material – Love in action

Material and spiritual surrender

Surrender is understood as a kind of *giving*, of *giving in*, or *giving up*. When we surrender we give *something* to *another*, we yield or renounce it. Something that is ours becomes the possession of someone else. Two actors vie for custody or control of something that cannot be shared, something that must be renounced by one, to the advantage of the other.

Our most immediate experience of surrender is a *material* one. We voluntarily agree to surrender a material possession to an other who claims a right to it. We recognise this right and surrender the possession. This right might be legal, political, social, moral, or demands it by threat or actual violence to give them. A similar act of surrender sometimes takes place a without our consent. Threatened with violence or other forms of coercion we may surrender our possessions to others against our will.

To relish

Verse 1

In his auspicious invocation to Rādhā rāsā sudhānidhi, Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī does not waste a moment before glorifying Caitanya Mahāprabhu as an embodiment of nearly unimaginable emotion. His body is described as studded with goose pimples of ecstasy as he dances and sings, tears running down his face.

Mahāprabhu’s emotion is nearly unimaginable, and yet we imagine it. Our minds recognise his emotion as our own, still hidden and unrealised in our hearts. Mahāprabhu’s appearance on earth lets us understand that to realise this emotion, to make it a reality, is the greatest experience we can want.

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Generosity, a story of the self

Generosity is often associated with material value, wealth or riches. It refers to giving away a material thing of value that is external to us, a thing that we ourselves had been given or had acquired, an article of clothing, a parcel of food, a precious stone. At the origin of this kind of generosity is the act of an other, of someone else who showed us some sort of generosity. It’s an exchange whereby we were given the thing, or perhaps purchased the thing in exchange for something of value.

In this sense an act of generosity is a kind of story, a narrative, a chronology or a history, a chain of events. It’s the story of a thing that becomes possessed, then dispossessed. It’s a relation to things that come and go in a kind of cycle, things that we might, in another world, another life, have lived without, and with which we live now briefly or for a long period.

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