what if a young man encountered the stark words of Jesus in the writings of leo tolstoy
and ever after took seriously the question 'what would Jesus do'
what if he determined to treat every person he met
-the homeless beggar on the street, the millionaire, the mayor, the woman who cleaned his toilet
-with care and dignity and respect.
what if he gave away all his possessions except necessities
so few that he could tote them all in a backpack.
what if he insisted on long periods of daily meditation,
never letting a hectic schedule interfere with his time of silence and solitude.
what if he shunned modern conveniences,
stayed immune to styles and fashions
and devoted his life to cultivating inner, spiritual strength.
moreover, what if this solitary figure became, despite his eccentricities,
one of the most famous people in the world,
the moral leader of the second most populous nation.
and to complicate matters, what if this man who modeled his life after Jesus
decided, as an adult, deliberately to stay outside the christian fold.
such is the life of mohandas k. gandhi (1869-1948)
...there has been no one like him:
no one more disciplined or stubborn or inconsistent or creative or baffling or lovable or infuriating.
many of the political principles we take for granted today originated in the mind of this man
who led a fifth of humanity to independence.
he broke every rule in the political manual and in the process
helped found the largest democracy in the history of the world.
fifty years after his death, we can at least begin to assess G by asking what relevance he has
in our speeded up world of internet sites and cruise missiles.
in my trips to india with dr. brand, i was surprised to find
how little G's modern compatriots know about this remarkable man.
and because he was called a saint-a hindu saint, certainly, but one strategically informed by christianity
-we in the west should pause to ponder what message he has for us.
he sits like a superego on the shoulder of the western church,
asking all of us the question Tolstoy asked himself:
'why don't we practice what we preach?
G died three years after the US dropped the atomic bomb on japan,
an event further convincing him that, for the planet to survive,
the world must look to the east for solutions.
G believed the west had forfeited its ability to lead the human race
and represented a future of decadence, materialism and armed conflict.
(foot: 'mr. G, what do you think of western civilization? G: 'i think it would be a great idea.
he looked for a new way based on spiritual, not material, strength.
few, very few, are heeding that call today.
the US stands as the world's sole superpower
and its sex and money culture continues to spread around the world.
modern india honors, but hardly follows G.
giant textile mills have supplanted the wooden spinning wheels.
high tech office complexes churn out software that runs the world's computers.
and, three bloody wars after G, his nation brandish the ring of power that had appalled him:
nuclear weaponry.
even so, india cannot get the strange little man out of her consciousness.
if someone staged a beauty contest to select the least likely world leader, G would win easily.
barely 5 feet tall, he weighed a mere 114 pounds
and his skinny arms and legs stuck out from his body like the limbs of a malnourished child.
his ears flared straight out from his shaved head;
his squat, oversized nose looked fake,
like one of the rubber noses attached to glasses that people wear to costume parties.
steel rimmed spectacles kept slipping from that nose, tilting down toward his mouth,
itself oddly shaped due to his habit of wearing dentures only while eating.
his lips curled over nearly toothless gums.
'he's rather like a little bird, sad lord mountbatten, the last british viceroy of india,
a kind of sweet, sad sparrow perched on my armchair.
as G walked, he leaned either on a bamboo stave or on the shoulders of his 'crutches',
as he called his two young grandnieces.
he wore the same clothes every day:
loose indian loincloth and sometimes a cotton shawl,
both made of coarse material he had spun at his own wheel.
he carried all his belongings in a small sack, except for one,
an ingersoll pocket watch, which he proudly wore on a string.
G followed a strict schedule and no one,
not the king of the british empire nor the leaders of india nor his closest friends, could alter it.
he would arise daily at 2 a.m. to read from the hindu or christian scriptures and say prayers,
spend the next quiet hours answering correspondence,
then do his ritual ablutions, complete with a salt and water enema.
at noon he passed for another health regimen,
placing a porous cotton sack packed with oozing mud on his abdomen and forehead.
modern historians, who tend to pick at the scabs of the famous, tell of G's
petty demands on associates, his bizarre personal habits, his cranky stubbornness.
he tested his vow of chastity by sleeping with nude young women.
