Gandhi Hoes His Garden

India 1947

'You must not lose faith in humanity,' Gandhi wrote on 29 August. 'Humanity is an ocean. If a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.'

He had kept his faith in man. He had kept his faith in God. He had therefore kept his faith in himself. 'I am born a fighter who does not know failure,' he assured a prayer meeting audience. Partition of India was a fact, but 'it is always possible by correct conduct to lessen an evil and eventually even to bring good out of evil', Gandhi said.

He still hoped his faith would move people, but how? 'I am groping today,' he declared. He was full of 'searching questions' about himself. 'Have I led the country astray?'

A lesser man might have sulked or grown bitter or plotted the discomfiture of those who thwarted him. Gandhi turned the searchlight inward; perhaps it was his fault.

'I can echo your prayer that I may realize peace and find myself,' he wrote in a letter to Kurshed Naoroji. 'It is a difficult task but I am after it.' 'O Lord,' he exclaimed, 'Lead us from darkness into light.'

He was approaching his seventy-eighth birthday. The world he had built lay partially in ruins all around him. He must begin building anew. Congress was too much a political party; it must become an instrument for the constructive uplift of the people. He wrote two articles in Harijan on the virtues of non-violent, non-revolutionary, God-loving, equalitarian Socialism. He was seeking new directions. He was old in body and young in spirit, old in experience and young in faith. Future plans lifted past troubles from his back.

He had gone to Calcutta and been taken into a Moslem house in an area were the stones were slippery with fresh blood and the air acrid with the smoke of burning homes. The moslem family to whom the house belonged were friendly to him. 'For the moment I am no enemy,' he wrote Amrit Kaur. He rejoiced more in the smallest triumph of brotherhood than in the political independance of a country.

The bereaved came to him in the lowly house and he wiped their tears. He found solace in the balm he gave others. He had discovered his new task. It was his old task: to assuage pain, to spread love, to make all men brothers.

St Francis of Assisi, hoeing his garden, was asked what he would do if he was suddenly to learn that he was to die at sunset that day. He said: 'I would finish hoeing my garden.' Gandhi continued to hoe the garden in which he had worked all his days. Sinners had thrown stones and filth into the garden. he continued to hoe.

Pertinacity was Gandhi's antidote to frustration and tradgedy. Action gave him inner peace.

The Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer