Krsna
How do I believe in the existence of you, Krishna?
I genuinely want to know.If I am stripped naked in a room full of men, and I start begging one of them to save me, and one of them finally steps forward and stands between me and the rest of them, why would I call him God? Why would I worship him as the Almighty?I would just think, someone finally chose to stand up for me.Then why do I believe in you?Why do I trust that you exist, Krishna, when all I have done till now is trust you, and all I seem to have received in return are lessons about not trusting people?
Why would I believe in you when you yourself asked me to question your existence?
To question those religious beliefs, those rules, those norms, everything that ties me down and tells me what I should believe, how I should live, what I should be.
So why would I believe in you?
Or maybe…
maybe this is exactly the reason I should.
Maybe God was never supposed to be a body sitting somewhere up there, watching me, waiting for the moment I needed to be saved.
Maybe God is a belief.
Maybe it is an energy that flows within me, within you, within everyone.
Maybe all I have to do is channel that energy towards something good.
Maybe the energy inside me is you, Krishna.
Maybe you are in me.
Maybe when I find the courage to stand up for myself, that’s you.
Maybe when a man sees a woman being stripped naked in a courtroom and finds the courage to step forward and stand beside her, that’s you.
Maybe when someone chooses to care for me when they don’t have to, that’s you.
Maybe when someone holds my hand when I’m falling apart, that’s you.
Maybe when someone stays.
When someone chooses kindness when cruelty would have been easier.
Maybe that’s you too.
Maybe when I somehow find the strength to believe that I’ll figure things out, even when I have absolutely no idea how I will, maybe that is you, Krishna.
Maybe you don’t have to come down and save me.
Maybe you never did.
Maybe you gave me the ability to save myself.
Maybe you exist in every person who chooses to do the right thing when they could have simply walked away.
Maybe you exist in every act of kindness, every bit of courage, every person who chooses to stand up for someone else.
Maybe you move from one heart to another, never belonging to just one person.
Maybe you are in me.
Maybe you are in him.
Maybe you are in all of us.
Maybe all this time I have been asking,
“Where are you, Krishna?”
while you were quietly answering,
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“I am here.
I am in you.
I am in the person who stands beside you.
I am in the courage that makes you stand up again.
I am in every good thing you choose to do.”
Maybe that’s what you meant when you asked me to question you.
Maybe you weren’t asking me to blindly believe in you.
Maybe you were asking me to find you.
In courage.
In love.
In resistance.
In kindness.
In myself.
Maybe I kept searching for Krishna in the sky while you were quietly living in the things I was doing on earth.
Maybe I kept waiting for you to come and save me, when perhaps you had already given me everything I needed to survive.
Maybe the God I was taught to look up to was always asking me to look within.
And maybe…
just maybe…
the Krishna I have been waiting for has been breathing inside me all this time.
Maybe you were never someone I had to wait for.
Maybe you were never someone I had to prove existed.
Maybe you were simply the part of me that kept believing there was still something worth fighting for.
And maybe, Krishna, that’s enough for me to believe in you.
But as you said, Krishna, I would still question the existence of a religion
how can a thing you created judge humans on the basis of what they eat,
how can eyes as pure as yours ask women to cover themselves up,
how can a soul like you forbid a bleeding woman from coming close to you,
what were you so afraid of, Krishna?
I still do not believe in that religion which suppresses me.
I dare believe you didn’t create it, Krishna.
How could someone like you choose to divide humans on the basis of whom they worship,
when you never once taught me that I had to worship anyone.
All you ever wanted from me was to be a good person.
It was never about worshipping someone, Krishna. It was about becoming someone.
Because if you are the one who breathes in every soul,
then how could you have written rules that starve some souls of dignity?
How can a god without a body
care what body I was born into?
How can eyes that see everything as one
ask me to hide the very shape you gave me?
You, who they say drank poison for the whole world,
you, who they say loved a woman the world called impure,
how could you be the one who calls my blood unclean?
If I bleed, I am only proof that I create life the way you once said you create worlds,
so why would you flinch from the one thing that makes me most like you?
No, Krishna. I don’t believe you wrote those rules.
I think men wrote them, and then hid behind your name
so no one would dare question a god.
It’s easy to obey a rule when you’re told it came from the divine.
It’s harder when you realize it only ever came from someone afraid of losing control.
So they gave their fear your face.
They gave their control your name.
And they called it devotion.
But you never asked me to kneel.
You asked me to rise.
You never said, “fast for your husband’s life,”
“cover yourself so you’ll be seen as good.”
You said, “fight for what’s right,
even if it’s your own family standing against you.”
You taught karma, not worship.
You told Arjuna to fight, not to fold his hands and wait for temple bells.
You never said, “worship me and you’ll be saved.”
You said, “do your work with a clean heart, that’s enough.”
So how did we end up here,
a woman not allowed inside a temple
because her body did the very thing your body would have called sacred?
I think somewhere along the way,
people stopped being taught about you,
and started being taught how to control each other in your name.
And I refuse that religion.
Not you. Never you.
I refuse the one that turned you into a weapon
when you were only ever meant to be a mirror.
Because if you really are in me, the way I’ve started to believe,
then every time someone used your name to make me smaller,
they weren’t worshipping you.
They were worshipping their own fear, and just borrowing your face to do it.
You never divided us by who we bowed to.
You only ever cared what we did with our hands once we stood back up.