the man who could galvanize millions failed as a leader of his own family,
mistreating his wife and raising a son who rebelled to become an embezzler, gambler and penniless alcoholic.
and when his wife lay dying from acute bronchitis
and the british flew in a vial of rare penicillin that could save her life,
G refused the doctor permission to give it to her intravenously lest the violence of the needle violate her body. as a result, she died.
nevertheless, after the gossip is heard and G's image corrodes
and his own nation continues to forsake much of what he lived and died for
-even after all that, G still radiates a unique quality, one that never failed to affect those who knew him.
moutbatten, a seasoned military commander, summed up his moral power with a simple strategic formula,
at thew time when civil war was breaking out across india:
'on my western front i have 100,000 crack troops and unstoppable bloodshed.
on my east i have one old man and no bloodshed'.
somehow G mobilized his followers, millions of them, into joining a crusade like none the world had seen.
'those who are in my company, he warned his followers,
must be ready to sleep upon the bare floor, wear coarse clothes, get up at unearthly hours,
subsist on uninviting, simple food, even clean their own toilets.
they fought with the weapons of prayer, fasting, prison terms and bodies bruised from beatings
and in the end their unorthodox methods helped liberate half a billion people.
...G's most famous contribution, the technique of civil disobedience, evolved gradually.
indian born, he trained as a lawyer in london, then moved to south africa.
he led marches, took his share of beatings, spent a few hundred days in jail,
and learned the discouraging results of protest under an oppressive regime.
upon return to india he confronted a very different situation:
not a minority community of indians living in a strange land, but a majority, 500,000,000 citizens strong,
in a subcontinent ruled by the british.
indians had expected the british to reword their loyal service in world war I with more independence,
but instead the colonial power clamped down with a series of harsh laws
not unlike the discriminatory laws int the american south.
as the british empire tightened the screws, G meditated long hours about the appropriate response.
it came to him early one morning, in the dawning moments between sleep and consciousness.
he decided to call for a day with no activity at all.
india would respond to its masters by simply refusing to cooperate.
shops would close, traffic would cease, the country would shut down for one day.
we who live in its wake, after dozens of adaptations around the world,
can easily miss the extraordinary nature of that move.
nothing liked it had been attempted before.
...next, G tackled the colonial economic system.
..when G lived in india, one sixth of its population seemed more animal than human.
they lived in squalid slums amid open sewers in which swarmed rats and every other disease bearing agent.
the hindu doctrine of karma gave a theological basis for the elaborate system of 5000 subcastes
that kept people in their place.
caste, a grouping of human beings that went deeper than tribe or race, had been accepted for 5000 years
and few questioned it.
the lowest caste of all, Untouchables, provided a valuable service to society,
sweeping the streets and cleaning the latrines and sewers-
acts a higher caste hindu would never perform.
you could tell untouchables by their dark color and by their posture,
for they cringed like beaten animals.
the name defined them:
if a cast hindu so much as touched one or touched a drop of water one had polluted,
he would recoil and begin an elaborate purification process.
an untouchable had to shrink from the path of caste hindus
to avoid casting a shadow and thus defiling their superiors.
in the 1930's the british discovered a new subcaste, the Invisibles,
whom they had not encountered in three centuries of presence there:
assigned the role of washing clothes for the Untouchables,
these poor creatures believed they would pollute higher castes by sight,
so they emerged only at night and avoided all contact with other people.
with little to gain but refection from his peers, G took up the cause of the Un.
first, he bestowed on them a new name;
they were no longer to be called Un, but rather Harijans, the Children of God.
at his first ashram, a spiritual commune, in south africa,
G stirred up a storm of protest by inviting an Un to move in.
when the chief financial backer of the commune experiment withdrew his support,
G made plans to move to the Harijan's own quarters.
finally he committed the most defiling act possible for a hindu,
cleaning the latrines of the Un.
when he returned to india, he called them his brothers and stayed in their homes whenever possible.
years later, after independence, when other leaders in india were pressing lord mountbatten
to accept the honorary post of governor-general,
G proposed an alternative candidate,
an Un sweeper girl 'of stout heart, incorruptible and crystal like in her purity'.
although his candidate did not get the nomination,
by such symbolic actions G helped change the perception of Uns all across india.
laws were modified and strictures removed.
today in india, the caste system continues in a milder, less repressive form.
but 100,000,000 people now call themselves not by a curse-Untouchable
-but by a blessing: they are the Children of God.
