Soul Force

Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham

November 12, 2006

Mohandas K. Gandhi was a particularly unattractive youth.  He had very large ears and he was exceedingly shy.  He was also cowardly.  As he put it

I was a coward....  It was almost impossible for me to sleep in the dark, as I would imagine ghosts coming from one direction, thieves from another and serpents from a third.[1]

It took Gandhi a long time to find his voice.  Looking at his path can help us find our own voices.  Listening to his voice in support of non-violence is also particularly important today because we are once again being bombarded with messages that violence is the only possible solution to problems such as terrorism. 

During his school years Gandhi deliberately chose as a close friend a Muslim, Sheik Mehtab, partly for protection from bullies at school, partly to challenge his own shyness by being with a boy so daring and outrageous that he was sometimes referred to as a “devil.”[2]  Perhaps in desperation over his gnawing sense of personal failure (he flunked out of college), Gandhi went to London to study for the bar.  The one demand placed on him by his mother was a vow that he not eat meat.

Now this vow to abstain from meat put him in a difficult position both on his voyage to England and once he got to London in 1888.  Vegetarian cuisines were, to say the least, not in vogue.  The British held that the Hindus’ refusal to eat meat resulted in their “weakness,” and hence the supposed ease with which they could be subjugated.  In his life’s work, Gandhi was to use the force with which he clung to this vow to demonstrate to the world that strength of character could outmatch mere force of arms and indeed brutality in all its forms.

As a youth, Gandhi was not immune to British influence in other regards, however.  As he attempted the impossible task of becoming an English gentleman, he describes his attire this way:

[A] high silk hat burnished bright; a Gladstonian collar, stiff and starched; a rather flashy tie displaying almost all the colors of the rainbow under which there was a fine striped silk shirt;  … a morning coat; a double breasted vest; and dark striped trousers to match.  He was, [in short], a student more interested in fashion and frivolity than in his studies.”[3]

This phase – complete with dancing, violin & elocution lessons, lasted about three months until a friend gently convinced him that he would never be able to pass as an English gentleman; he promptly reversed field and began a return to his own roots.  It was this wonderful youthful naiveté followed by a return to his true self which first drew me to Gandhi.

Gandhi still hadn’t found his voice when he returned to India after three years and found himself too shy to practice law because he could not bring himself to speak in court.  Fortunately, a relative found him a job in South Africa, working to resolve a business dispute between parties there.  The color bar was rigorously enforced in South Africa.  When he appeared in court he was termed a “coolie barrister” and ordered to remove his turban; he refused and left the court.  While traveling across the Transvaal with a first class ticket, he was ejected from his compartment and the train when a white man objected to his presence. 

It was while doing this job that Gandhi discovered where his particular genius lay – he was able to resolve the case amicably by clearly understanding the needs and interests of the two parties through mediation and peacemaking rather than one-sided advocacy.  As he was about to return to India, he learned that the South African government proposed to deny Indian citizens living there the vote, and to invalidate their marriages.  He found himself compelled to stand with the community of which he had become a part.  He had come to realize that the British gentility to which he had once aspired served as a mask for the oppression of his people, and all people of color, both in South Africa and in India. 

By now, Gandhi had come to realize that what you wear on the outside is a lot less important than what is in your soul.  While training in London, he had been entreated by many of his friends to convert to Christianity, which they insisted was the only true religion.  Other friends insisted that he study the Koran, but his own roots called him back to Hinduism, whose shortcomings were manifest, but where he found teachings and treasures similar to those he saw in Christianity and Islam.  The one book about Christianity he came to treasure was Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You.  Tolstoy – the Russian novelist who penetrated the human side of war in his monumental War and Peace – strove to understand the true meaning of the message of Jesus, when it seemed to him that Christianity had turned it into something quite different.  Gandhi found Tolstoy’s to be the one book about Christianity which seemed to be genuine.  Now, as it happens, there’s a Unitarian Universalist note to this story.  Tolstoy wrote his book in response to the work of Adin Ballou, the American Universalist and then Unitarian minister who founded Hopedale, a utopian community in Milford, MA.  The community, which lasted from 1841 to 1856 before succumbing to a hostile buyout during a depression, was based very simply on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in particular this:

Matt 5: 38 "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' 39 But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; …  43 "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

There’s a wonderful scene in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi that captures the application of this teaching:

Walking together in a South African city, [Gandhi and a Presbyterian missionary] suddenly find their way blocked by young thugs. [The] Reverend … takes one look at the menacing gangsters and decides to run for it. Gandhi stops him. "Doesn't the New Testament say if an enemy strikes you on the right cheek, you should offer him the left?" [His friend] mumbles that he thought the phrase was used metaphorically. "I'm not so sure," Gandhi replies. "I suspect he meant you must show courage – be willing to take a blow, several blows, to show you will not strike back nor will you be turned aside. And when you do that it calls on something in human nature, something that makes [your enemy’s] hatred decrease and his respect increase. I think Christ grasped that and I have seen it work."[4]

This was the message Adin Ballou taught Tolstoy who then passed it on to Gandhi.  Gandhi showed his esteem for Tolstoy by naming his first ashram “Tolstoy Farm.”  He began the practice of reducing his needs to an absolute minimum in order to free his mind and body for service.  He started by cutting his expenditures in half and then doing that again, learning at every step how to sustain life with as little attachment as possible.  He found that the joy of life increased as his attachment to material goods decreased.  Years later, when asked by a journalist to sum up the secret of his life in three words, he chuckled, “Renounce and enjoy!”[5]

          By the time Gandhi returned to India in 1914 after two decades in South Africa, he had found his voice.  He had become a champion of his people and had forged the means of ahimsa – non-violent resistance – backed by the spiritual depths to support it, satyagraha – soul-force or truth force.  Each morning for the rest of his life he meditated and read the Bhagavad Gita to prepare himself for the day, and each evening he convened a prayer meeting for whoever was around the ashram with readings from all of the world’s scriptures.  His wide acquaintance with the religions of the world is reflected in his book, All Religions are True.  This practice provided the spiritual support for his work from that point forward.

