Gandhi, Children, and Guardian Angels

Gandhi named the book of his autobiography "My Experiments with Truth," not "My Discovery of Truth" or "The Truth I Learned," but experiments—plural, ongoing, fallible. He approached life like a scientist approaches a lab: with hypotheses to test, failures to document, variables to adjust. He experimented with the spinning wheel: what happens to a nation's soul when it produces its own cloth? Or what happens to a person if he limits himself to wearing just two pieces of clothing—a dhoti and a shawl? What happens if dissent and resistance hold on to non-violent means? What happens if people practice civil disobedience when the laws become oppressive and unfair? Perhaps the most dangerous thing we do on days like, Gandhi Jayanti is to celebrate him as if he is a finished work. As if non-violence has won, permanently. He'd likely find our veneration more troubling than our criticism—because worship puts an end to inquiry, and inquiry was his religion.

Truth is not something achieved once and for all, rather it is something that requires daily experimentation. Dealing with life we must be like children—they are constantly curious and experimenting, whereas adults are full of conclusions and rigid certainties. Jesus says in Matthew 18: 1-5, 10 that one who becomes like a child and welcomes a child, would enter the Kingdom of God. It is interesting to note that children do not worship anybody; worship is an adult thing. Jesus challenges us to be children.

We speak of guardian angels as if protection were their only purpose—bodyguards assigned at birth, redirecting falling debris and whispering warnings at crosswalks, etc. What if a guardian angel's true work isn't to shield us from accidents and pain, but to ensure we meet exactly the struggles we need, that we are forced by them to experiment? What if angels are not averting collisions, but arranging every necessary collision we need? They are not sparing us from sufferings, but pushing us into suffering that shapes us—of course only when we are strong enough to be transformed by it. Angels are more unsettling than comforting—Jacob wrestled with an angel, and angels accompanied Jesus in his excruciating agony; Jacob had his thighbone broken, and Jesus hung on the cross for hours.

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