G strove to recognize the inherent dignity in every person.
in his ashram in india, he adopted a leprosy patient, another of india's outcasts.
each day he changed the man's bandages and bathed him.
he wanted, he said, to devote the same care in making a mud pack for a leprosy victim
as in conducting an interview with the viceroy of india.
he also helped elevate the status of women in the country
by surrounding himself with highly competent women followers.
G summarized his beliefs in three points, which he credited to the victorian author john ruskin:
1. that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all
2. that a lawyer's work has the same value as a barber's
inasmuch as all persons have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work
3. that a life of labor, such as that of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman,
is a life worth living.
G sought ways to put those principles into practice.
in cities like bombay and calcutta, he preferred staying in a hovel of the sweepers' colony to a hotel.
he used a pencil until it was reduced to an ungrippable stub,
out of respect for the human being who made the pencil.
...i see the face of Jesus in disguise, said mother teresa
about the dying beggars she would invite into her home in calcutta
'sometimes a most distressing disguise'.
she, like G, understood that the direction of charity is not condescending, but rather ascending;
in serving the weak and the poor, we are privileged to serve God Himself.
G worked hard at identifying with the poor, by removing any barriers that might distance him.
to anyone who has been to india, i need cite only one instance of G's outreach:
his insistence on traveling third class on trains.
he would sit on hard benches crammed together with the unwashed peasants and their farm animals,
an experience of crowdedness, noise, filth, and smells unimaginable to most westerners.
why? he was once asked.
he replied, 'because there is no fourth class'.
(i contrast that attitude to my own excitement when i collect enough mileage points
to earn an upgrade to an airline's business class.)
G had no innate love of suffering
and had been assertive in early battles for personal rights in south africa
after he was thrown out of a first class compartment because of his skin color.
yet as he immersed himself in the sacred scriptures of hinduism, islam buddhism, and christianity,
he became convinced that the humility of a servant is the one posture required by God.
only then did he strip off his european clothes, dispossess himself of material things
and seek companionship with the poor and suffering.
'a leader, he said, is only a reflection of the people he leads.
G allowed no VIPs to interfere with his preferred style.
when Lord moutbatten offered to fly him to an important meeting on his private plane,
G chose instead his normal third class rail passage.
he caused something of a scandal on a visit to england to meet with parliament and king george.
he arrived amid great fanfare and press coverage
and the nation gasped as he tottered down the steamship gangplank
wearing only a cotton loincloth and leading a goat, his milk supply, by a rope.
declining offers from the best hotels, he chose instead to stay in an east end slum.
when reporters asked him to explain why he dared meet with a king in a 'half naked' state,
G replied with a smile, 'the king was wearing enough clothes for both of us'.
G never insisted that political leaders follow his strict path;
his was a moral and religious crusade, not just a political one.
but he did ask, after indepencence, that each government minister live in a simple home
with no servants and no car,
practice one hour of manual labor daily and clean his or her own toilet box.
long after his death, congress leaders continued to wear the homespun cotton uniform he espoused
and conducted party meetings while spinning cotton threads.
...in 1947, as the momentum for independence swept across india,
centuries old animosities began to boil to the surface.
hindus and muslims turned against each other with ferocity.
muslims burned the huts of their hindu neighbors, forced them to eat sacred cows,
raped the hindu women and butchered their husbands.
hindus fought back in kind and thousands of muslims also died in the months leading up to independence.
increasingly it appeared the whole country would burst into flames.
while politicians sat in elegant palace rooms in new delhi and bartered for power and land,
G went on an 'ointment' crusade.
let them argue, he said; he was going to the people,
to the angry hordes who were assailing each other so viciously.
at the age of 77 he headed to the region where the most violence had occurred.
he led his ragtag group of hindu disciples into charred muslim villages
to face taunts and rocks and bottles.
if turned away, he would look for a tree to sleep under.
if accepted, he would read from the bhagavad gita and koran and new testament,
teach basic principles of health and hygiene, then trudge on to the next village.
in all he visited 47 villages, walking 116 miles barefoot.
in each village G tried to persuade one hindu and one muslim leader to move
into the same house together and serve as guarantors of peace.
he asked them to pledge themselves to fast unto death
if one from their own religion attacked an enemy.
incredibly, the method worked.
while debates continued in the delhi palaces,
G's personal ointment began to salve the wounds across the region.
for a while the killing stopped.
when the politicians decided to carve the separate nation of pakistan out of india, however,
the country needed more than ointment;
it needed huge swaths of bandages to stench the flow of blood that quite literally
turned rivers scarlet and filled the skies with vultures.
as G had predicted in his appeals against it,
the partition provoked a reaction with no historical precedent.
when boundary lines were finally announced,
hindus found themselves caught within the borders of a newly created and hostile pakistan
and muslims found themselves in hindu india.
thus began the greatest mass migration ever as 10,000,000 people left their homes
and attempted a frantic march across mountains and desert plains to a new home.
lord mountbatten, the british viceroy who oversaw independence,
knew that the two areas were potential conflagrations.
on the west where india bordered west pakistan, hostilities would undoubtedly break out.
but the eastern territory, along the gerrymandered border of east pakistan (now bangladesh),
posed a greater threat.
sitting along that border was calcutta, the most violent city in asia.
no city in the world matched its poverty-more than 400.000 beggars
-its religious bigotry, its unrestrained passions.
calcutta brazenly worshiped the hindu goddess of destruction,
who wore a garland of skulls around her waist.
in a one day preview of what was to come, violence had flared in calcutta
and 6000 bodies were tossed in the river, stuffed in gutters or left to rot in the streets.
most had been beaten or trampled to death.
as reports of atrocities flooded in, mountbatten sent his crack boundary force to the western frontier
to check the escalating violence (it would ultimately claim half a million victims).
that left him no reserves for the eastern front.
desperate, mountbatten pleaded with G to go to calcutta and there
among the Un he had embraced as brothers, somehow to work a miracle.
G consented only after a muslim leader, one of the most corrupt politicians in calcutta,
agreed to live with him, unarmed, in one of calcutta's worst slums.
if a single hindu died at muslim hands, G pledged he would fast to death.
so it was that two days before india's independence mohandas G arrived in kipling's
'City of the dreadfulnight'.
a large crowd awaited him as usual, but this one greeted him not with cheers but with shouts of anger.
they were hindus out for revenge and to them G represented a capitulation to muslim injustices.
hadn't they seen relatives butchered and wives and daughters defiled by muslim mobs?
G got out of his car amid a shower of rocks and bottles.
raising one hand in a frail gesture of peace, the old man walked alone into the crowd.
'you wish to do me ill, he called, and so i am coming to you'.
the crowd fell silent.
'i have come here to serve hindus and muslims alike.
i am going to place myself under your protection.
you are welcome to turn against me if you wish.
i have nearly reached the end of life's journey.
i have not much further to go.
but if you again go mad, i will not be a living witness to it'.
peace reigned in calcutta that day
and then on the formal day of india's independence
and the next
and the next,
for 16 days in all.
in the alley outside G's slum home, people gathered each night to attend his prayer meetings
a thousand at first,
then ten thousand
and finally a million people jamming the streets of the slum
to hear him lecture over loudspeakers on peace and love and brotherhood.
once again G was confronting a political crisis with that he called 'soul force'.
the innate power of human spirituality.
while whole states in india were going up in flames,
with millions of people fleeing their homes
and hundreds of thousands dying,
not one act of violence occurred in that most violent city.
'the miracle of Calcutta' it was called worldwide.
a relieved lord mountbatten dubbed G, 'my one man boundary force.'.
the miracle did not endure.
on the 17th day two muslims were murdered,
a rumor about a hindu victim spread
and then, a few hundred yards from G's house,
someone lobbed a grenade into a bus full of muslims.
the people had broken their pledge and
G began a fast unto death, directed not against the british but against his own countrymen.
he would not eat food again unless all those who had committed violence
repented and solemnly vowed to stop.
at first no one cared.
what was the life of one shriveled old man in the face of an assault on
one's religion and family and honor?
revenge seemed far more appropriate than forgiveness.
gunfire echoed through the streets of calcutta during the first day of G's fast.
