The spirit not the letter

The spirit not the letter

October 2022

The Spirit, friends, not the letter 

The capacity to penetrate to the spirit of the matter instead  of staying with the letter of it, is what distinguishes  evolution, says Suma Varughese 

I have been reading Lust for Life, the beautiful book  based on the life of legendary  painter Vincent Van Gogh. It  is the lot of most artists and  visionaries to be misunderstood  and even reviled by their fellow  human beings, but even so,  the opposition, hostility, and  subsequent misery and poverty  that Van Gogh was subject to is  exceptional.  

Particularly dark is the phase that  he went through when he decided  to sign up as an evangelist (before  he discovered his true métier as  an artist). He even did a course on  the subject with his characteristic  passion and sincerity, but ignoring  his deep and powerful sermons,  two of his examiners rejected him  because they felt he was not facile  with his speech. It was left to the  third to insist on giving him a  berth as an evangelist to Borinage,  a coal mining region, whose  residents worked in inhuman  conditions for negligible wages. 

Van Gogh boarded with a baker  called Denis initially. One day,  he was invited to go down with  the miners to see the condition  they worked in. Witnessing their  hardships—which included  crawling on their legs to dig coal  (so narrow and low were the  passages), enduring unbearable  heat while breathing in coal dust,  

and working for 13 hours with  one meal break—affected him  so much that he felt that unless  he shared their lives and their  poverty, he would be a humbug  who had no business preaching to  them. 

Forthwith, he left his comfortable  room and bed at the baker’s house  and went to stay in an abandoned  hut with no window but enough  cracks in the wooden wall to let  the wind in. He no longer washed  off his coal-grimed face because it  made him one of them. Retaining  the bare minimum, he gave away  most of his warm clothes to those  who had less. When calamity  struck the mine and one of the  passages collapsed, trapping and  killing 57 coal miners, Van Gogh  worked like a maniac looking  after the injured, tearing up his  own clothes, even his underwear,  to form bandages.  

He was holding a funeral service  in honour of the dead miners  when in walked his two examiners  to see how he was doing. Horrified  at what they felt was his utter  degradation, they denounced  him and dismissed his services,  declaring that they had never  been so humiliated by anyone’s  conduct as they were by his. 

Thus is Christ crucified again and  again and again!  

Sadly, all they could see was the  dilapidated stable in which he  held his services, and Van Gogh’s  gaunt, coal-grimed appearance.  They were unable to perceive  the love he bore the miners nor  his supreme selflessness and  compassion. 

Too many of us are unable to  penetrate to the spirit of the thing  and get trapped in the letter of it  instead, slaves to the external, the  superficial, the form. 

I remember a beautiful story  about a labourer who would do  his utmost to attend the evening  aarti (devotional ceremony) at  a temple. One day, he hastened  as usual, but alas, the priest told  him he was too late. He let out  a heartbroken sigh. The canny  priest told him that he would give  him the merit of all the aartis he  had done for God in exchange for  the merit of his sigh. The man  joyously agreed. That night, Lord  Krishna visited him in his dream.  “You made a bad bargain,” he  told him. “Your grief-stricken  heartfelt sigh was much more  valuable than a lifetime of doing  aartis for me. Sincere devotion  from a pure heart is precious.  Outward practices cannot be  compared with it.”  

Suma Varughese is a thinker, writer, and former Editor-in-Chief of Life Positive. She also holds writer’s workshops.  Write to her at sumavarughese@hotmail.com. 

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