God in the Grind
Lessons from Bhakti poetess-saint, Janabai
Trigger warning?: I’m using the word God generously in this post because it resonates with me. If “God” is a trigger for you, dear reader, feel free to replace it with whatever word(s) you like to use that symbolize that which is bigger and vaster than us humans; ancestors, Spirit, Love, the Universe, Mother Earth, presence, etc.
What does it mean to choose a Lover?
To open the petals of a longing heart
to a tree, the sky, the gaze of another,
to a chosen God, a lifetime of purpose.
What does it mean to give yourself to a Lover?
Once or twice, or many times over,
reveling in the intensity of excitement
in the addiction of being desired, of desiring…
all while "knowing that the loving face too
will one day fade to indifference or bone."
What does it mean to Love anyway?
To show up again and again
with an unarmored heart, naked
chanting and stomping at the frontlines
healing and grinding inside, humming
in devotion to vaster Beings
for all hearts to know peace,
all beings to be free
here, now.
In a juicy discussion a few nights ago in the Embodying Bhakti series, we were studying and contemplating love, liberation, and devotion through the ancient South Asian poetess-Saint, Janabai.
Lakshmi Nair, my beloved co-faciltator, shared with us that Janabai lived during the 13th century in Maharashtra and was sold into servitude at the age of 7. She spent her whole life as a household servant with low status as a woman and person designated in Sudra caste.
Janabai’s poetry draws on the difficult labor she was tasked with in the household, yet her God named Vitthala was ever-present…
“You leave your greatness behind you
to grind and pound with me.
O Lord, you become a woman
washing me and my soiled clothes,
proudly you carry the water
and gather dung with
your own two hands.”Janabai
In Janabai’s poetry, her chosen God, Krishna (Vitthala) became a servant to do the “dirtiest” work with her. In this way, she was considered radical to make God a servant alongside her, giving dignity and respect to her work and her life. She actively brought God into her daily grind, she elevated the mundane to the saintly sublime.
Bringing God into the grinds of healing, relationships and activism
So we sat with the question of what would our “grind”- the grind of intergenerational healing; of relationships, loss and heartbreak; of resilient activism in times of continuing apocalypse and catastrophe- be like if we devotedly brought God/ the Divine/ Spirit/ Higher Self etc. into it?
As Janabai and folks’ shares percolated in me, I kept coming to this practice and power of CHOICE. To bring God into my grind is to welcome even the most sacred into the most challenging. Rather than avoiding or denying the difficulty, I choose to invite the divine into it. By choosing to embrace the divine in even the grindiest aspects of my life, I transform my struggles into sacred practices, my hardships into holy endeavors.
To bring God into my tense and misunderstanding relationship with my brother is to expand beyond my righteous ego and see God holding us both, spaciously enough to validate both our feelings’ and needs. When I bring God into the disconnection between us, I remember that at some point in time, I chose my brother, and he chose me; and perhaps we are souls here to learn from each other. With God here beside me, I’m resourced to inquire, what am I here to learn from my brother? This brings me to tears.
To bring God into our activism, alongside the pain, loss and grief of witnessing global suffering and political chaos, is a powerful choice. Welcoming the divine into these heavy realms helps to silence and humble my logical brain that is always demanding answers. Divine presence allows me to say, “I don’t know,” knowing that that may to be the wisest answer.
Integrating the divine into our activism isn't about bypassing pain, responsibility or accountability; it’s about embedding ourselves in a sacred context. This choice taps into a deeper strength, compassion, and wisdom that allows our activism to become more than just a reaction to injustice, but a deliberate act of love and devotion. It reminds me and my ego that my efforts are part of a much larger, sacred ecosystem of justice and healing work.
When the suffering feels unbearable, and rage at personal, interpersonal and systemic injustices feels consuming, even the intent to choose to invite the divine into these spaces can be meaningful. Our activism then becomes a form of prayer, a testament to our devotion to a world where vaster sources of love, justice, and compassion prevail. Each act of resistance, each effort to uplift and support, becomes an offering to the divine.
Godly Grinds as Portals to Liberation
Over time, Janabai’s poetry expressed that she became Vitthala. She became God. She didn’t write poetry about Vitthala taking her away from gathering shit with her hands. She didn’t escape the lowly circumstances she was sold into and her life didn’t change dramatically. Still, she became God.
Janabai's experience challenges my conventional notions of liberation. I (and I’ve witnessed many to) see liberation as escaping oppression or changing the external circumstances. Yes…and, Janabai’s poetry reveals a deeper, internal liberation. Despite her unchanging conditions, she experienced a radical transformation by embodying the divine.
Now, this DOES NOT BYPASS the desperate need for external change, for a Free Palestine, for the end of apartheid, for justice for all oppressed communities, and for much better human care en mass for our planet. Striving for external change is essential. Yet, Janabai’s embodiment of God even as she gathered dung with her own two hands models a liberation beyond my logic’s sensibilities. Perhaps liberation is not an internal-or-external binary, exclusive to one way of being, or conditional upon circumstance…
Finding divinity in our struggles transforms our pain into sacred practice and our hardships into holy ventures. As we embody and welcome the divine into our grind, both we and our grind are transformed, perhaps even, like a saintly muse, Janabai, liberated and still liberating.
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