Contact with The Mother

GRACE WITHIN GRACE

One afternoon I sat up to read in the Mother India of December 5, 1959, the article: “The Grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.” I was so deeply moved that it created in me reverberations of gratitude to the Master and the Mother. When I recovered from the immensity of them, I found it was already 3.15 p.m. My God! lost in the Grace, I had forgotten to attend my Professor’s lecture on Eliot’s “The Burial of the Dead” in The Waste Land, which was to begin at 3 p.m. “Did Grace fail me or did I fail it?” This was the first thought that struck me. Then came second thoughts: “Well, let me give a fair man’s chance to the Grace. If, by some freak, the lecture has not yet begun, I can still attend and get the benefit.”

With this thought I rushed up to the Lecture Hall and found to my disappointment that the lecture had started. Then the faith in me said, “What if the lecture has started? Still there are 40 minutes to go (it was 3.20 p.m.). Why don’t you profit by them?” To this the sceptic in me came up with his objection and resistance: “My boy, you will be disturbing the harmony of the class if you intrude in the middle.” It was at this time that the third thought (not thoughts!) sprang from my mind: “Come what may, get into the class.” I invoked the peace of the Mother, took courage in both hands and managed to enter. There was, to my surprise, absolutely no reaction to my intrusion. To my greater surprise and even wonder, I found that the lecture on Eliot had not begun after all! The Professor was doing the concluding part of his lecture on Middle English (which, of course, I had not intended to hear) and the one on Eliot was to follow. Needless to say, I attended the whole lecture and enjoyed it exceedingly.

Only that night I could realise (I had known it before, but only yesterday I could realise it) that the Grace of the Divine is for those who wait without hope. Before going to bed, I prayed to the Mother in the aspiration that the sceptic in me might be educated and, then in the words of Eliot,

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope.

I hope this letter of mine does not come as too much of an anti-climax to that article in Mother India.

Kandaswami