The Issue (Part 3) – The Help and the Grace

If we cannot do it by ourselves, there is someone who is willing to do it for us. This is Savitri, the Light of the Supreme, the incarnation of the Divine Mother who enters the prison house of matter, veiling Her Light and Glory and Powers. She comes near us to breathe hope and give strength. Her very Presence is enough to disarm the sentries. Her smile is enough to fill us with renewed energy and enthusiasm.

But for this She must first sacrifice Her own divinity, become like us, one of us, experience the same sorrow and the pang that human beings experience, feel the same limitations and difficulties that we have, know what moves us and makes us suffer. Though Transcendent and beyond the cosmic Law, She yet must come beneath the yoke of the Law of Karma, assume a limited form and name, take up a human body vulnerable to disease and death like all the rest of us. Nay, She must experience the agony of the human heart, the pains that we experience when we lose a loved one, face and discover the inner reason for hell, wrestle with the Shadow that turns love into hate, good into evil, joy into suffering and life into Death.

Then alone She can give us a true and lasting solution, a remedy suited to our needs and our possibilities. If She comes flashing Her divinity then there can only be some dazzling miracles for the faithful few but not a change in the very machinery of Nature, not a fundamental victory that transforms that way Nature operates now subjecting us to grief and death. The very cosmic laws must change as they have outlived their purpose. New Laws must be established in place of the old, new ways of life, new modes of thought and activity, an entirely new way of being:

In her the superhuman cast its seed.
Inapt to fold its mighty wings of dream
Her spirit refused to hug the common soil,
Or, finding all life’s golden meanings robbed,
Compound with earth, struck from the starry list,
Or quench with black despair the God-given light.
Accustomed to the eternal and the true,
Her being conscious of its divine founts
Asked not from mortal frailty pain’s relief,
Patched not with failure bargain or compromise.
A work she had to do, a word to speak:
Writing the unfinished story of her soul
In thoughts and actions graved in Nature’s book,
She accepted not to close the luminous page,
Cancel her commerce with eternity,
Or set a signature of weak assent
To the brute balance of the world’s exchange.
A force in her that toiled since earth was made,
Accomplishing in life the great world-plan,
Pursuing after death immortal aims,
Repugned to admit frustration’s barren role,
Forfeit the meaning of her birth in Time,
Obey the government of the casual fact
Or yield her high destiny up to passing Chance.
In her own self she found her high recourse;
She matched with the iron law her sovereign right:
Her single will opposed the cosmic rule.
To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose.
    [Savitri: 19]