January 30th is the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. For me, Gandhi represents a spiritual presence of which I am in awe. His life-long commitment to non-violent protest of oppression and tyranny has something to say to us today. And so does the life-long work of Rabindranath Tagore, winner of a Nobel Prize in literature.
Tagore was Gandhi’s contemporary, less than a decade older than Gandhi was, and they were friends from the time they met in 1913.
This is not a biographical sermon. It is a sermon about their contributions, what they shared in common and in what ways they were so different. I will also talk about a man named Hammargren—unknown to history, but very meaningful to each of us.
Tagore is the brilliant, dazzling intellect,
Gandhi the devout spiritual leader, and
Hammargren is the dedicated servant – all models and inspiration for us. I will bring Hammargren in at the end of the sermon.
Tagore and Gandhi were from privileged families. Tagore was born in 1861, Gandhi in 1869. Tagore’s family was of the Brahmin caste and deeply religious. His family, however, had been outcast, shunned by their peers, because two of Tagore’s great uncles had become Muslims. Tagore’s family was extremely wealthy and did not suffer from this ostracism. They were, in fact, a family of independent spirit. Perhaps because of these circumstances, they embraced cultural and social change that they might not have embraced had they been a complacent Brahmin family.
Tagore’s grandfather was the first Indian industrialist and a close friend to Roy Rammohan Roy, considered the “Father of Modern India.”
Rammohan Roy was also a religious reformer who founded a religious center Brama Sabha, to worship “one true God.” Tagore’s father, a deeply religious and spiritual person was the catalyst that transformed the center into a dynamic, influential religious center that became the birthplace of Bharat Samaj, which established ties to the Unitarian missionaries and eventually the American Unitarian Association.
Tagore’s family story is tied to India’s story. They were part of the political and religious movements of modern India.
Tagore was deeply influenced by his father who taught him religious tolerance and provided the inspiration for Tagore’s inclination to world travel. Writers say that as an adult he had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of other cultures and had the money to satisfy this need to explore.
Gandhi, born eight years after Tagore into a business caste family was most influence by his deeply religious Hindi mother. As a child, he she taught him life lessons:
Non-injury to any living creature
Vegetarianism
Fasting for self-purification
Religious tolerance of other Hindi sects and other religions
When Gandhi left to study law at London’s University College—the same university at which Tagore studied—he made a promise to his mother in front of a Jain monk. It was not to eat meat while he was in England.
He did not eat any meat, but was not satisfied with that simple rule; he looked for and joined a vegetarian society. This led him to London’s Theosophical Society. This Society was founded to promote universal goodwill and was devoted to the study of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Brahmin texts, ancient writings of the Upanishads. Tagore also studied the Brahmin texts of the Upanishads.
After graduating from London University and being admitted to the Bar of England and Wales, returned to India. Not very successful in law in India, he took a one-year position with a Muslim firm in South Africa when he was twenty-four. During that year, he was a successful legal representative of the firm, but during that year, he had suffered many beatings and humiliations by the South African authorities who strictly enforced segregation laws against Indians. Just as his year’s contract was up, and he was preparing to return to India, he became involved in a political movement to protect Indian voting rights in South Africa. The movement failed, but Gandhi stayed for another six years to promote Indian rights in South Africa.
During this time, he returned to India for his wife and sons. When Gandhi was thirteen, his parents married him to a young India girl Kasturba, who was also thirteen.
Gandhi says in his writings that it was Kasturba who showed him courage and the kind of love one needed to practice non-violent protest. He says that when they were first married and he was still afraid of the dark that it was Kasturba who was never afraid and she taught him courage. He also said that he was an arrogant young man, and he tried every day to make Kasturba submit to his will—because she was his wife. She quietly protested his oppression, never accepting his tyranny, all the while loving him, but never allowing him to dominate her.
It was, he wrote, Kasturba who taught him the courage and the love required for Satyagraha. Satyagraha is a word created by Gandhi to represent the holding on to the one truth. For Gandhi, that one concept defines life—we are all one. Satyagraha is living and facing one’s enemies holding on to that one idea—we are one with our enemy. He said only courageous people could practice Satyagraha—a coward would never have the courage to face a violent enemy and see that enemy as himself.
Gandhi also used the Sanskrit word ahimsa in his pursuit of Satyagraha. Which means, “then when all violence subsides in the human heart, the state which remains is love.” Gandhi taught that our true nature is one of love and it is covered up by violence and other negative ideas.
Satyagraha is love in action.
Gandhi was devout. He woke every morning between 3:00 o’clock and 4:00 o’clock and prayed and meditated for several hours before breakfast. He prayed every night for several hours before going to sleep. His biographers write that as the years passed, instead of becoming an “old man,” he seemed to become stronger and stronger. He recited his mantra Rama, Rama, Rama, as an incessant prayer. It means, “I forgive you, I love you, I bless you.” And, when he was killed, his last words were Rama, Rama, Rama.
We know the story of Gandhi’s achievements. He helped India see that they could throw off the yoke of British imperialism with non-violent non-cooperation. He practiced what he preached to his country for over thirty years, and eventually, Britain gave independence to India.
There are some historians who say that it was the economic losses of World War II that compelled Britain to give India her independence, but most historians acknowledge that Gandhi’s contributions can never be overlooked or ignored.
If Gandhi was the doggedly, determined, devout prophet, Tagore was the dazzling, brilliant prophet.
His artistic and literary contributions in poetry, short story, essay, visual arts earned him, as I have already said, the Nobel Prize. Tagore was deeply religious and spiritual himself. He had mystical experiences at an early age. Where Gandhi was the mediocre student, Tagore was the brilliant student. What they had in common, was suffering.
