Guiding Light: How Namdev’s Unwavering Faith Moved The Divine

Man’s life is powered by faith. We repose our faith in our parents when we are young. As we grow older, friends, family, spouses, and partners are added to the list of people we trust. But how can we survive without the faith that subsumes all these faiths? How can we survive without faith in God?

Namdev’s mother Janabai had this habit of taking a plate of freshly cooked food to the temple at Pandharpur and offering it to Lord Vitthala before the family sat down to eat lunch. Thus, every meal was eaten as prasad in their devout family. One day, Janabai was unable to go to the temple herself, so she asked her young son, Namdev, to go in her place.

The young boy happily agreed to do so and set off for the temple. He set the plate of food before the deity, tightly shut his eyes, and begged the Lord to accept the food he had brought. To his dismay, when he opened his eyes, he found the food on the plate untouched.

For him, naivedya was not just a show-and-take-away ritual. He closed his eyes once again and implored the Lord to accept the food. When the food was still left untouched, the boy began to shed bitter tears. “Vitthala! Vitthala!” he called out piteously, “Don’t you like me? Are you so angry with me that you refuse to touch the food I have brought to you?”

Lord Vithoba is tender-hearted! He could not bear the grief of His dear devotee, so He appeared in human form and promptly ate the food placed before Him! Seeing the empty plate, Namdev was happy and returned home to inform his mother that the food had indeed been offered to God. Janabai was mystified.

The following day, she entrusted her son with the same errand and secretly followed him to the temple to see what he did with the food. To her amazement, she saw Nama close his eyes and pray to Vitthala, and she saw the Lord appear in human form and eat the food placed before Him!

Thus, in faith, we do not believe that God can but believe that God will.

Dada J P Vaswani was a humanitarian, philosopher, educator, acclaimed writer, powerful orator, messiah of ahimsa, and non-sectarian spiritual leader.