Transcendant Grandeur of the Lord

TRANSCEDENT GRANDEUR OF THE LORD

PeddadaRamaswamy

Man has from the earliest times of antiquity been incurably religious; and though, either from the allurements of iniquity or the encrustations of indifference, for a time entirely oblivious of his high destiny, he has never been able to remain the “finished and finite clod, untroubled by a spark.” The ceaseless yearning for a greater and a yet greater perfection is the fine innuendo bywhich the soul has always asserted its larger claim. St. Bernard has defined man as “a capacity for the infinite.” Religious experience in every age has affirmed “that there is no repose for the mind except in the absolute, for feeling except in the infinite, for the soul except in the Divine.” The spiritual auto-biographies of the world’s saints and mystics abound with instances where the human soul in its godless march has been unsuspectingly arrested by the aggressive grace of God which, dancing in the beauty of a flower or darting through the flash of lightning, smiling on the cheeks of a baby or beaming through the tears of a mother, winning bythe charms of love or subduing through the desolation of sorrow has profoundly disturbed it, firmly possessed it, steadily transformed it and finally appropriated it. The “wistful eyes of life” are therefore continually set towards a vision that is alike its home and its heaven. And the gravitation of the soul which draws it towards this home and heaven is love. The Poet - prophet Words worth has therefore sung “our destiny our being’s heart and home is with Infinitude and only there.” And the greatest devotees have everywhere instinctively realised the inadequacy of ascetic practices and external disciplines and found the fullness of spiritual satisfaction in the beatitudes of love, its flights and its profundities, its ecstasies and its exaltations. “Thou has made us for Thyself and our hearts shall know no rest from Thee. “So sings St. Augustine. And Rabindranath Tagore proclaims the supremacy offaith over mere works, of love over moral law when he sings “They come with their laws and codes to bind me fast; but I evade them ever, for I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into His hands”. The Sufi mystic Mirza thus expresses his experience:

This is the banquet-house of infidels and all within are intoxicated.

All from eternity’s dawn to the day ofdoom, in astonishment lost!
Depart then from the cloister, and towards the tavern bend thy steps;

Cast away the cloak ofthe darwish, and don thou the libertine’s robe!

Thus inebriated with love, every devotee has plunged into deeper and deeper profundities of the Supreme Being. And love has such wonderful potency that when a soul is possessed with it, it not merely “covereth” but annuls, entirely annihilates, completely transforms, mysteriously alehemises the “multitude of sins.” Hence it is that the love­intoxicated poet sings:

“The spirit of the worm beneath the sod

In love and worship blends itself with God.”

Yes; the spiritual experience of man has everywhere been this; “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God.”

In its mystical adventures, the human spirit has soared to the highest altitudes of spiritual exaltation in the quest of the Lord as the Spouse Divine of the human soul. “Thy name is as ointment poured forth; therefore do the virgins love thee.” So sings Madam Guyon to whom religion is but the marriage of the human soul with the Divine Soul. And in our own country, the Vaishnavite devotees have ever typified the eternal relationship of the human soul with the Divine soul in the happy imagery of the ecstatic love of Radha and Krishna. Religion may begin in the fear of the Lord; it may pass through the discipline of obedience to law; it may ripen into the trusting attachment of the child to the Divine Mother; but it reaches its climax in the beatitudes of conjugal love, in the ecstasies of bridal atonement, in the raptures of spousal union. And yogis and mystics and sufis all over the world have worked themselves into the sex of the woman and mirrored forth their high spirituality in the absorbing quest of the Celestial Bridegroom, in the mid-night tryst with the Lord of Brindavan, in the enraptured communion with the Heart-­Ravisher. And all the paraphernalia of kisses and embraces, of perfume and zephyrs, of the wine and the flute, of the rose and the lotus, of the bulbul and the kokila are only the imagery which signify the throb of expectancy or the thrill of enjoyment, the anguish of the quest or the ecstasy of realisation, the torture of separation or the transport of union.