within 24 hours his already weak heart started missing one beat in four,
and his blood pressure dropped precipitously.
the next day, as his vital signs plummeted, rioters paused and listened to
broadcast reports of the old man's blood pressure and heart rate.
soon the attention of every citizen of calcutta was riveted on the straw pallet
where he lay, too weak to speak.
the violence stopped.
no one was willing to take an action that might cause
the Great Soul to die.
one day more and the gang responsible for the murders came to confess to G,
to ask forgiveness,
and to lay their arms at his feet.
a truck arrived at his house filled with guns, grenades and other weapons
that people had surrendered voluntarily.
the leaders of every religious group in the city signed a declaration
guaranteeing that no more killing would take place.
persuaded by their actions,
G took his first few sips of orange juice and said his prayers.
this time the miracle held.
calcutta was safe.
as for G, he made plans to head west, as soon as he regained strength,
into the heart of the violence that had killed half a million people.
when i read the history of mahatma G alongside the history of the christian church,
i cannot help wondering what went wrong.
why did it take a hindu to embrace the principles of
reconciliation, humility and vicarious sacrifice so clearly modeled by Jesus Himself?
G credited Jesus as his source3 for these life principles,
and he worked like a disciplined soldier to put them into practice.
what has kept christians from following Jesus with the same abandon?
..G's auto biography presents events in a strange proportion.
'the story of my experiments with truth' he titled it,
portraying external events as merely the stage on which
the internal drama of his own character development was playing out.
one paragraph will mention the Great salt march, a turning point in G's career and india's history,
but four consecutive chapters will explore his internal agony over
whether or not to include goat's milk in his vegetarian diet.
G cast his life as the gradual refining of a soul.
in the autobiography, G traces the evolution of his simple lifestyle.
he had tried western ways as a law student in london,
outfitting himself in an evening suit, silk top hat, patent leather boots, whit gloves and a silver tipped walking stick.
he remained something of a dandy when he returned to india
and did not begin to change until he went to south africa.
first he ironed his own shirts, much to the ridicule of his law colleagues.
then he practiced cutting his own hair, leaving patches of unevenness that drew even more laughter.
while drawing a good salary, he experimented by halving household expenses,
then halving them again.
at the end of every day he made a meticulous accounting of every penny spent.
from these experiments, G found that the process of
spending less money and acquiring fewer possessions
simplified his life and gave him inner peace.
in addition, it allowed him to identify more closely with
the poor people he often represented in court.
over time, he winnowed his material possessions down to these:
EYEGLASSES
A WATCH
SANDALS
A BOOK OF SONGS
A BOWL
to answer correspondence he used pads made from the cut up envelopes of the letters he was answering.
he ate with a spoon that had been broken off and repaired with a piece of bamboo lashed to it with string.
reading his account, i recall with a pang that when i moved from chicago to colorado
the movers calculated my household belongings to weigh 12,000 pounds.
even subtracting the 6000 pounds of books, that leaves three tons of material accumulation!
and with all this baggage, do i have a life measurably richer than mahatma G's?
yesterday, i interrupted this chapter to spend an hour scrambling on the rood of my car
trying to repair a garage door opener.
i had another frustrating interruption tinkering with the software that runs my fax machine.
the battery for my portable phone ran down.
i realized with a start who much of my life is ruled by material things.
i can justify or at least rationalize some of these possessions,
especially those that help me in my work.
yet how carefully do i attend to Jesus' warning
against the danger of gaining the whole world and losing one's soul?
Jesus' lifestyle, i must admit, had much more in common with G's than with mine.
voices in the west today are calling for a return to simplicity.
some christians uphold the virtues of a simple lifestyle and raise questions about
the morality of western standards in the light of world inequities
(though, in fairness, the level of simplicity they recommend more closely resembles
what G started with than what he later attained)....
G had dined with great leaders.
he had seen the seduction of power,
the reliance on servants to carry out every whim,
the endless spiral staircase of luxury,
the absorbing anxiety over investments,,
the deluge of letters and speaking invitations and endorsements and phone calls.
knowing well the burden of fame, he also knew the only way to combat it
was to seek simplicity with all his heart.
if he did not, his soul force,
the inner strength from which he got the stamina and courage for moral confrontations,
would leak away.
