God or Religion: Are they the same?
Merle Essberger’s Story
“We were brought up to fear God,” she said. Merle Essberger describes her life as a seventy-seven-year-long study of religion. She was born in 1944 in Princes Town, Trinidad and Tobago. But like many of the island’s residents, her origins lie elsewhere. Both her father’s and mother’s families emigrated from India to Trinidad, under British colonial rule at the turn of the 20th century. Her parents and grandparents worked in the fields harvesting sugarcane under what is known as the Indian indenture system, which promised pay and housing in exchange for labor. “That is one of the truest forms of hard work,” said Essberger. Trinidad and Tobago’s colonial history, having changed hands among the Spanish, French, British, and Dutch empires, gave rise to the islands’ diversity. Essberger describes growing up among peers of African, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and white descent. Her Hindu mother and Muslim father cultivated her sense of her Indian identity through stories, traditions, and trips to the Hindu temple and Muslim mosque.
St. Joseph Secondary School offered the best education on the island, albeit one heavily inflected with the missionary legacy of Catholicism. “In order to enter the convent school, I had to give up Hinduism,” said Essberger. “I had to give up my ancestry for education.” The English and Irish nuns who ran St. Joseph demanded that both Essberger and her parents convert to Catholicism. “It’s the colonial legacy repeating itself once again,” she sighed. Essberger describes her high school experience as a rigid one, in which God was portrayed as a merciless figure: “God was always ready to punish you for not going to Sunday mass.” On school grounds, Essberger was taught strict codes of deportment: no slouching, no casual speech, even among friends. “The school was very English, and we were raised to be arrogant.” Essberger uses the word arrogant to convey the sense of superiority that the students of St. Joseph were taught to derive from being Catholic and attending private school. “We weren’t allowed to speak to non-Catholics, because we were told that they were of a lower class.” As a result of the nuns’ strict teachings, Essberger spent countless hours up late at night crying for her grandparents, “who were good people, but would have to burn in hell since they were non-Catholics.” She did not understand why God could be so brutal to his disciples.
Before attending St. Joseph, Essberger describes her early childhood in Trinidad as warm and open-minded. “We had friends from all different classes and religions: we had very rich friends and very poor friends. We had Hindu, Muslim, and Catholic friends too.” Essberger reflects that it was a privilege to be raised with so much exposure to such a variety of backgrounds and experiences. “It’s something you wouldn’t find in a book, it’s something you had to live through.” She characterizes this widespread acceptance of diversity as the “Trinidad mentality.” This outlook has stayed with her all her life, despite the lasting impact of the British school system, where she learned to divide and categorize others.
“By the time I moved to the U.K. at twenty, I hated God. I couldn't believe that God could harbor so much hate and contempt.” While attending a London cosmetology school, she struggled with her faith, wanting to reject Catholicism but was unsure of her own beliefs. When Essberger’s father came to visit her the following year, he brought a special gift from her concealed past. The Mahabharata, known as one the most sacred texts in Hinduism, taught Essberger that mistakes were not sins to be rejected, but a means of spiritual growth. “In Hinduism,” she described, “You always have to make a choice. If you take the left path and it is the wrong one, that is okay because you learned from your mistake.” Bolstered by her renewed belief in Hinduism, Essberger revised her opinions on God, realizing that he did not have to be the cruel disciplinarian Catholicism made him out to be.
At the end of her studies, Essberger had two options: stay in the United Kingdom or go home. Unwilling to return to Trinidad to marry the boyfriend she had left behind, Essberger applied for a work visa. After her application was denied, she moved to Hamburg, Germany, to work as a beautician at the Four Seasons Hotel. One day at work, she met the film director Ruprecht Essberger, the man who would become her future husband. When they married two years later, she left behind her maiden name of Insanali, and took the name Essberger. She was twenty-seven years old. The couple had a Presbyterian wedding, and Essberger recalls having to hide the fact that she was Hindu from her new German extended family and friends. “I was raised in a Christian environment, I knew how to assimilate myself properly,” she said with a laugh.
When her husband asked if she would play a role in his T.V. series “Das Fernsehgericht tagt” (“The Television Tribunal is in Session”), Essberger agreed. While filming an episode about an Indian family, Essberger found the courage to retrace her own roots. She spent three months in residence at the Auroville Ashram in India. “I fully immersed myself in the Indian philosophy. We spent hours each day meditating. The silence was brutal, yet crucial. In the evenings we would listen to lectures on different Hindu philosophers, like Adi Shankara.” During her period at the ashram, Essberger reduced her life to only the barest essentials, devoting all her time to reflection and study. She soon came to a profound realization, one that marked the beginning of her “new life.” As Essberger put it, she realized, “I don't believe in religion, but I do believe in God.”
She neither subscribes to the Catholic definition of God nor to the Hindu pantheon, understanding Hinduism as a philosophy, not a religion. Essberger sees God to be her “brother, father, mother, and sister.” Looking back on her journey through life and faith, she acknowledges, “I respect the Catholic Church’s teachings, it's important to be a good Samaritan, for example, but I regret fearing God.” Essberger also rejects the arrogance and the divisive qualities that the nuns at St. Joseph instilled in her. “I lived the parallel reality of my ancestors in India under the caste system,” she said, reflecting on the way that her status as a Catholic supposedly made her superior to her non-Catholic peers. “But our purpose in life is not to divide but to unite.” Most importantly, Essberger learned how to forgive and accept herself. When she returned to Germany, she decorated the shelves of her apartment with pictures of her grandparents in traditional attire and placed the texts of the four Vedas in her library. “I stopped concealing my Hinduism but at the same time I let go of religion. I didn’t need it to believe in God.”
