To all those who were instruments in bringing about suffering to the saints, their attitude was one of forgiveness and returning good for evil. They tried to do good to the man who did them the greatest harm. To endure everything, to be always firm and unshakeable in their faith in the Lord and a spirit of continuous forgiveness-this is the nature of saints, and these characteristics are found in saints all over the world. All people who have risen to spiritual heights and have become worshipful by mankind—they have always manifested these wonderful qualities. To the saints, God is not a distant entity. To them God is an ever present living reality. Just as we are present to each other, to them, too, God is ever present. They turn to Him at every moment of their life. Whenever they were in need of help, solace, strength, guidance or light, they immediately turned to God even as a child turns to its parents. God was ever present before them and thus their lives were transformed by this ever present awareness of a superior being whom they felt to be their very own. They melted all the differences between themselves and God. They felt themselves to be very intimate with God. They felt God to be their own.
We also express this intimacy with God everyday through our prayers and hymns but we do not feel it intensely enough. In troubles, we trust our money or other external aids of the world rather than the indweller. We lack the sense of God’s presence.
On the contrary, the saints, even while living in the external world, are always in close contact with the Lord. Therefore they are God-men. They live a life in God and they always consider God to be the only real treasure, the greatest wealth, the only object worth having in life. They never have any other desire. Their desirelessness found ultimate rest in God alone and filled their heart with perfect contentment.
All saints stood above caste and creed. They belonged to one family—the great cosmic family of God. Absolute purity, absolute trust in God, absolute compassion, contentment, desirelessness, perfect guileless nature and total dependence on God alone—these you find in all saints.
Take anyone of the western saints. You will find the same simplicity, the same humility, the same frankness. Even if a man was about to cut their throat, they embraced him. That was the saintly reaction. They were filled with the spirit of this divine quality. In short, they fulfilled the spirit of the Amritashtaka, the last eight verses of the Twelfth Chapter of Srimad Bhagavad Gita wherein Sri Krishna describes the characteristics of a lover of God, one who is dear to the Lord.
We should also try to delve into the heart of these saints and feel as they felt in their hearts—an overflowing love for God, total forgiveness, motherly compassion, intensity of faith which alone could enable them to bear everything that came on their way and the Himalayan type of perseverance and patience they exhibited on the path of God-Realisation.
And if with our open hearts after removing all bias, we try to delve deep into the nature of the saints, then all the noble traits of their personality will come before us and we can engrave and emulate these noble traits in our hearts. That indeed will be the only effective manner in which we can worship these great souls by which we make an effort to carry out their teachings with sincerity and in a true spirit of respectability and try to emulate their lofty ideals and characters.
This emulation will be the greatest tribute we can pay to these saints.
We should try to emulate them. We should try to emulate the great ideal they have set before us through their exemplary lives. Therefore, to make ourselves adherents of the pattern of divine life which they have worked out, to make ourselves faithful reproductions of these great ideal lives would be the most effective manner in which we can offer our tribute and honour to these saints.
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