Offering to Srila Prabhupada – Meditating on your life for dedicating my life
Dear Srila Prabhupada,
Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to your divine lotus feet. All glories to the timeless bhakti legacy that you so tirelessly shared with us.
This year I gained a significantly deepened appreciation of how inconceivable your struggle was and how incredible your success was. I had the opportunity to write the text for a small photo-book about your life-story entitled “Prabhupada: The Moments that Made the Movement.” While I have read, heard and spoken about your remarkable life many times, writing enabled me to plumb unexplored depths in my appreciation of you.
Contemplating the defining moments of your life reminded me forcefully of the magnitude of the mountains that confronted you and the Everests that you still scaled. By trying to put in words how you took Krishna’s message of love to all the inhabited continents of the world, I felt myself coming closer to you – the saint who simply loved Krishna and who wanted the whole world to love Krishna.
In the early days of my bhakti practice, your biography Prabhupada Lilamrita was the book that inspired me the most. Each year as I practice bhakti, I on one hand appreciate more and more the spell-binding luminosity of spiritual love. But on the other hand I also realize more and more the desolate darkness of self-centered desires that crowd and cloud my heart. On many occasions of discouragement and disappointment, reading the last five chapters of the first volume of Lilamrita and the first five chapters of the second volume have provided me immense encouragement. Writing and thereby meditating on how much you struggled to give the bhakti legacy to us puts my small struggles in receiving and sharing that legacy in perspective.
In fact, it was after reading Lilamrita for the first time that my resolve to dedicate my life to your mission became solidified. I still remember how after reading it I prostrated myself in front of your picture in the book and begged for your mercy to overcome my many conditionings so that I could serve you lifelong. Writing about your amazing life brought intense memories of those honeymoon days in bhakti and kindled the flames of my devotional desires.
On this auspicious day, I seek your blessings to re-dedicate myself to sharing the message of love that you brought to me – and millions of fortunate souls before me and after me.
Your servant,
Chaitanya Charan das