"You who are weary,
downcast and bruised, you who fall, think perhaps that you are
defeated, hear the voice of a friend. He knows your sorrows, he
has shared them, he has suffered like you from the ills of the
earth; like you he has crossed many deserts under the burden of
the day, he has known thirst and hunger, solitude and abandonment,
and the cruellest of all wants, the destitution of the heart.
Alas! he has known too the hours of doubt, the errors, the faults,
the failings, every weakness.
But he tells you: Courage!
Hearken to the lesson that the rising sun brings to the earth
with its first rays each morning. It is a lesson of hope, a message
of solace.
You who weep, who suffer
and tremble, who dare not expect an end to your ills, an issue
to your pangs, behold: there is no night without dawn and the
day is about to break when darkness is thickest; there is no mist
that the sun does not dispel, no cloud that it does not gild,
no tear that it will not dry one day, no storm that is not followed
by its shining triumphant bow; there is no snow that it does not
melt, nor winter that it does not change into radiant spring.
And for you too, there
is no affliction which does not bring its measure of glory, no
distress which cannot be transformed into joy, nor defeat into
victory, nor downfall into higher ascension, nor solitude into
radiating centre of life, nor discord into harmony - sometimes
it is a misunderstanding between two minds that compels two hearts
to open to mutual communion; lastly, there is no infinite weakness
that cannot be changed into strength. And it is even in supreme
weakness that almightiness chooses to reveal itself!
Listen, my little child,
you who today feel so broken, so fallen perhaps, who have nothing
left, nothing to cover your misery and foster your pride: never
before have you been so great! How close to the summits is he
who awakens in the depths, for the deeper the abyss, the more
the heights reveal themselves!
Do you not know this,
that the most sublime forces of vasts seek to array themselves
in the most opaque veils of Matter? Oh, the sublime nuptials of
sovereign love with the obscurest plasticities, of the shadow's
yearning with the most royal light!
If ordeal or fault
has cast you down, if you have sunk into the nether depths of
suffering, do not grieve - for there indeed the divine love and
the supreme blessing can reach you! Because you have passed through
the crucible of purifying sorrows, the glorious ascents are yours.
You are in the wilderness:
then listen to the voices of the silence. The clamour of flattering
words and outer applause has gladdened your ears, but the voices
of the silence will gladden your soul and awaken within you the
echo of the depths, the chant of divine harmonies!
You are walking in
the depths of night: then gather the priceless treasures of the
night. In bright sunshine, the ways of intelligence are lit, but
in the white luminosities of the night lie the hidden paths of
perfection, the secret of spiritual riches.
You are being stripped
of everything: that is the way towards plenitude. When you have
nothing left, everything will be given to you. Because for those
who are sincere and true, from the worst always comes the best.
Every grain that is
sown in the earth produces a thousand. Every wing-beat of sorrow
can be a soaring towards glory.
And when the adversary
pursues man relentlessly, everything he does to destroy him only
makes him greater.
Hear the story of the
worlds, look: the great enemy seems to triumph. He casts the beings
of light into the night, and the night is filled with stars. He
rages against the cosmic working, he assails the integrity of
the empire of the sphere, shatters its harmony, divides and subdivides
it, scatters its dust to the four winds of infinity, and lo! the
dust is changed into a golden seed, fertilising the infinite and
peopling it with worlds which now gravitate around their eternal
centre in the larger orbit of space - so that even division creates
a richer and deeper unity, and multiplying the surfaces of the
material universe, enlarges the empire that it set out to destroy.
Beautiful indeed was
the song of the primordial sphere cradled in the bosom of immensity,
but how much more beautiful and triumphant is the symphony of
the constellations, the music of the spheres, the immense choir
that fills the heavens with an eternal hymn of victory!
Hear again: no state
was ever more precarious than that of man when he was separated
on earth from his divine origin. Above him stretched the hostile
borders of the usurper, and at his horizon's gates watched jailers
armed with flaming swords. Then, since he could climb no more
to the source of life, the source arose within him; since he could
no more receive the light from above, the light shone forth at
the very centre of his being; since he could commune no more with
the transcendent love, that love offered itself in a holocaust
and chose each terrestrial being, each human self as its dwelling-place
and sanctuary.
That is how, in this
despised and desolate but fruitful and blessed Matter, each atom
contains a divine thought, each being carries within him the Divine
Inhabitant. And if no being in all the universe is as frail as
man, neither is any as divine as he!
In truth, in truth, in humiliation lies the cradle of glory!"
- The
Mother
