The Call and Blessing

 

WHEN Gautama Buddha passed, Ananda, the perfect disciple, grieving and disconsolate, said to the people, “The Light is gone out of the world!” Then they cried out from the depth of their grief, “Too soon! Too soon!”
On the fateful Friday, January 30, 1948, Jawaharlal the beloved, said almost in the same voice and to the same people, though 2,500 years had stolen by, almost the same words, “The Light is gone out of the world!” and there arose a sigh that echoed mournfully over the globe.

For Gandhiji, taken all in all, was the successor to the throne, on which only one prince among men had sat, Gandhiji the Companion of Truth, the Builder of Non-violence, the most excellent good.

We can no longer stand in his company, but he still walks the earth. The voice speaks in the spiritual parliament of man. The touch still lays its sweetness on the troubled bosom and we in this country see a glorious summons beckon.

Humble and gentle, meek and fail, he was yet more powerful than any that wielded power before him, but his power was not the power of the powerful but the power of the powerless, the power of pureness and truth, the power of the loveliness of the soul, the power of simple grandness of a personality wherein millions saw themselves, the well and the ill, the poor and the famished, the power of a philosophy and fellowship of spirit that awoke the underlying riches in life. He lived in the life around him, trying to mix it with his own substance, so that worth and merit, intellect and talent, charity and nobility, daring and courage, the best of all goodness and greatness in the country, came to him, almost unbidden, in continual pilgrimage.

His life was wind and storm, but he lived unruffled. He was perhaps not a saint in the traditional succession, but saintliness found in him her native shelter. He lived a lamp unto himself, a lamp in dark that gleamed far off and near by.

This was the man that never showed a way that he had not trodden himself, nor spoke a word that he had not tested in his own life: this was he whom, though he was perennially thrown into one sorrow after another, the spotless gladness of a life founded in moral beauty never forsook. This was the most formidable rebel that lived but a rebel without a prototype, for his enemies were his friends and companions in a common cause. This was the warrior that shrank from striking his foe and yet was victorious: this the general that lost almost every battle he fought and yet showed before an incredulous world that his defeats were victories and that he was victorious in both life and death.

The Father of the Nation was a pilgrim and all his life a pilgrim’s progress. He was a pilgrim in search of the unselfish, diligent, self-refining life. He had to pull down many barriers that stood in his path; not only political subjection but sectarian narrowness and jealousy, economic indolence and degeneration, religious blindness and bigotry, a whole host of false beliefs and rituals. He was the weakest of men that yet did the mightiest works, the meekest in the most ominous setting the commonest of men who in some degree altered the common man nearer to his own pattern by the power of his own example and the flame of his faith.

His life was a ceaseless worship and vigil to truth; his actions truth’s promises and witnesses; his speech truth’s open doorway.

It is this lamp of truth that made Gandhiji the Great Reconciler. He was not the founder of a faith but a fellow-traveller of the prophets, who never strayed from the ‘Eternal Fount’: from the Universal Will that frolicks in the trembling leaf and in the toiling ant, in the mysterious atom, in the mighty sweep of suns and planets. None ever lived who did so much to bring men and men together in a common brotherhood for common ends of the deepest import. His life was one long battle to stop the recurring battles between religions and display, their sameness and oneness at the bottom and, the foremost and most steadfast Hindu of the age, none ever left behind such attestation that, whatever the complexion of the faith, all were fellow-pilgrims on the same highroad to the same fulfillment and blessing.

He lived the life of uplift abounding and became the absolute Harijan, so that the upper castes might open their eyes to the molested wealth in the lower castes and raise themselves by kinship and equality. None ever lived that so confidently and convincingly disclosed the glory of simplicity or so strove to churn and purify the life around and away.

If we ever saw him, stood in his company or listened to his voice, if he ever trod on the ground we tread, if all this had not been a dream or a vision that sped through a slumber of the country, if his spiritual valour is not to vanish from the earth, we shall set out shoulders to the Wheels of his Mission. It is a call and blessing without parallel, that we shall become a missionary nation to preach and establish the oneness of mankind–to unify ourselves on the basis of brotherhood succoured from narrow notions of caste and creed, community and race: on the basis of fundamental humanity succoured from manifold species of insidious pride.

We are thus summoned to erect a memorial to his life by rendering each his life a memorial unto him, so that we might become a pioneering nation pledged not to pause but to succeed in bringing all men together in mutual kinship.

A noble act or a good thought, a gesture of kindliness or a small sacrifice, a little suffering gladly gone through for another, or a timely use of tolerant imagination, a lovely nod of the spirit or a gentle touch of the hand, accruing from each every day, will bring Gandhiji nearer and nearer and prepare this nation to set forth on the Great Enterprise.