Come out of your meditations and leave aside your flowers and incense!
What harm is there if your clothes become tattered and stained?
Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of your brow. - Rabindranath Tagore
The Hindu mystic poet Tagore believed that both humans and the divine were engaged in a creative process - a process to give birth to goodness in the world. What made this poet so remarkable for his day and age (Tagore was born in 1861), is that he didn't believe that goodness was "found," or that goodness was an attribute or gift only of a Creator. Rather, that goodness was possible only when humans labored with divinity. If humans give up the project, goodness withers away.
I had gone a-begging from door to door in the village path,
when your golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream
and I wondered who was this King of all kings!
My hopes rose high and I thought my evil days were at an end,
and I stood waiting for alms to be given unasked
and for wealth scattered on all sides in the dust.
The chariot stopped where I stood.
Your glance fell on me and you came down with a smile.
I felt that the luck of my life had come at last.
Then of a sudden you held out your right hand and said
`What hast thou to give to me?'
Ah, what a kingly jest was it to open your palm to a beggar to beg!
Even with the Hindu themes, these poems speak to us as Ethical Culturist. Remarkably, it was Tagore's belief that the chief work to be done to make goodness possible, was to insure that a diverse and equitable culture continued to exist. His own family abandoned their high caste privileges, by consciously deciding not to perform the tasks imposed upon it, and he worked hard to uplift the "Untouchables" (India's lowest caste) to the same level of the Brahmans. In 1913 he wrote, "Shunned at the temple-gates by the pious; the outcasts, uninitiates, seek their God beyond the artificial, inwardly, in mid-night skies, in forest flowers, in love and separation...I have prayed: Deliver us, O man of men, from the creed which flaunts exclusion..."
Tagore's thinking didn't remain static. At first, he believed that the promotion of a diverse culture was sufficient. He founded a school in which all the cultures and religions of India co-existed equally - a mini United Nations - and he truly felt that his school could serve as a model for the world - thirty years before the United Nations was created. For him, to recognize the diverse nature of human existence, was to see the divine flow in all things - not just in those things we call our own.
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.
However, a few years later, reflecting on his newly created school, Tagore realized that something more than the mere maintenance of diversity was needed. Diversity is indeed the foundation, but something was missing. He immediately set out to create a new school, once again emphasizing diversity, but this time also stressing the need for action; a school where diverse students worked together for their own mutual benefit.
Whom do you worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut?
Open your eyes and see your God is not before thee!
He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground
and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.
He is with them in sun and in shower,
and his garment is covered with dust.
Put off your holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!
Let us take a moment to reflect on Tagore's message, for in many ways, it echoes our own. In our own ways we too become preoccupied oft times with the "chanting and singing and telling of beads!" which Tagore warned us of, even if our own religious pitfall is the lifeless repetition of idealistic aspirations unsupported by action. We need to embrace life not only in ideas, but in actions, by which for us as well, goodness can emerge like an "unknown hidden flower's scent."