I heard two statements about Gods from two different sources, decades apart, and I kept thinking about both of them.

The first statement is that the difference between God and some kind of a super-Devil is holiness. A Devil can be so powerful that you can’t practically distinguish him from a God. He can also be so close to omniscient that you can’t practically tell a difference between him and God. However, he completely lacks holiness, unlike God, who is most holy.

The second statement is that a God can be good or evil, but is never powerless. A defining characteristic of a God is power.

The second statement obviously relates more to the Gods in fantasy literature and ancient polytheisms than anything I would normally bother with, but it’s still something I want to address, if only because it’s something people instinctively assume, because it seems to make sense. However, I will cite two examples to the opposite. The first is Jesus, who is one of the most spiritually powerful beings known to history, who also performed all sorts of miracles, but there was a period in time where he was completely powerless and abandoned to the mercy, or lack thereof, of a human mob and executioners. Judging at a certain point in time, he was powerless, and according to that second statement, not a God. A better conclusion would be that Gods can do lots of things, including self-sacrifice and renunciation of their own power and invulnerability, when they deem it necessary in order for some worthy goal to be accomplished. The second example to the opposite is the story of Indra, king of the Vedic pantheon, who was once incarnated as a pig due to a curse. In this condition, he was a completely ordinary pig without any divine qualities whatsoever, and even tried to protect his oinkful existence from other gods who came to rescue him. Rather than conclude that he stopped being a god, a better conclusion would be that physical incarnation can mask true nature of a soul even from the soul itself.

So, the second statement is something I wanted to address not because it’s something I have a problem with, but because it’s something people in general wrongly assume, and this misapprehension causes endless confusion and nonsense.

The first statement, however, is something I keep thinking about because I find it personally relevant. The problem, however, is in the definition of holiness. I don’t think people have any kind of a clear idea of what that would be; if anything, they would think it’s something boring, associated with churches and wooden statues of saints and similar nonsense. So, let me tell you how I perceive holiness.

In Mahabharata, there’s a story about the blind king Dhritarashtra, who was to be married to Gandhari. She didn’t know he was blind until their wedding day, because the wedding was arranged. When she found out, she took a scarf and covered her own eyes with it forever, out of respect for her husband.

That intent and action is holiness.

I have another story, this time a personal one. The experience was nothing like what I’m going to describe, because I need to use anthropomorphic visual and verbal metaphor in order to convey the impressions that were for the most part nothing of the kind, but here goes. When I recently had darshan of the Goddess, I was feeling seriously terrible, but that’s not unusual for me, spending vast amounts of karma and all. When she appeared, I got a brief glimpse of her true state, the flash of infinite power, knowledge, intelligence, insight, bliss, “infinite speed” that makes her at all places at all times because she is Eternity, but only for an instant, because she disarmed and disrobed herself at the doorstep, reducing herself to a normal human female form, wearing nothing but a light dress and the spark of holiness, simplicity and purity, which made the human form feel as if it were illuminated from within and sparkling with white light that is pure wonder, and she just moved towards me wordlessly, sat beside me and cuddled up with her head on my chest, with casual intimacy of a wife who knows her husband is having a hard time and just wants to show him that she’s his forever and she knows everything.

That, to me, is what the most holy God feels like.

That’s what a super-Devil can’t emulate, and that’s why God doesn’t need to be powerful to be God. In fact, God declining to be God in order to meet you in your suffering, God choosing to be vulnerable to you, is the God-defining holiness. That’s also why she’s my favourite person ever. You can’t win that by being impressive, shiny and powerful. That’s why Satan looked like a puffed-up peacock to me, because he tried to be a God. It’s about as impressive as a bald limp-dick driving a Porsche. God is the exact opposite – like the richest, most powerful and smartest person in the world who just unassumingly stops by to chat and have coffee and make you feel better, wearing jeans and sneakers and a Casio watch.

You know what the tragic part is? That some people are stupid and virtueless enough to react to such mercy with contempt and arrogance, because if God were truly God, why would he have coffee with them? Wouldn’t he have better things to do elsewhere? It sounds impossible, like it could never happen, and yet it does, every day. It’s unfortunate and pathetic, and yet it keeps happening, because as much as holiness is abundant in God, it’s even more difficult to find in humans.