Now, you might think, oh yes, both were from privileged families, how did they suffer? What is suffering to one may not be suffering to another. However, someone recently told me, “All of us have enough pain in our lives to justify our suffering.” We keep that in mind when we say both Tagore and Gandhi believe they had suffered a lot in their lives.
Gandhi suffered as a child, slow in school, shy, and afraid. Tagore suffered as a child because he felt alone and abandoned most of the time. This suffering, Tagore said, made him the writer and artist he became.
Tagore, like Gandhi, established ashrams, or communes, as we would say here in America. He believed in educating all Indians, and established schools in villages where there was no education. Tagore like Gandhi believed that the caste system was an integral part of the problem in India.
Gandhi saw it as inherently evil and kept Indians from seeing themselves as one. Tagore saw it historically. He wrote that when the light skinned Aryans—Indo-Europeans—came to India, thousands of years before, implementing the caste system, based on skin color was a way to conquer the indigenous people without annihilating them like the British and the Spanish did to the indigenous peoples of the North and South America and Australia. This caste system ensured the continued existence of the Indians, but in turn, Tagore wrote, it instilled in them acceptance of foreign domination.
He wrote that British imperialism was not a primary evil, but a ‘political symptom of our social disease.’ He believed education was the answer to freeing India from British rule. He was brilliant, a genius, and in his way he contributed to the cultural and social changes that India made to become a free India.
Tagore and Gandhi, friends, not always agreeing, but both believing a free India was possible.
Tagore dazzlingly brilliant
Gandhi doggedly devout
And now, the dedicated—Hammargren. Tagore wrote about Hammargren in an essay.
When I was young, a stranger from Europe came to Bengal. He chose his lodging among the people of the country, shared with them his service. He found employment … teaching … French and German, and the money … he earned he spent to help poor students in buying books… He was pitiless in his extraction from … his resources, in money, time, and strength, to the point of privation; and all this for the sake of a people who were obscure, to whom he was not born, yet whom he dearly loved. At last, under the continual strain of work in an alien climate and surroundings, his health broke down. He died, and was cremated at our burning ground, according to his express desire.
The attitude of his mind, … [the dedication] for a people … [from whom] he was so utterly [alien] …was something we were unaccustomed to associate with Europeans in India, that it gave rise in our mind to a feeling of love bordering upon awe.
We all have a realm … in our mind, where dwell deathless memories of person who brought some divine light to our life… who may not be known to others, and whose names have no place in the pages of history. Let me confess to you that this man lives as one of those immortals in the paradise of my individual life.
Let me read that again. We all have a realm … in our mind, where dwell deathless memories of person who brought some divine light to our life… who may not be known to others, and whose names have no place in the pages of history.
He came from Sweden, his name was Hammargren.
Tagore goes on to tell why Hammargren came to India, and the reason was his love of one of the men I spoke of earlier, Roy Rammohan Roy, the father of modern India.
What is important here is not “why” he traveled to India, but that he did travel to India, and dedicated his life for something in which he believed so deeply, that he died for his beliefs.
Hammargren dedicated
Gandhi doggedly devout
Tagore dazzlingly brilliant
Three human beings, using what talents God gave them to make a difference. There is a wide spectrum of usefulness. From Gandhi’s long life of sacrifice, to Hammargren’s dedicated but brief sacrifice among strangers, to Tagore’s brilliant voice of liberation—and everything in between.
I chose Tagore’s poem “The Skeleton” for our reading, because it expresses the possibilities we all have. Yes, we’re going to die, we are, after all, flesh and blood manifested around a skeleton, but this life is not one in which we can just exist.
Flesh and blood can never be the measure of the truth that is myself…
Never can my life contain to the full all that I have thought and felt, gained and given, listened and uttered.
We have, amidst our suffering, honey, and lotus blossoms, and secret paths of delight. And in the midst of it all, if we listen with open heart, we hear the “Eternal Silence,” we hear the “Word of the Lord.”
No, this life is not a life where we can just exist. We are created to make a difference and it does not have to be like anyone else’s, not Gandhi’s, not Tagore’s, not Hammargren’s, but ours. Our difference.
May it be so.
Reading I
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.
Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of you," nor again the head to the feet, "I have no need of you." On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? But strive for the greater gifts.
Reading II
A Skeleton by Rabindranath Tagore
A beast’s bony frame lies bleaching on the grass
by the meadow path –
the grass that once had given it strength and tender rest.
The dry white bones seem like the hard laughter of Time
which cries to me:
‘Thy end, proud man, is one with the end of the cattle
that graze no more,
for when thy life’s wine is spilt to its last drop
the cup is flung away with a final unconcern.’
‘Hollow is thy mockery, Death’ said I in answer,
Mine is not merely the life that pays its bed and board
at close of day
with its bankrupt bones and is made destitute.
Never can my life contain to the full all that I have thought
and felt, gained and given, listened and uttered.
Often my mind has crossed time’s border,
Is it to stop at last for ever at the boundary of
crumbling bones?
Flesh and blood can never be the measure of the truth that is
myself;
the days and moments cannot wear it with kicks at every step
as they pass on;
the wayside bandit, dust, dares not rob it of all its possession.
Know that I have drunk the honey of the formless
from the lotus of endless forms;
in the bosom of sufferings I have found the secret path
of delight;
I have heard in my being the voice of Eternal Silence;
have seen the tracks of light across the empty desert of the
dark.
Death, I accept not from thee
that I am a gigantic jest of God,
that I am the annihilation built with all the wealth
of the infinite.