{"id":291610,"date":"2008-07-17T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-17T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/from-suspicion-to-a-living-dialogue\/"},"modified":"2024-05-13T20:39:47","modified_gmt":"2024-05-13T18:39:47","slug":"from-suspicion-to-a-living-dialogue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/from-suspicion-to-a-living-dialogue\/","title":{"rendered":"From suspicion to a living dialogue"},"content":{"rendered":"

My name is Sandeep, born and brought up in Bangalore, India.<\/strong> Raised in a Hindu community, my parents brought me up according to Hindu traditions and religious values. Every day begins offering prayers to our God to seek blessings by lighting a lamp with oil and incense sticks, and end the day in the same way giving thanks to God. Each Hindu family has their own God for e.g. Lord Krishna or Lord Shiva. My parents are devoted to two different Gods; as a result I began devoting myself to both of the deities. We have certain festivals which are practiced in order to thank God and His creations. For instance, at the beginning of our new year, we celebrate the harvest of the previous year and mark the beginning of the new harvest by offering various folk programs and preparing special dishes e.g.:- the festival of Pongal & Onam. In our every day life too we inculcate the practice of offering prayers before beginning any task. It could be before preparing breakfast or signing documents at work. We also inculcate the practice of visiting our Gods\u2019 temples along with our family as often as possible in order to refresh our spiritual life and the feeling of unity under God\u2019s shelter with reference to our Holy Book the Bhagavad-Gita. My parents are religiously tolerant and yet they kept their distance from other faiths<\/strong>; for instance they always had the wrong assumption when it came to Christianity that \u2018BEWARE Christians convert other faiths\u2019 as they had a few bitter experiences. My folks never bothered though to know the reason behind the others conversion which I could never understand. As I grew up I accompanied my aunt and grandma who offered prayers every Thursday in a Catholic Church. My understanding towards Christians as well as to other faiths became stronger as I realized that we all are the children of one God with different names. At college a very good friend of mine borrowed my guitar and I had to get it back for practice<\/strong>. When I went to get it he asked me if I would be happy to meet his friends and I obliged. It was worth meeting this bunch of strangers. Later on I got to know that they were all young people of the Focolare Movement who made a choice of putting God in the first place of their lives and tried to put into practice Christianity in a concrete way, by living the Gospel. That was when I decided to get to know more about Christianity and realized in a practical way that true Christians were not the one\u2019s who wanted to convert other\u00a0 people, but helped them build more strength in living their respective faiths. For instance living the Gospel meant putting the Holy Book into practice which made me realize the importance of reading the Gita. The experiences of these new friends shared during our meetings, seeing them attend daily mass at Church reminded me to offer my prayers with family at the temple. The prayers they would offer before every meal reminded me of the verses from the Gita which in turn I recited within myself along side. Hence, I got an opportunity to share the feeling of togetherness, unity, joy and fraternity all under the warm ideal of God amongst us. The Experience of being with these Christians has been unique.<\/strong> An experience which has taught me to share and learn to reciprocate unconditional love with the ideal of God amongst us in all that we pursue. But to love, care and strive towards the will of God in the present moment is very challenging; during my every day life for instance at work, not everybody realises that a small gesture of Love like just saying hello can make a lot of difference and bring a smile on people\u2019s faces making them happy. I just listen to my workmates when they are troubled due to work pressure and this has helped them to learn to love too, and has given me a humble feeling of sharing God\u2019s Love with everybody I meet. With my friends, to help us live our lives according to the Will of God during the day, we circulate amongst ourselves a thought for the day that we try to put into practice. Everyday is a new day and has a different experience to share. Also, every month my Christian friends try to put into practice a certain verse from the Gospel for the whole month, which in turn helps me relate to the objectives in my religion. In doing so, I experience a strong bond of unity with my Christian friends. Now I would also like to share few instances and experiences of putting Christian\u2019s values into practice in my every day life, Firstly beginning at home from being a single kid I was always aloof because my folks were always concerned that I would get into trouble. Of course later music became part of my life and I began making, sharing and knowing more friends but again only pertaining to music. As I began knowing more about the life style of my Christian friends, and met different people from various communities, the shared views, the thoughts and experiences helped me learn more about the Golden Rule which is present in all religions, \u201c\u201cDo to others as you would do to yourself … in order to build unity wherever I am. Consequently at home I began spending a good amount of time with my folks in helping them with the smallest of things of giving them company and helping them in their routine activities. The joy and smile of relief and happiness they would radiate would make it feel as a complete day. Even at class my Christian friend and I observed that the class was always divided into different groups<\/strong> and each group would never want to be with the other due to small issues of not possessing similar tastes, poor communication or various other trivial differences. Gradually my friend and I took the initiative to build unity from the smallest level within our class. It surely made a difference in the class and in the final year of graduation everybody realized the importance of being united and at least made the smallest of attempt to assist and love each other concretely. About my parents who were paranoid as to why I would not miss a single meeting with my Christian friends, they did get suspicious about me getting converted as I was always inclined visiting the church since my 10th grade. But later after my friends visited home and met both my parents they were convinced about no conversion of any sort. In fact they were more than glad to let me be part of the movement and wanted to know more about the movement through me. Actually initially I too was hesitant in getting used to this new style of life as there was more emphasis on the Christian scriptures but when I got more acquainted with it I realized it co-related to the religious Hindu principles thus inculcating more knowledge and faith in my own religion too. Above all I have realized the importance to be selfless<\/strong> and always try to share unconditional love with all my fellow human beings, it is a feeling which is inexpressible. More than that, it makes us experience the presence of God amongst us; all it takes is to always bear in mind the Golden rule \u201cDo to others as you would do to yourself\u201d. (S. –<\/em> This experience was told\u00a0at “Let’s connect”, an interreligious meeting, organized from the Focolare Movement, during the Youth Festival of the WYD 2008 in Sydney)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The story of a young Hindu and his Christian friends. The common committment in living the Golden Rule helps also to grow in your own Faith<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}