September 6, 2017 – Freedom and Surrender

From the quickened womb of the primal gloom,
The sun rolled, black and bare,
Till I wove him a vest for his Ethiop breast,
Of the threads of my golden hair;
And when the broad tent of the firmament
Arose on its airy spars,
I pencilled the hue of its matchless blue,
And spangled it around with stars.

I painted the flowers of the Eden bowers,
And their leaves of living green,
And mine were the dyes in the sinless eyes
Of Eden’s Virgin queen;
And when the friend’s art in the truthful heart
Had fastened its mortal spell,
In the silvery sphere of the first-born tear
To the trembling earth I fell.

When the waves that burst o’er a world accurst
Their work of wrath had sped,
And the Ark’s lone few, tried and true,
Came forth among the dead,
With the wondrous gleams of the bridal beams,
I bade their terrors cease,
As I wrote on the roll of the storm’s dark scroll
God’s covenant of peace.

Like a pall at rest on the senseless breast,
Night’s funeral shadow slept —
Where shepherd swains on Bethlehem’s plains,
Their lonely vigils kept,
When I flashed on their sight, the heralds bright,
Of Heaven’s redeeming plan,
As they chanted the morn, the Saviour born—
Joy, joy, to the outcast man!…

Part 1 of the poem “Light”, written by Sri Aurobindo, aged 10

Freedom and Surrender

…this is what’s remarkable: that when one is perfectly surrendered to the Divine one is perfectly free, and this is the absolute condition for freedom, to belong to the Divine alone; you are free from the whole world because you belong only to Him. And this surrender is the supreme liberation, you are also free from your little personal ego and of all things this is the most difficult — and the happiest too, the only thing that can give you a constant peace, an uninterrupted joy and the feeling of an infinite freedom from all that afflicts you, dwarfs, diminishes, impoverishes you, and from all that can create the least anxiety in you, the least fear. You are no longer afraid of anything, you no longer fear anything, you are the supreme master of your destiny because it is the Divine who wills in you and guides everything. But this does not happen overnight: a little time and a great deal of ardour in the will, not fearing to make any effort and not losing heart when one doesn’t succeed, knowing that the victory is certain and that one must last out until it comes. There you are.

The Mother

The Sunlit Path, page 211