God’s delegate soul comes here

Re: 02: Hard is it to Persuade Earth-Nature's Change by RY Deshpande on Sat 20 Jan 2007 07:58 PM PST Profile Permanent Link

A fire has come and touched men's hearts and gone; A few have caught flame and risen to greater life. Fated day in the life of Savitri has arrived and the poet is describing the sequence of events in detail. It is a narration portraying, in pointed and minute details, the psychological state of Savitri. But, then, in the course of narration, he is also making a departure, with a purpose, in making a reflective observation. He has inserted these lines about the supernal fire’s coming and returning, lines which do not really form a part of the running narrative; but the occasion is most appropriate to offer a significant commentary on the state of affairs in man’s progress towards his higher spiritual destiny. God’s delegate soul comes here, but hardly there is anyone to receive the precious boons he brings for us.

• St John said: "…ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full." Is there anyone who is asking anything to make his joy full, anything worthwhile? Hardly anyone. We pray and ask for petty things.
• Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk who lived in South India as a Sannyasin till a few years ago, spoke of "the wisdom of the dark night". For him it was a kind of worldwide crucifixion that could bring happiness to humanity, by working for the cross.
• But is there really anyone who suffers for the cross? takes it to make progress? "God strolled in the Garden with Man," says the Hebrew Scripture.
• Jacob saw heaven opened.
• God spoke to Joseph through dreams.
• Moses communed with God on Sinai.
• David lost himself in dancing for the Lord.
• Jesus declared "I and the Father are one." Thus he revealed in himself the possibility of God and humankind becoming one. Man was not ready and, alas, the opportunity was missed. Is Man ready now? Not really, though he fervently reasons out for himself the prospects of post-human destinies. “A mystic heart is seen in the letters of the apostles:
• Paul reached the divinised state of losing his ‘self’, saying: ‘I no longer live, but Christ lives in me!’
• James wrote that every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of Lights, in whom there is no variation nor shadow of turning.
• Peter proclaimed that Christ even descended to hell to liberate imprisoned souls, and
• John understood the most sublime truth of God's essence: God is Love!”
• So are the experiences of the Sufis, and of the Bhaktas lost in the divine beatitude.

But then where does the rest of the mankind stand? Jesus was crucified but only after a long period of time man sort of awoke to the message of love he had brought. He did awake, but does he live in it? Perchance once in a while. Has not the message ceased and the messenger waned? What has happened to the reassuring Word that came on the wings of glory?

In every religion some or the other gigantic vital being arose and appropriated for itself the light and the power that had come with it. Humanity as a whole continues to remain unregenerate. An empire was built, a Church was founded, the aspiring soul of man wrote the praise of God in books and on walls of the cathedrals, and in paintings, and in music, all celebrating the spirit of a new birth. And yet were invented the racks and wrenches of maltreatment, betraying how much man can get perverted. Hardly is there any difference between the crucifixion Christ faced and the burning of Bruno or Jeanne d’Arc at the stake.

In her last letter dated 28 March 1430 Jeanne writes: “I beg and request, very dear friends, that you defend the city for the king and that you keep good watch. You will soon hear my good news in greater detail.” But where was the good news? Soon her trial began and on 30 May 1431 she was executed at Rouen. Earthly gins and instruments of torture symbolised perversion of human nature; the practitioners of noble teachings stooped to shameful infra-rational mediocrity; worst example is of the holocaust which exposed the cruelty that lies in the gaping and mirky depths of the human belly.

• Can that night in his belly be illumined, the gloom removed?
• Is Savitri’s birth connected with it?
• Great souls had come, and a few had caught the flame; but what had happened to the rest?

In Savitri (pp. 609-10) the God of Death tells Savitri:
The Avatars have lived and died in vain,

Vain was the sage's thought, the prophet's voice;

In vain is seen the shining upward Way.

Earth lies unchanged beneath the circling sun;

She loves her fall and no omnipotence

Her mortal imperfections can erase,

Force on man's crooked ignorance Heaven's straight line

Or colonise a world of death with gods.

A few have caught the flame, cleansed their souls in the Hour of God. But even they are not ready enough to live and move in the wide Eternity of God, live here upon earth in its brightness, bright in the flame of immortality. When the moment comes, it is the Grace that comes to lift us up; the moment comes, and it is not we who cause that moment; what is expected of us is to be always ready to receive it. But hardly there is anyone who perceives its coming and, if at all he perceives, does he receive it. “I want twelve disciples to change the world.” But where are they? And one will betray him before the cock crows in the morning: "It is he to whom I shall give a piece of bread when I have dipped it." RYD