Of such spousal consummation ‘Ekanta Seva’ is a most superb and inspired Epthalamum. As the allegory is unfolded, the song progresses through the whole gamut of spiritual emotions poured forth with the vividness and spontaneity of enjoyed bliss. In the very beginning is a fundamental fact of mystic experience, Namely, that even as in physical life it is the mother that starts the little child on the process of drawing nourishment from the bosom of love, so in spiritual life it is the grace of God which starts the soul on the Quest for the Infinite. The Lord reveals himself to the soul merely to disturb its love. But even before the soul has recovered from the embarrassment of this sudden revelation from the intoxication of this ravishing vision, the Glory is withdrawn, the Beauty becomes veiled; and the soul as it wakes up feels an aching void within and without. But the thirst has been induced, the longing has been awakened; and the soul borne up by the consciousness of its destiny, sustained by the knowledge of its invaluable birthright, starts on a long and arduous quest; not the quest of the trembling criminal for a doubtful pardon but the quest of the lonely wife for her concealed Lover. The flying swallow and the passing breeze are commissioned with message of love, of languishing love. The sins of the past are recollected - the sin of comprehending in thought the unfathomable Profundity, the sin of enshrining in the heart the Immeasurable Reality, the sin of stepping in startled bashfulness at the sudden coming of the Lord, the sin of self-forgetting in a delirium of joy at the blessed vision. But the anguish of desolation is soul-deep, the longing for the Lord is irrepressible; and the Quest is renewed with a determined purpose to fathom the depths of Love to explore the recesses of Peace, to scale up the heights of Holiness, to bombard the citadel of joy, that the Lord might be captured from the retreats and reveries of his inaccessible Transcendence. And the poem hastens through the excitements of coming union, the anticipations of prospective bliss, on to the Beatific Vision in the final canto, –a  most impassioned out-pouring of god­-intoxication which for its rapture of inward realisation, its ecstasy of mystic transport stands perhaps unsurpassed, if at all equaled, in modern mystic literature. The grandest verity of spiritual life is here once again illustrated, “thy opening and his entering are but one moment.” And the joy and thankfulness are overpowering that at last, not as the reward of paltry discipline, but as the triumph of torrential grace, the little stream is swallowed up into the Vast Ocean, the flickering ray is resumed into the Vast Ocean, the flickering ray is resumed into the Central Effulgence, the feeble note is caught up into the Universal symphony, the eternally pre-ordained mergence of the soul in the Over-soul has at last been realised. And as the little rain-drop is evolved into the shining pearl, the dull carbon is transfigured into the brilliant diamond, the vile worm is metamorphosed into the glorious conch, even so, the prodigal is reclaimed into the beloved child, the sinner is baptised into the rejoicing saint, ‘man’s nothing perfect’ is mysteriously transformed into “God’s all-complete.” And then follows a sudden dilatation of consciousness. The Soul that has realised God has the Indwelling Inspirer, beholds him also as a Besetting Presence: The clouds are the mantle that deck His brow; the stars are the pearls that make up His garland; the sky is the abode where His majesty is unveiled; the earth is the pedestal for the resting of His feet. Oh, who can describe the transcendent grandeur of the Lord? Who can praise the surpassing glory of the Supreme Being? Words are frail and fall off, thought is stupefied and turns away, Imagination trembles and reels in the attempt to describe Inconceivable Reality, to grasp Absolute Perfection, to limn forth Ravishing Beauty, to glorify Inexhaustible Love. The ‘initiated’ alone know; the ‘elect’ alone enjoy. And of such a chosen soul, the blessed bride of the Lord of Love, the only prayer is that the Lord may vouchsafe ever to let it abide in Him and grant unto it the precious blessing, the valued privilege, the indescribable delight, the rapturous experience, the ravishing ecstasy of singing His love, proclaiming His glory, fulfilling His Will, establishing His Kingdom through time and eternity. Such is the mystic experience, such the inspired message of the realised ones.

(Introduction to Ekanta Seva written by the twin poets Venkata Parvatiswara Kavulu in 1922)