Contact with The Mother

"YES, I WAS THERE"

I received a letter from my sister in California informing me that my mother was to undergo a series of operations. My mother had not written to me for fear of making me worried, living, as I was, three thousand miles away in Pondicherry.

My sister who had not cared to know anything about the Mother and whose Christian unitarian religion would never let her believe in her divinity, wrote to me in a tone of challenge, “Now tell that person in Pondicherry about whom you have so often been writing to us to do something in this critical period of our mother’s operations.”

I went to the Mother that evening and told her that I had received an urgent letter from my mother in the United States informing me that within four or five days she was to have a series of operations and that she wanted the Mother’s help.

The Mother did not do anything more than nod her head.

When about fifteen days had passed, I received a letter from my mother that she had been successfully operated on. “But”, wrote she, “something wonderful happened, very difficult to put into words.”

“After the operations, when the effect of the anaesthetic was gone and the pain became intolerable, suddenly, in the Boston Hospital itself, I felt the presence of somebody surrounding and enveloping me. I can’t explain it. I can’t put it in words. The pain left me completely and I had a wonderfully deep and peaceful sleep. I am now having a surprisingly rapid recovery.

“I want to ask you but one thing. Could that presence, could it be the Mother of Pondicherry?”

The day I received the letter I went to the Mother and told her the whole thing. In reply, with her wonderful smile, she uttered only these four words: “Yes, I was there.”