God Fearing or God Loving

Human beings, by their innate nature tend to engage in differentiation, segmentation. The act of categorising anything in buckets or groups is by default for us. We do it basis color, caste, creed, socioeconomic levels and many more. ‘Atheist’ and the ‘Believer’ are two major such groups and today we are going to talk about subsets of ‘Believer’ group. I call those as ‘God Fearing’ and ‘God Loving’.

Before delving deeper, I need to mention that they both have faith and trust in the God. Both fall under ‘Believers’, but differentiated by few characteristics.

‘God fearing’ ones is those who follow the daily ritual, visiting temples, putting tika on the forehead, reading the religious scriptures, chanting mantras, shlokas by feeling the beads (mala). Any deviation in their religious schedule, missing a mala or two, is like a blasphemy for them.

‘God loving’ on the other hand – they too involve themselves in all above activities, though not necessarily. They don’t do it as a compulsion or force it onto them. Even if they miss on anything, they don’t carry the fear about negative omens like the ‘God fearing’ group does. I think those are the ones who attained the true meaning of praying/bhakti without any burden or any kind of fear.

Both the subsets are in the line of God only. But the ‘God fearing’ ones seems a give and take or transactional whereas the ‘God loving’ ones feel like they already surrendered them to Him and accepted it. I find myself more aligned to the ‘God Fearing’ set more than the ‘God loving’ one and try my best to change into the later.

Which one of these you are aligned with?

[P.S. – My personal views, no hard feelings]

Vb