G had suspicions about modern technology.
he believed people who owned cars, radios and well stocked refrigerators and clothes closets
would become psychologically insecure and morally corrupt.
he knew enough about soil conservation to realize that india's land
could not tolerate even a a few decades of the sold abuse caused by high technology farming.
(in 150 years, iowa has lost more of its topsoil than india has lost in 5000 years.)
he had questions about how long energy sources would last.
and besides, G said, he would continue to recommend cows
until a tractor was invented that could produce milk, yogurt and fertilizer.
ironically, the stimulus for G's drive toward simplicity
came from the writings of westerners-Tolstoy, ruskin and thoreau-
who convinced him that riches were a burden
and that only the life of labor was worth living.
G named his first commune Tolstoy farm in the novelist's honor.
..the west and india too for that matter, has ignored G...
..somehow..G managed to be fairly effective without even a hand crank telephone.
'our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,
which distract our attention from serious things', said thoreau, his mentor.
'they are but IMPROVED MEANS TO AN UNIMPROVED END,
the end which it was already but too easy to arrive at...
we are in great hast to construct a magnetic telegraph from maine to texas;
but maine and texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate'...
G also observed every monday as a day of silence,
both to rest his vocal cords and to promote harmony in his inner being.
he held to that silence even when summoned to meetings in the heat of negotiations over india's future.
from the inside, as a journalist,i have watched a disturbing pattern in what we do to religious leaders today.
we reward them with applause, fame, enticing new contracts and a flurry of requests
for speaking engagements and media appearances.
we push our pastors to function as psychotherapists, orators, priest and chief executive officers.
when a leader shows unusual acumen, we dangle the temptation of a radio show or TV program,
complete with a fund raising machine to float the organization.
in short, we in the church slavishly copy the secular model of media hype and corporate growth.
i wonder how much more effective our spiritual leaders would be if
we encouraged them to take monday as a day of silence for reflection, meditation and personal study.
(note: or better yet follow the pattern Jesus taught the apostles:
(let the church chose spiritually qualified deacons and do anything and everything else that is not against
Jesus' mission for the church...) 'BUT WE WILL G-I-V-E O-U-R-S-E-L-V-E-S TO
THE MINISTRY OF THE WORD AND PRAYER..... (N-O M-O-R-E...not even the teeniest thing).)
in his personal habits G moved beyond self discipline into renunciation.
he allowed no room for sensuous pleasures
and in his autobiography you read nothing of a pleasant experience with music or with nature
or the delights of taste or smell.
a typical mean consisted of two segments of grapefruit, some goat's curds and lemon soup.
he also waged a lifelong struggle against lust.
at the age of 37, though married, he took a solemn vow of celibacy.
he spent much energy investigating what foods might have the slightest aphrodiacal quality,
then eliminated salt, spices, tea and most exotic vegetables and fruits from his diet.
such strictness seems strange to modern westerners,
though of course christian history has seen its share of ascetics.
the east has a continuing rich legacy of 'holy men' who seek to control human passions.
'it is for my sake, explained G to his critics, that i insist on such spartan practices.
i am the one who will suffer if i give in to my carnal nature'.
at a conference in south carolina, i heard arun G, grandson of mahatma,
ell the story of traveling from south africa to india at the age of 12 in order to meet his grandfather.
arun's father, a leader of the civil rights movement in south africa,
arranged the trip out of fear that arun was growing up as a spoiled brat.
the first meeting with the famous grandfather did not go well.
mahatma was trying to teach the young boy to keep an anger diary.
'it is normal for you to feel anger'. he said.
what matters is how you channel that anger'.
he asked arun to pause each time he had angry feelings
and in the heat of the moment to write down all his thoughts and feelings.
then, the next day, after the emotions had cooled,
he should go back and read the diary and reflect on how to channel that power for good.
'go ahead and try it, said his grandfather.
write down whatever makes you angry'.
the 12 year old arun soon felt so much rage against having to waste time recording his anger
that he broke his pencil in two and threw it over his shoulder.
gently but firmly, his grandfather sat him down and gave him a lecture.
