Bhagavad Gita · Chapter 9: The Royal Knowledge and Royal Secret

Bhagavad Gita 9.19

tapāmyahamahaṃ varṣaṃ nigṛhṇāmyutsṛjāmi ca | amṛtaṃ caiva mṛtyuśca sadasaccāhamarjuna ||

I give heat; I hold back the rain and I send it forth. I am immortality and I am death; I am both what is and what is not, Arjuna.

Modern context

The divine is the heat of summer and the coming of rain; it is immortality and also death; it is being and non-being. This is not a comfortable verse. It refuses to split the world into a good part that belongs to God and a bad part that belongs to something else. Drought and flood, birth and death, all fall within one reality. Accepting that does not mean liking suffering. It means not living as if half of life were outside the sacred.