Personal Faith
Born an Irish Catholic, and expressing an early interest in the priesthood, Rishi Das joined a Hare Krishna ashram, in Dublin, in 1979. In 1982 he was given Brahmanical initiation - ordained as a priest - in the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition.
Inspired by biblical and philosophical reading, which began when he was fourteen, Rishi Das developed a broad interest in spirituality. He said of this early period:
...to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our words and all our deeds, and love our neighbour as ourselves struck me as an instruction, as a plea, and actually, as a necessity. Considering how to do to that, how to forsake all and follow God out of love has provided me my greatest challenge in life.
Joining a Hindu movement in the Ireland of his time did not feel like a courageous act for Rishi Das. Of his first encounters with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) he said:
They were speaking Christianity but not calling it that. I knew I had met the people I was to practice with. My desire was to be a Christian. I had to struggle with the fact that I found it being practised to the highest standard by non-Christians.
To sample his spiritual thought in the form of prayer we can refer to one of his BBC Broadcasts:
Dear Lord, my desire is to serve you, and I offer what I think is best. Please let me know what You desire, and bless me with the grace to accept what you think is best.
And for a touch of his well known humour:
Over the next few years as I tried the ‘lose-weight-without-any-change’ method, as I wore ever tighter clothes, and weighed myself to depression, I felt doomed. My lowest point was the day I weighed myself after a haircut.
Read more about this topic: Shaunaka Rishi Das
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or faith:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Your faith an’ trouth yese never get
Nor our trew Love shall never twain
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And kiss me both cheek and chin.
My mouth it is full cold, Margret,
It has the smell now of the ground;
An’ if I kiss thy com’ly mouth
Thy life days will not be long.”
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