Extracted from
MEDITATION ON THE IMITATION OF CHRIST: A VEDANTIC INTERPRETATION
by Swami Chidakarananda and Sister Jayanti.
1. The Learner: Father in heaven, Father of Jesus Christ my Lord, I
bless you for deigning to remember me and my poverty. Father of mercies, God of
all comfort, I thank you for refreshing me with your comfort, little though I
deserve any comfort at all. To you and your only-begotten Son, together with
the Holy-Ghost, the Comforter, I give blessing and glory always, both now and
for ages without end. Ah, Lord God, you the holy one, you my lover, when you
come into my heart, the whole of my inmost being will leap with joy. You are my
glory, the comfort of my heart; my stronghold and my refuge in my hour of
peril.
It is
said that grace is when one receives much more than one deserves. Nowhere is
this felt as intensely as in spiritual life.
When
love touches the heart, all our previous troubles are forgotten, we feel an
overwhelming gratitude engulfing us, and we thank God and the universe for this
sweet and rare experience that so utterly exceeds anything we could have
thought about it. Then we sing a million praises and rejoice in humble
gratefulness; we feel and know that we are blessed.
2. As yet I am but weak in love,
unsure in virtue; that is why I need your support, your comfort. So come to me,
come to me often and teach me what is in your holy laws. Set me free from evil
passions; heal my heart of all its ill regulated affections; so that, whole and
pure in my inmost being, I may become ready to love, strong to endure
suffering, steadfast to persevere.
The
mind cannot stay all the time in the peaks of divine love. And if we have
recently awakened to the realm of love, we may occasionally feel that our old
habits and tendencies slip back into our life when love seems to depart or
shines less brightly. We may feel, as Kempis says, “weak in love, unsure in
virtue.” But there is no cause to be afraid; as we shall see in the coming
verses, once we fall into the blazing furnace of love, it will purify all dross
and rekindle our forgotten divine glory.
3. A mighty force it is, this
thing love, mighty and altogether good; alone it takes the weight from every
burden, alone it bears evenly the uneven load. It bears a burden as if no
burden were there, makes the bitter things of life sweet and good to taste. To
love Jesus is a wondrous thing; it urges men on to mighty deeds, stirs up in
them the desire for a life ever more holy. Love must be ever mounting on high,
unfettered by things below; love would ever be free, a stranger to every
worldly desire; fearful least its inward vision grow clouded, least some
worldly gain should encumber its advance, some worldly misfortune bring it
headlong down. There is nothing sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing
higher, nothing wider, nothing fuller, nothing better in heaven or earth; for
love is born of God, and only in God, above all that he has created, can it
find rest.
When
man attains the highest degrees of divine love, it permeates our life entirely
and it reshapes all our thoughts and actions, rendering us unable to do
anything that may interrupt its blessed current. But in the initial stages love
must be protected just as we protect a child from any kind of harm. Therefore
Sri Ramakrishna used to advice to first develop and strengthen our love for
God, to make it impervious to all external influences. Then we can live in the
world without fear, for once love is established in our heart, everything we
experience will simply bring us one more chance to feel the touch of love.
“If
you enter the world without first cultivating love for God, you will be
entangled more and more. You will be overwhelmed with its danger, its grief,
its sorrows. And the more you think of worldly things, the more you will be
attached to them.
“First
rub your hands with oil and then break open the jack-fruit; otherwise they will
be smeared with its sticky milk. First secure the oil of divine love, and then
set your hands to the duties of the world. [1]
There
is a beautiful similarity in this verse between the way in which Vedanta
describes the Absolute and the manner in which Kempis explains love. Vedanta
describes God as Satchidananda, i.e. Existence, Knowledge and Bliss in an
absolute degree. Similarly, Kempis tells us that “love is born of God, and only
in God, above all that he has created, can it find rest.” This is so because
God is that very love: perfect, immortal love. When this divine love is
experienced through the selfish influence of the ego it manifests as passion,
greed, etc., but when the ego begins to fade love starts to manifests its
unselfish, all-pervading influence, and we begin to love all without
distinction, for God is love, and he is all.
4. A man in love treads on air; he
runs for very joy. He is a free man; nothing can hold him back. He gives all
for all, finding his rest in one who is high above all else, the source and
origin of all that is good. For gifts he has no regard, but turns to him who is
their giver, who is above all good gifts. Love often knows no limits; its
impetuous fire leaps across every boundary. Love feels no burden, makes light of
toil, strives for things beyond its strength. Love never tries to make out that
anything is impossible; everything, in the eyes of love, is both possible and
lawful. Love, then, can do everything; many a task there is that love can
fulfil and many a wish it can make effective, where the man who does no love is
powerless and fails.
Real love is, in a certain way, a kind of
madness. When we love, all the cares and considerations that we normally have
in connection with the body are forgotten. When man is enraptured in the
madness of divine love, his behaviour does not often follow any of the
conventional patterns of reason or the norms of society. Sri Ramakrishna
frequently said that in this world everybody is mad about something; some are
mad after money, others after name and fame, etc., and there are some very
fortunate ones who are mad after God.
This divine love can only be expressed in terms
of human love and human relationships; so we find in the life of many saints
and mystics that those who were possessed of this divine madness worshiped God
in a very intimate way, without barriers – as friend, as child or even as
lover. Swami Vivekananda describes the characteristics of this intense love
thus:
“Often
it so happens that divine lovers who sing of this divine love accept the
language of human love in all its aspects as adequate to describe it. Fools do
not understand this; they never will. They look at it only with the physical
eye. They do not understand the mad throes of this spiritual love. How can
they? ‘For one kiss of Thy lips, O Beloved! One who has been kissed by Thee,
has his thirst for Thee increasing for ever, all his sorrows vanish, and he
forgets all things except Thee alone.’ Aspire after that kiss of the Beloved,
that touch of His lips which makes the Bhakta[2]
mad, which makes a man a god. To him, who has been blessed with such a kiss,
the whole of nature changes, worlds vanish, suns and moons die out, and the
universe itself melts away into that one infinite ocean of love. That is the
perfection of the madness of love.”[3]
