I had invitations from Germany and I decided to go. But travelling from one country to another has become so difficult nowadays that I had to give it up. Specially, going from France to Germany is beset with obstacles. On my way back from Holland I shall try my best at least to visit Hamburg. Germany needs sympathy, and I hope I shall have the opportunity to go there and offer it to her.
The other day I was taken to Rheims and other devastated regions of France in a motor car. It was a most saddening sight. Some of the terrible damages deliberately done, not for any necessities of war, but to cripple France for ever, were so savage that their memory can never be effaced. For it will take a tremendous effort and also an immense lapse of time to make them things of the past. When the spiritual ideal is lost, when the human relationship is completely broken up, then individuals freed from that creative bond of wholeness find a fearful joy in destructiveness. In such catastrophes one can realise what a stupendous force of annihilation is not only kept in check in our society, but made into multitudinous manifestations of beauty and fruitfulness. Then we know that evils are like meteors, stray fragments, wreckage of a broken-up wholeness, which need the attraction of a great planet of life’s ideal to be assimilated into the peace of creation. Only spiritual ideals have that great power of attraction that can transmute these rebellious fractions into a perfect roundness. The evil forces are literally outlaws. They only need the control and cadence of creative laws to change them into good. Our Shiva is the lord of terrible spirits, who are spirits of death: and he is also Shivam, the good. The true goodness is not in the negation of badness; it is in mastery of it. It is the miracle that turns the tumult of chaos into the dance of beauty. The true education is the use of that power of miracle, that ideal of creation. Punishments and disciplines imposed from outside are negative. The teacher is Shiva. He has the divine power of destroying destructiveness, of sucking out poison. If France had the Shiva in her heart she could transform evil into good, she could forgive. And by that forgiveness she could prove her own immortality, and truly save herself from the hurt which was inflicted upon her.
This is difficult, but this is the only way of salvation. Only the creative ideal can completely get over the acts of destruction. It is the spiritual ideal, it is love, it is forgiveness. God is perpetually exercising it and thus the creation is ever kept sweet, and in the heart of death life has its ceaseless play of joy. Do we not know this in our individual life? Have we our own right to exist in this wonderful world? Would we not burn it, destroy it? Has not God’s creative power given us our place in his universe? Must we forget that, when we judge and deal with our own fellow beings?