'that pencil was just a stub, he said,
but imagine if 20,000,000 boys around the world threw away a pencil.
think of the trees that would have to be cut down.
think of the workers who put the graphite inside the pencil.
think of the needless waste'.
he borrowed a flashligh and the old man and young boy
spent the next hour searching on hands and knees for the pencil stub.
for the next several weeks, Mahatma coached his grandson on controlling his expression of emotions.
'HE TAUGHT ME TO ,MASTER MYSELF, arun recalled.
'it took many more months of practice after i returned home.
but in time I SAY THAT IT SET ME FREE.
i had been a helpless victim of my own passions.
now i was learning to be the master'.
back in south africa, arun followed in his father's footsteps as a civil rights leader...
'i could never have taken the abuse and even physical violence
involved in the campaign for civil rights in south africa had i not leaned that lesson as a 12 year old'.
the next day, at the same conference, i sat on a panel discussing the cultural trend
toward obscenity and rage as seen in rap music by performers like eminem
and in television programs like 'south park' and 'beavis and butthead'.
i listened as parents voiced concern over lyrics describing wife murder, cop killing and racial hatred
and then teenagers vigorously defended their right to express whatever emotions they felt.
'shows like that and rap music, they're our ways of getting out the hostility we feel', said one 18 year old.
'take them away and kids'll probably turn to violence'.
the difference between two approaches to human passion,
the way of the east and the way of the west, had never seemed so stark.
G knew that HIS ONLY MORAL POWER FOR OTHERS
CAME FROM WHAT HE HAD ALREADY MASTERED HIMSELF.
once, a woman in his village brought her son and asked him to
tell the child to stop eating sugar because it was bad for him.
she said the child would not listen to her, but he would listen to G.
'bring the boy back in a week, and i will tell him'.
a week later the woman returned with her son.
G took the boy in his arms and
told him not to eat any sugar,
then bid them both good bye.
the mother lingered behind and asked, 'Bapu, why did you have to wait a week?
could you not have told him last week?'
'no', he replied. 'last week i myself was eating sugar'.
it was this principle, of moral persuasion through example, through vicarious suffering,
that G would hone to perfection in his practice of fasting.
early in his career, tow of the young people under his tutelage lapsed into immorality
and G agonized for days over a fitting response.
most members of the ashram called for strict punishment of the offenders,
but it seemed to G that a guardian or teacher was at least partly responsible
for the failures of hie ward or pupil.
he doubted the other students would realize the depth of his distress
or the seriousness of sin unless he did some penance.
and so, in response to the students' transgression,
he went on a total fast for 7 days and took only one meal a day for four and a half months.
'my penance pained everybody, he concluded, but it cleared the atmosphere.
everyone came to realize what a terrible thing it was to be sinful
and the bond that bound me to the boys and girls became stronger and truer'.
...many of G's accomplishments died with him.
his beloved nation took a different path than the one he had advocated
and so has the world,
growing since his death more belligerent and less receptive to his core beliefs.
but for a time this strange, baffling man
somehow managed to raise other men and women above the level of their usual selves.
he held no office
and any who obeyed him did so voluntarily.
his only claim to leadership was the force of his own soul.
'the commonplace deed is a great step and a beautiful compromise, said G.
'the beauty of it consists in today's compromise being less impure than yesterday's;
it consists in our eyes being carried in a straight line towards something beautiful
when we look, not at the deeds, but at the direction in which they are set.'
G had intimate christian friends, such as the missionaries charlie andrews and e. stanley jones.
as his writings demonstrate, he understood the details of christian doctrine
better than most chirstians.
why, then, did he ultimately reject it?
growing up in india, G had little contact with christians as a youngster.
\rumors spread in his town that if a hindu converted to christianity
he would be forced to eat meat, drink hard liquor and wear european clothes.
G also recalls one very unpleasnat memory of a christian missionary on a street corner of his town deriding hindus and their gods.
as a law student in london, G had a more prolonged exposure to christianity.
at a friend's request, he read through the entire bible.
he confesses that the old testament was uninspiring and put him to sleep,
but the new testament produced a profound impression.
throughout his life, G found himself going back to the teachings of Jesus,
his model for nonviolence and simple living.
he also read...still, he could not reconcile the disparity he saw between Christ and christians.
