V V Ganeshananthan

In Bethesda, Maryland, where I grew up, the local Sri Lankan Hindu community convened at someone’s house once a week to worship. We sang traditional prayers in Tamil and Sanskrit, and listened to legends of the gods recounted in English. For the children, the stories were the best part; we sat through an hour of prayers that most of us did not understand in order to hear them. Cross-legged on someone’s living room carpet, we passed the time by studying the pictures of various gods — Shiva, Murugan, Ganesh-propped up against a fireplace, with flowers, incense, and prasatham, an offering of food, before them.

To some, the scene might have looked like a conflict: prayers and thoughts directed to (essentially) one God; pictures of many.

To an outsider, it would have looked like we were praying to those pictures. If we were in a temple, we would have been praying to statues. To some old-school Western minds, that’s straight-up idol worship — pretty obvious paganism and polytheism. And when I went to school, that’s what my textbooks said — Hindus were polytheists. Teachers and textbooks felt the need to categorise, but the categories offered as options did not suit the religion I knew from my Friday afternoon worship. As far as I could tell, I was more monotheist than polytheist. But the problem wasn’t in figuring out which one I was — the problem was my discomfort at the need to put Hinduism, or any religion, in one box or another. Every Friday, I prayed in many ways, and directed my prayers through many routes — one divine face or another. — Beliefnet.com