Culture

Love and Truth

Rahil Patel

Introductory

The Longing Beneath Every New Year Greeting

Last winter I walked through the quiet grounds of Compton Verney, a country house gallery set in the Warwickshire countryside in England. The trees standing bare in their winter silhouettes, and the cold air making every colour inside feel brighter.  

The exhibition was by the British Indian artist Chila Kumari, and it was a joyful collision of worlds, of neon-bright Hindu deities beside ice cream vans and cakes, which were playful nods to her father’s business in the North of England. It felt like a whole childhood rendered in colour: temple and high street, incense and sugar, all held together with affection. 

But what stayed with me long after I left wasn’t the colour. It was the title: Love and Truth. 

Happy New Year?

I paused when I first saw it. Love and truth? Those are not natural Hindu categories. Hinduism has many beautiful ways of imagining life: dharma, karma, liberation, devotion etc. but it does not frame the human journey around “truth” and “love” in the way the Christian story does. And yet, there it was, glowing across the wall. As I walked through the exhibition, I wondered whether these two words so familiar in Christian imagination touch something in all of us, whether we fully recognise it or not. 

This always returns to me around New Year’s Day. Every 1 January, my phone fills with warm WhatsApp messages from my Hindu relatives: “Happy New Year! Hope it’s a good one!” And I smile each time. Yet a curious thought lingers. They already celebrated their New Year weeks earlier at Diwali. The Hindu calendar, Vikram Samvat, runs fifty-two years ahead of the Gregorian one, and Diwali is the moment the new year begins with lights, sweets, and a kind of gentle, home-shaped joy. And Sikhs celebrate in March with the Nanakshahi calendar. 

And yet, every January, without fail, I find myself surrounded by wishes of joy and hope from friends and family whose own traditions never taught them to imagine the world in those terms. It’s not a criticism, far from it. I love receiving those messages.

But I can’t help asking, quietly: Where did these words come from? What longing are they giving voice to? 

In 2024, the writer Clare Gilbert whose beautiful novel I, Julian imaginatively retells the life of Julian of Norwich, described hope as being “optimistic even when the heart is broken.” A friend once told me that biblical hope is “the joyful anticipation of something good.” These are not ideas tied to circumstance. They come from somewhere else entirely. 

I had a strange encounter with this long before I became a Christian. I remember watching The Lord of the Rings film as a Hindu monk, sitting in my monastery office in London. There is a scene where Pippin stands beside Gandalf, looking out over a shadow creeping across the land. With fear in his voice he asks, “Is there any hope, Gandalf?” And Gandalf, with that quiet seriousness only he can muster, replies, “There never was much hope. Just a fool’s hope.” 

Even then, before I knew anything of Jesus, something in me recognised the beauty of that line. Hope is never naïve optimism. It is the stubborn belief that something good may still break through, even when the world gives every reason to believe otherwise. 

A longing for meaning

A memory from New Delhi returns to me too. In the foreword to Anthony Stone’s Hindu Astrology: Myths, Symbols and Reality, journalist Garima Garg describes the evening Queen Elizabeth II died. It was September and still heavy with heat, the kind of night where the air settles low and streetlights shimmer. She writes that as news spread across the city, a “comet-like orb” streaked across the sky. 

Sceptics dismissed it instantly as debris or satellites. But for astrologers in Delhi, the timing made their breath catch. A celestial sign appearing at the very moment a monarch died, how could one not pause? Garg describes the hushed excitement, the sense that something extraordinary had brushed past the ordinary, that the heavens had whispered into a human moment. 

It struck me how deeply human that reaction is. Even in astrology, with its complex maps of stars and myth, there is a longing for meaning, alignment, transcendence and for the unseen to speak into the seen. 

Once, while visiting St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican with the head of my former monastery, we wandered past sculptures and paintings. These depicted the sorrow of Christ’s suffering, Mary’s grief, the weight of the cross, the stillness of death. My teacher stared for a long time before turning to me with confusion: “Why does everyone look so gloomy and sad? Our paintings are full of smiles and celebration.” I remember thinking, I don’t think that’s the point here. 

At the time, I didn’t have the words for it. But now I see it clearly: Christian joy is not the denial of sorrow; it is God meeting sorrow with Himself. Joy is what rises when grief is seen, named, and held by Christ who does not turn away. It is something deeper than the bright happiness I grew up with and a truth I did not know how to articulate then. 

And so, as another year comes to a close, I keep thinking about those New Year messages, those words of hope and joy sent freely by people whose own traditions rarely speak that language. Perhaps they reveal something we all carry, even when unnamed: a longing for a love that does not fade, a truth that does not shift, a hope that does not disappoint, and a joy that can exist even in the shadow of sorrow. 

These are not merely cultural borrowings. They feel like echoes of something older, deeper, written quietly into every human heart. 

 So, when my phone lights up again this 1 January, I will smile, reply with warmth, and pause for a moment. Because maybe, without fully realising it, those lovely messages are giving voice to the same longing that led me from a monastery in India to a cathedral in Rome to the foot of the cross: a longing that Christians believe is fulfilled in Christ Himself. 

Going Deeper

I, Julian by Claire Gilbert.

A richly imagined retelling of the life of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. A beautiful story of hope, suffering, and divine love.

🔗 Book resource

Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present by Robert Eric Frykenberg.

A thoughtful historical overview showing how Christianity has quietly influenced Indian society, culture and ideas of dignity and hope.