels of fear and desire, people worship God and
demand protection and prosperity in exchange for the worship. Deity
worship offers the opportunity to worship God at a much loftier level of
love wherein the devotees consider themselves servants of God and
want to offer him everything they possibly can – including
protection.
Therefore, devotees consider it their prime duty to
do everything to prevent the Deity from being vandalized. God manifests
himself
as the Deity not to prove his omnipotence to those bent on
defying him, but to give a facility for those eager to serve him. When
the faithless try to desecrate the Deity, the Lord simply unmanifests
himself from the Deity so that they can inflate their illusion by
imagining that there is no God in the Deity. Of course,
defiant acts like desecrating the Deities or desecrating sacred texts
will eventually lead to grievous karmic consequences. Do such
acts demonstrate the absence of God in the Deity? Not at all to those
who understand the purpose of the Deity manifestation. To them, such
acts only demonstrate the utter absence of genuine God
consciousness among the vandals.
Coming to the fly question,
how should we respond on seeing a fly near the Deity on the altar?
Philosophically, we should understand that the Deity has allowed the
fly there to graphically show how we are neglecting our service to the
Deity, how we are not keeping the altar clean. Practically, we should
hasten to remove the fly and make arrangements by which flies will not
disturb the Deity again. The point is that the devotees see the Deity
as a special, invited divine guest and so feel duty-bound, in fact
love-bound, to offer the Deity the best possible service.
Although God can never be insulted, that he manifests himself
in forms that can apparently be disrespected is a sign of his
extraordinary love for us. This is beautifully expressed by Pillai
Lokacharya, a great South Indian saintly teacher: “This is the
greatest grace of the Lord, that being free He becomes bound,
being independent He becomes dependent for all his service on the
devotee... In other forms, man belonged to God. But behold the supreme
sacrifice of Ishvara [Krishna] in the form of the murti, for here the
almighty becomes the property of the devotee.... He carries the Lord
about, fans him, feeds him, plays with him-yea, the Infinite has become
finite, that the child soul may grasp, understand, and love him.”