The struggle for the independence of India took another 33 years, until 1947, and it consumed the rest of Gandhi’s life.  Some have argued that India would have become independent even without Gandhi’s efforts, and that may well be true.  What Gandhi did accomplish, though, was the creation of a nation.  In his own practice and in all of his travels, he insisted on becoming one with the humblest people with whom he met.  Where once in South Africa he insisted on his right to travel first class, now he traveled third class because, he said, there was no fourth class.  He took up the cause of the untouchables in the society and insisted on including them in his ashram and in all of his activities.  He gave them a new name – “Harijans,” the children of God.  He refused to visit temples where Harijans were excluded, saying that God would not reside in any place where all humans were not welcome.  We can be proud to say that Gandhi’s efforts are continued in the work of our Unitarian Universalist Holdeen India Program, which works with organizations of India's most excluded and oppressed peoples and supports their efforts to participate fully in the social, economic and political life of India.[6]

Using the tools he had forged in South Africa, Gandhi taught the entire nation to assert their own inherent worth and dignity.  And his path helped to minimize the violence that might otherwise have erupted on the road to freedom.  Whenever a campaign he led resulted in any violence whatever, he called it off at once. 

Nowhere was his influence in quelling violence clearer than during the sectarian clashes between Hindus and Muslims as India and Pakistan both won their independence in 1948.  When violence broke out in Calcutta – in one day more than six thousand people were beaten or trampled to death –Gandhi consented to come only after a Muslim leader agreed to live with him, unarmed, in one of Calcutta’s worst slums, home to four hundred thousand beggars.  He was greeted with shouts of anger by crowds thirsting for revenge. 

“[Gandhi] got out of his car amid a shower of rocks and bottles.  Raising one hand in a frail gesture of peace, the old man walked alone into the crowd. ‘You wish to do me ill,’ he called, ‘and so I am coming to you.’ The crowd fell silent. ‘I have come here to serve Hindus and Muslims alike. I am going to place myself under your protection.  You are welcome to turn against me if you wish. I have nearly reached the end of life's journey. I have not much further to go. But if you again go mad, I will not be a living witness to it.’"[7]

Peace reigned for 16 days; while in other parts of India millions were fleeing their homes and hundreds of thousands were dying, no violence occurred in the most turbulent Indian city of all.  On the seventeenth day two Muslims were murdered, rumors started to fly about Hindu deaths, and a grenade was thrown into a busload of Muslims.  Gandhi commenced a fast unto the death aimed not at the British but at his own people.  Though they ignored him at first, within two days the rioters stopped for fear of doing anything to end the life of the Great Soul.  They turned in their arms and swore to remain at peace and they did so.

Gandhi came to embody the soul of his people.  Rather than adapting to the ways of the English overlords, he held high the traditions of his own land.  When he came to meet with the rulers, he did so in his loincloth and shawl.  Winston Churchill “fumed at ‘the nauseating and humiliating spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy's palace, there to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor.’”[8]  When he went to London to meet with the King, he wore the same garb.  (If you’ve seen “The Queen” at the Loring Theatre recently, you’ll have a good idea how his visit might have been received.)  A reporter asked how he dared meet with the King half naked.  Gandhi just responded to the question with a smile, "The king was wearing enough clothes for both of us."[9]

We, too, are living in difficult and violent times.  I know that Gandhi’s heart would be broken over the endless struggle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir since the time of independence.  Would there were a Shi’ite Gandhi in Iraq now who could go to Bagdad and call on a Sunni leader to join him in seeking peace and overcoming sectarian violence.  We are a nation at war in a world at war.  Violence runs unchecked in Palestine, in Darfur, in Afghanistan and most of all in Iraq.  Gandhi called all of us toward a better way.  He said:

“To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself.  And a [person] who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life.  That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”[10]

Gandhi called on us to look first within ourselves, to find a voice, to discover the seeds of Truth, and to cultivate them.  His way of non-violence, he would say, is as old as the hills.  The Buddha taught 500 hundred years before Jesus:

Hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can. This is an ancient and unalterable law.

Or as Jesus said it, “Do not resist an evildoer,” and “Love your enemies.”  If only all Christians could remember that teaching as thoroughly as Gandhi did. 

My spiritual friends, Gandhi reminds us to start from within.  We must first begin by freeing ourselves from our own hatreds, our own attachments.  And then, with growing confidence, we can shine!  We can engage in the radical act of saying “Hello” to the stranger.  And we can remember that it doesn’t really matter much at all how we look or how much of a failure we may feel like some of the time.  Gandhi’s life got off to a really rocky start, and he never got to have a beautiful body, but he certainly got to be a Great Soul; and that, my friends, is a work all of us are called to be about.

 

Amen

 


[1] Eknath Easwaran, Gandhi the Man, Petaluma, CA:  Nilgiri Press, 1978, 12.

[2] Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth:  On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence, New York: W.W. Norton, 1969, 134.

[3] Quoted in Susanne oeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, Gandhi:  The Traditional Roots of Charisma, Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1967, 24.

[4] Philip Yancy, Soul Survivor:  How My Faith Survived the Church, New York:  Doubleday, 2001, 148-149.

[5] Easwaran, 105.

[7] Yancy, 161.  Pieces of the following section are from here as well.

[8] Yancy, 153.

[9] Yancy, 158.

[10] Easwaran, 60.