G lived in south africa during the most formative poeriod of his life,
and a few nasty incidents ther did little to disabuse him of his notions of christianity. he encountered blatan discrimination in that ostensibly christian society, being thrown off trains,
excluded from hotels and restaurants, and barred from some christian gatherings.
one white woman who used to invite G for sunday meals
made it clear that he was unwelcome after she observed the influence G's vegetarianism
was having on her 5 year old son.
before then, he had been attending the wesleyan church with her family every sunday.
'the church did not make a favorable impression on me, he remembers,
citing dull sermons and a congregation who appeared rather to be worldly minded,
people going to church for recreation and in conformity to custom.
..(concerning becoming a christian) ..my difficulties lay deeper.
it was more than i couldbelieve that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God,
and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life.
if God could have sons, all of us wwere His sons.
if Jesus was like God, or God Himself,
then all men were like Gopd and could be God Himself.
my reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus
by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world.
metaphorically there might be some truth in it.
again, according to christianity only human beings had souls and not other living beings,
for whom death meant complete extiction; while i held a contrary belief.
i could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice and a divine teacher,
but not as the most perfect man ever born.
His death on the cross was a great example to the world,
but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept.
the pious lives of christians did not give me anything that the lives of men of other faiths had failed to give.
i had seen in other lives just the same reformation that i had heard of among christians.
philosophically there was nothing extraordinary in christian principles.
from the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed to me that the hindus greatly surpassed the christians.
it was impossible for me to regard christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions.
i shared this mental churning with my christian friends whenever ther was an opportunity,
but their answers could not satisfy me.
he summarized his position.
'i cannot concede to Christ a solitary throne'.
sadly, the concepts of grace and forgiveness from God do not appear in G's works.
hinduism stubles at grace.
'if one is to find salvation, said G, he must have as much patience
as a man who sits by the seaside and with a straw picks up a single drop of water, transfers it
and thus empties the ocean'.
at the end of his autobiography, he is still lamenting that he is not passion free
in thought, speech and action.
'i must reduce myself to zero, he concludes.
G graciously omits from his autobiography one other painful memory from south africa.
the indian community especially admired c.f. andrews, whom they themselves nicknamed
'Christ's faithful apostle'.
having heard so much about andrews, G wanted to meet him.
but at his firs chance to hear andrews, G wanted to meet him.
but at his first chance to hear andrews, G was turned away from the church meeting
because his skin color was not white.
later G and charlie andrews became fast friends, but G never forgot the sting of that incident.
commenting on G's experiences in south africa, e. stanley jones concludes,
'racialism has many sins to bear,
but perhaps its worst sin was the obscuring of Christ in an hour when
one of the greatest souls born of a woman was making his decision.
on one visit to india i found myuself in a christian community in new delhi,
a kind of ashram composed of young indians who are trying to work out corporately
Jesus' radical call to his followers...
wanting to encourage my fellow christians in new delhi,
i reminded them of G's statement that insight into the world's problems
must come from the east and not the west.
'WE MUST BE THE CHANGE WE WISH TO SEE', G said.
i urged them to take the best of what their continent has produced,
some of the same ideals that appealed to G and trace their christian roots.
they could challenge my nation in a way that i as an american could not. (?!)
as shown by the fact that young americans will sometimes listen to a G before they will listen to Jesus.
the world may be receptive to this message, i said.
one thoughtful young indian who had sat quietly through the discussion spole up at this.
'i don't understand, he said. you seem to say that the west in general is receptive to a saint,
someone like G who stands apart from culture.
but is the church receptive?
you have said that american christianity has never produced a saint who follows along the lines of a G.
all the christian leaders are so different from G.
you seem to imply that if a G rose up in the american church today,
he would not be taken seriously, would perhaps be laughed at and rejected.
and yet those same christians say they worship Jesus Christ.
why don't they reject Him?
He lived a simple life, preached love and nonviolence, refused to compromise with the powers of this world.
He called on His followers to 'take up a cross' and bear the sufferings of the world.
why don't american christians reject him?
(note: maybe most of the american christian church has..)
it was a good question. one i still cannot answer.
'stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards
has been the way of the world through the ages.
today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified.' mahatma gandhi
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