My luck cannot be adequately expressed in words. I saw the
Divine Mother in flesh and blood in Jillellamudi.
I worshiped her. I sat in her presence and heard her speak in the most gracious manner to saints and sinners alike. I collected the pearls that dropped from her divine lips, and lodged them in the recesses of my heart. I saw her giving food to hundreds and thousands of visitors every day. I watched her in some of her most sublime moods and also in her commonest moments. I saw her caressing the heart-broken and the afflicted in the storm of life. I watched her kissing away their tears in one enchanting sweep of love. I saw her wiping out their misery with her love-laden words of solace. I saw her smiling happily and sharing in their joys. I observed her sobbing with grief stricken, taking a full share in their tragedy. The rich and the poor, the affluent and the indigent, the happy and the miserable, the high and the humble all flocked around her in Jillellamudi and found in her their own Mother ready to share their joys and sorrows, a fountain of peace and solace. To her, everyone was welcome, beggar or prince. Everyone was dear to her as her intimate child. Here lay her supremacy. She is indeed the epitome of all those attributes that are extolled as divine in all the scripture of the world.
One day, a visitor from Israel, a young man of 20, asked Mother. “What is the difference between you and Christ”? Mother answered, “None”.
He again asked another question: “Jesus used to refer to his Father in Heaven, to someone superior to him. Is there anyone superior to you?”
Mother replied, “No”. There is none superior to me. None inferior too. I am also the lowest!”
Mother was amazingly simple like that!
Her words were straight and simple. They went into the listeners’ hearts like darts. Mother had practically no school education. But She spoke words of the highest wisdom. Spiritual stalwarts meekly sitting at her bewitching feet sought clarification on philosophical data and collected the pearls that fell from her gracious lips.
Mother’s message is two-fold: Love and selflessness. She was an incarnation of compassion like the Buddha and Jesus Christ. She left us a superb legacy of love and self-denial. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is also the ringing message of Amma.
Mother came to awaken the world from the deep and wretched slumber of ill-will into the realms of good-will. Many a Vivekananda has to stand up and march forward carrying her message to the farthest corners to make the world a better place
to live in.
Only when we live her message of love and selfless service. will we be truly worthy of the company she gave us while she graced the earth with her sojourn!
Let us, therefore, light our little torches as the perennial bonfire of Love left behind by Mother! Mother expects every one of us. her dear little children to live up to the ideals she set for us!
Let us solemnly rededicate ourselves to the service of the suffering, the poor, the needy and the neglected. That alone will be the real service to Mother.