Question: I am going through a very tough time in relationships. In rage I tore the Gita I read. But then, after calming down I understood greatest sin I did to Sri Krishna. I asked for forgiveness and said that in my whole life I will never get angry again and if I do, he can take away the most precious thing to me, my love, the one person I love. I am 18 years old. Will God forgive me or punish me? I am truly repentant for my sin.
Answer by Romapada Swami:
It looks like you are sincerely repenting for your action.
Krishna is our very kind eternal Father and He forgives our actions if we sincerely repent for them and make a firm resolve and make deliberate efforts to carefully avoid repeating them.
The Holy Name of God can actually eradicate the reactions for all the sins already committed.
Scriptures state that when properly chanted, hari-nama can destroy more sins than one can possibly ever commit.
In order to derive the full benefit of chanting — it can even burn up the residual tendency in the heart to commit further sins! — chanting must be taken up properly. One should carefully avoid the ten kinds of offenses in chanting, especially the mentality that one can continue sinning and that it will be adjusted on the strength of chanting.
Conversely, an attitude of surrender, sincere repentance, and adherence to a theistic way of life are favorable and quickly help to perfect one’s chanting.
Chanting gives immediate relief from the blazing reactions of past sins, and quickly ushers in auspiciousness – this can be tangibly experienced in our lives. Yet, as long as we are in this material ocean, its waves and whirlpools will not cease; that is to say that by taking up chanting it is not to be expected that there will never be another difficulty/pain/reversal in one’s life. But these do not have the same disturbing effect upon those who take firm shelter in the Holy Name.
In that sense, one could say that chanting gives the spiritual strength to tolerate material disturbances, but this is not the same as suffering that comes from past sins. And the Holy Name ultimately delivers one from this treacherous material existence altogether.
