Heart of God. Rabindranath Tagore
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The heat growing in the heart of God for ages—
The cowardice of the weak, the arrogance of the strong, the greed of fat prosperity, the rancour of the wronged, pride of race, and insult to man—
Has burst God’s peace, raging in storm.
I first found these lines during World War II— and have never forgotten them. After the war, when I sought more of Tagore’s work, I first encountered his prayers of power. With what other literature of my acquaintance might they be compared? I saw kinship with the enduring majesty and inner depths of the Hebrew Psalms, yet happily they avoided the latter’s recurring vindictiveness. I felt Tagore’s passionate, profoundly personal I-Thou experience akin to that expressed in the Confessions of Augustine, yet he was no ally of St. Augustine’s intense negation of both life and the world. The prayers of the modern Poet of India did and do celebrate life in spite of its abundance of tragedy, and they affirm our world of ever enduring, ever changing harmonies of color and sound.
When I met Amiya Chakravarty, an Indian and American scholar who once was Tagore’s literary secretary, he encouraged my quest to know more about this rare living legacy of prayer. I was clearly not alone in my appreciation of Tagore’s contribution. Indeed, it was precisely such work as the prayers in this small book that led to Rabindranath’s becoming the first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The Nobel Committee considered and passed over Tolstoy, Ibsen, Strindberg, Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. The award symbolized the uncommon strength of Tagore’s simple prayers of common life. Indeed, in his introduction to Rabindranath Tagore’s first English writings, Gitanjali (Song Offerings), W. B. Yeats tells us that when he was carrying the manuscript with him as he traveled on trains and buses, he often had to close it lest some stranger see how much it moved him.
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