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Maternal Affection for a Divine Son: A Spirituality of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
Love for God as an actual concrete activity of a human being is sometimes obscured in contemporary American Christian culture. This essay studies the role of maternal affection for the divine child Kṛṣṇa, humanly embodied as a male child, in order to serve as a cross-cultural catalyst for the traditions of Christian love for Christ. The focus is the tenth-century Hindu Vaiṣṇava text, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Vaiṣṇavas promote the experience of loving God through imaginative participation in narratives of Kṛṣṇa's loves and by identification with human women who loved him, particularly his mothers. They are the exemplars of a maternal love for a divine child. This imaginative participation and identification is open to both men and women. This study illustrates the roles of gender, narrative, and imagination in the experience of loving God with one's whole heart, soul, and might.
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References
1 This reduction has been promoted by a misinterpretation of an important theme in contemporary theology: that, for the Christian, love for God and love for neighbor ought to be joined in actual practice. See Rahner, Karl, “Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God,” Theological Investigations 6 (New York: Seabury Press. 1974), pp. 231–49.Google Scholar But see also Rahner, Karl, The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor (New York: Crossroad, 1983)Google Scholar where he carefully distinguishes the two loves in order to clarify the role of love for God. More importantly, at the level of popular religion, this reduction is part of the American cultural canon. See the provocative discussions in Bellah, Robert N., Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William M., Swidler, Ann, and Tipton, Steven M., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 93–97.Google Scholar
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