Divine Love and Amazing Grace

In-depth feature — Reported by Prof Sehdev Kumar

14 Sehdev Kumar

Few are those from whom the Grace withdraws,

but many are those who withdraw from the Grace.

Sri Aurobindo

If vengeance and retribution have been the driving force in human history, as is so often asserted and by so many, then another force – seemingly so feeble and so rare – of love and compassion, of nobility of heart and of amazing grace runs like a warm current in the icy torrents of life. It is this force that gives meaning and substance to the idea of Divine Love and of Amazing Grace.

The tremors of uncertainty and disquiet that have shaken up Auroville over the past year and a half certainly seem to invoke the meaning, and the extent, of grace and divine love in the most existential terms.

How does one respond to certain debilitating words and actions that seem so steeped in arrogance to so many?

How does one keep a window open for a dialogue when so much is perceived by many to be brashly shut off with crass impudence?

How can one truly be “a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness” when you are trampled in your own home by policemen in the name of ‘official protocol’ of the distant and unyielding powers-that-be?

How can those who are intoxicated with the love of power ever understand the power of love?

As I see some dark shadows engulf Auroville, I wonder where could one look for hope and certain Divine Grace, for some redeeming light that would make everyone see – far beyond one’s own limited and stunted view – the special and unique grandeur of the idea and vision of Auroville in the grand human journey across the ages.

Don’t we all, at some time or another in our lives, let go our own individual stance for the sake of something grander: a mother’s sacrifice for her child, a seer’s for his vision, a soldier’s for his country, an explorer’s for his mission, a seeker’s for Truth?

It is thus that once I heard a psalm of hope in the words of the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the midst of the most devastating war in the human history. In 1941, at the age of 8, he saw a certain divine grace descending in the faces of war-ravaged women in Moscow as they came out to watch a march of 20,000 German prisoners. Each one of these women had lost a brother, or a son, or a husband to the Germans. The women saw the emaciated, blood-stained soldiers hobbling past on crutches, or leaning on each other.

“Then I saw an elderly woman in broken-down boots push herself forward,” wrote the poet in 1962. “She went up to the column, took from inside her coat something wrapped in a colourful handkerchief, and unfolded it. It was the crust of black bread. She pushed it awkwardly into the pocket of a soldier, so exhausted that he was tottering on his feet. And now, suddenly, from every side, women were running toward the soldiers pushing into their hands bread, cigarettes, whatever they had. The soldiers were no longer enemies. They were people. They were human.”

What is the source of such ascension in the human spirit? How does such sense of oneness and human unity emanate even in the most sordid moments? In the words of 15th century weaver-sage Kabir:

From one light all has come to be

What is good, what is bad

Are all phantoms of your own mind.

In the midst of such seeming distance and turmoil in Auroville at present, one wonders how does one – how do we all – prepare for such grace to emanate?

How does Auroville, as one large family with members from all over the world, and India, as a hosting nation and as Vishwaguru – through her various representatives – prepare?

A fourteenth-century Indian text takes an analogy from the world of painting. Like the linen cloth on which the painting is made, the heart, the text suggests, must first be washed, and cleansed thoroughly of impurities. It must then be ‘primed’, made properly smooth, for only upon such a surface can a clear outline be drawn. With the drawing completed, the last stage follows: the colours are filled in.

Each one of us then fills in the colours in accordance with our own pratibha, our own hidden talent for grace. Or we imbibe that talent from the words and inspiration of such sages as Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope,” observed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. “Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”

Hope. Faith. Love.

Could these be the seeds in the ground of our being that bring forth the fruit of Grace imbued with the fragrance of Divine Love?

I believe this is how, each one of us in Auroville – as a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness, and in celebration of the vision of human unity – must let our self-centredness go so we can learn to move, slowly but surely, towards the Centre of the Self.

It is not an easy journey for any one of us; it has, in fact, often been very arduous for me in my own endless hankerings and seekings in many lands and over many years. Yet, I believe, it is a necessary journey. A real Pilgrimage.

Empathy. Love. Grace

Is there anyone among us who has not struggled to see the face of another as our own?

“What is done out of love,” insisted Nietzsche, “always takes place beyond good and evil.” In that penumbral region, in a certain state of grace, sometimes we are blessed to discover how, on the face of each one of us, we wear, in the illuminating words of Thomas Hardy, “but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.”

In the midst of such reflections, I found myself quietly speaking to the children of the City of Dawn:

O Child of this new Light,
Remember
If such a tiny seed
In such dark dingy waters
Can rise to become
Such a beautiful lotus
What might not you and I

My Love
Become in our journey
To the Sun.

Sehdev Kumar