Mother Devotee

"At the age of sixteen, Sri Ramakrishna came to Calcutta, where after some time he was engaged as a priest in the Kali temple of Dakshineswar. The fire of his longing for God, which had been smoldering within for many years, now burst into flame.

He was not satisfied with merely seeing the image of the deity. He wanted to see the living form of the Mother with his eyes open. Assurances of the scriptures could not satisfy him, and philosophical speculations about God only made him impatient. He wanted the direct vision of a living God. He refused to wait for God’s slow-moving grace to come to him in the course of time—he wanted to meet it more than halfway through intense effort.

Skepticism would often creep into his soul and fill his mind with disappointment and agony. His worship mainly consisted of the passionate cry and prayer of a child separated from its beloved mother. As outpourings of his soul, he would sing songs composed by seers of God, and tears would then flow from his eyes.

Often he would accuse the Divine Mother of being stonehearted and unkind for not granting her vision to him, saying, “Are you true, Mother, or is it a mere fiction of the mind—only poetry without reality? If you do exist, why can’t I see you? Life is passing away. One day is gone, followed by another. Every day I am drawing so much nearer to death. But where are you, my Mother?”

"His whole soul, as it were, melted into one flood of tears, and he appealed to the goddess to have mercy on him and reveal herself to him. No mother ever shed such burning tears over the death-bed of her only child. Crowds assembled round him and tried to console him, when the blowing of the conch-shells proclaimed the death of another day, and he gave vent to his sorrow, saying, “Mother, oh my mother, another day has gone, and still I have not found thee.”

People thought he was mad, or that he was suffering from some acute pain, for how was it possible for them, devoted as they were to lust and gold, to name and fame, to imagine that a man could love his God or Goddess Mother with as much intensity as they loved their wives and children? The son-in-law of Rānī Rāshmani, Mathur Bābu, who had always had a love for this young brāhmin took him to the best physicians in Calcutta to get him cured of his madness. But all their skill was of no avail. Only one physician of Dacca told them that this man was a great yogī or ascetic, and that all their pharmacopeia was useless for curing his disease, if indeed it were a disease at all. So his friends gave him up as lost. Meanwhile he increased in love and devotion day by day.

One day as he was feeling his separation from Devī very keenly, and thinking of putting an end to himself as he could not bear his loneliness any longer, he lost all outward sensation, and saw his Mother (Kālī) in a vision. These visions came to him again and again, and then he became calmer. Sometimes he doubted whether these visions were really true, and then he would say, “I would believe them true, if such and such a thing happened,” and it would invariably happen, even at the very hour he expected."