“We All Are Ramakrishnas”
This is Romain Rolland’s praise, in admiration, of Ramakrishna:
The Seraphic Master had spent his whole life at the feet of the Divine Beloved, the Mother – the Living God. He had been dedicated to Her from infancy; before he had attained self-consciousness he had the consciousness that he loved Her. And although, in order to rejoin Her, he had been condemned to years of torment, that was only after the manner of a knight-errant, the sole object of whose trials was to make him worthy of the object of his chaste and religious love. She alone was at the end of all the interlacing paths in the forest – She alone, the multiple God, among the thousands of faces. And when he had reached Her, he found that he had learnt to recognize all those other faces and to love them in Her, so that with Her he embraced the whole world. The rest of his life had been spent in the serene fullness of this cosmic Joy.*
Inherently, we all are Ramakrishnas. To live in his Joy is to live in the Mother, through, I believe, coming to Know our mothers as Her.
* The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel, trans. E.F. Malcolm-Smith (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 2008), p. 1.
