Why God feels absent, and how can we bring Him back to our lives

Many choose not to believe in God, concluding that with the world the way it is, or there is no God, or He just doesn’t care.

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Many choose not to believe in God, concluding that with the world the way it is, or there is no God, or He just doesn’t care. Instead of dealing with what they believe to be an absent or insensitive God, they somehow find solace in the idea that there is no God, and they are on their own.

This feeling is understandable. The world looks random, unfair, and unpredictable, making, for some, atheism look like a reasonable explanation that matches what their eyes see. If there is a God, why does life look so harsh? The right answer, however, is not in negating the existence of God, but in recognizing the effects of His absence.

In school, we learn that cold is just the absence of heat. Similarly, darkness is the absence of light. Just like cold and darkness don’t exist as independent entities, but are just the absence of the positive, suffering, fear, and uncertainty are not separate forces, but just the absence of God.

Why is that God becomes absent from our lives? Because we want so. God does not impose Himself; He respects our free will. Because we wanted a world where we are free to live the way we wanted, He created this material world, initially as a peaceful place, where we could live in harmony with nature. Simultaneously, He gave us the Vedas, so we could hear about Him and live our lives in a way that we could achieve both happiness and liberation. However, we choose to transform the world He created into a concrete jungle, where rivers are roads and trees are towers of glass, where there is no sunlight, no real food, and no peace, where people stay hooked into their phones, seeing videos with pets and senseless dances to forget about the harsh reality outside, a reality we ourselves created.

We may refuse to accept responsibility, arguing that we don’t have a choice and that the world was the way it is even before we were born. This is, of course, true to a certain extent, but still, we contribute to it daily with our choices. We continue buying in supermarkets instead of cultivating the land, we are happy to live in a big city, and we remain hooked to our phones like everyone else. We may be victims of the system, but at the same time, we are the ones who maintain the system.

The good news is that we don’t need to radically change the way we live; we just need to add Krsna to our lives. As Prabhupada used to say, “Godhead is light, nescience is darkness. Where there is Godhead there is no darkness.” As we add Krsna Consciousness to our lives, gradually all the darkness of material life subsides.

Thanks to Sri Caitanya Mahāprabhu, we have a very simple process for that: we just need to call for Krsna by chanting His holy names. In reality, He is present already; he was with us the whole time, but we were choosing to ignore Him. Now, when we start calling His name, He has the opportunity of becoming present in our lives. It may still feel distant in the beginning, but He starts to feel closer as our heart becomes purified, which in turn comes as a result of sincere chanting. It happens that all the material contamination we allowed to build up around ourselves covers our eyes and blocks our ears, but as they are removed, we can see again and realize that Krsna was with us the whole time. It was not Him that left us, it was we who chose to turn our backs on Him.

Krsna is the possessor of everything. There is nothing that is not His already. The only thing He wants is our love, and this love is also the thing that can make is fully satisfied. Just as a boy and a girl feel happy in the company of each other, we can find true happiness only in the company of Krsna. Love, however, can be only voluntary. If Krsna were to shout from the sky and give us a karmic reaction immediately every time we did something wrong, we could be coerced to follow the rules, but we would never be able to love Him. Love must be the voluntary, the result of a conscious choice. Krsna is cultivating relationships with His devotees from time immemorial; He knows that the only way to foster our love is to give us freedom. He thus allows us to act the way we want, and to observe the consequences of our acts, but at the same time, remains available, living inside our hearts for the time we finally turn to Him.

There is, however, a trap we should learn to avoid, that is to make God an order supplier, to condition our devotion to Him to material rewards, to develop the feeling that I can serve God only to the extent that He makes my life comfortable.

When we go to the doctor, we can’t expect that all medicines will be sweet, and all treatments will be completely free from any discomfort. Depending on the disease, the doctor may have to give us a bitter medicine or send us for a difficult surgery. It is not because he wants us to suffer; he just gives us the treatment that is necessary according to our infirmity. Similarly, Krsna has to give us what is necessary to cure our material disease. The treatment can be blissful at times, but it also has difficult periods. Superficially, a devotee may appear to face difficulties in life like everyone else, but there is a crucial difference: an ordinary materialist makes God absent from his life, and therefore, he is alone, enjoying or suffering the results of his own actions, under the mechanical laws of nature. A devotee, on the other hand, is under the care of an attentive physician, who is on his side during the treatment, attentive to adjust the dose of the medicine and counteract the side effects in the best way. The materialist is alone, cutting himself from the Lord, while the devotee is trying to revive this connection and is therefore cared for by Him.

Often, we look for external miracles. We expect a palace coming from the sky or the ocean opening for us to cross. However, the true miracles happen inside: resentment loosening, bad habits weakening, gratitude appearing, fear fading, courage rising. These are the proof that the treatment is working and that we are gradually becoming free. These are the symptoms that the sun is rising, and darkness is disappearing. These are the signs Krsna is manifesting in our lives.

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