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0 SAVIOUR

0 Saviour dear,
You are so near.
0 Lover kind,
Bind my heart, bind.
0 Father pure,
1 am all Yours, sure.[ 45]

The flawless harmony of this poem, its synthesis between speech and substance, proclaims that God is a living experience. What we perceive when we read it is an unveiled intuition of God that has come to us still bathed in that first light of ecstasy. The love bond that is so much the core of this poem brings us to that group of poems in which God is portrayed as the Lover or its more lyrical extension, the Beloved. Mary Anita Ewer comments:

Along all the roads that mystics follow there are signposts pointing to the mystic marriage. It is difficult to discuss any phase of mystic symbolism without bringing in the subject of a Divine love-union.[46]

Thomas Aquinas explains further:

The soul in the preceding degrees, loves and is loved in return ... but in this, in an admirable and ineffable was ... she holds and is herself held; she clasps and she is closely embraced, and by the bond of love she unites herself with God, one with one, alone with Him.

Around the concept of God as the Beloved, Sri Chinmoy accumulates an entire language and atmosphere of love, so that we come to recognise the presence of the Beloved even in those poems where He is not explicitly named:

Who passes by, who passes by,
Blossoming the lotus
With the touch of His magic Feet?
Behold, He illumines my inner world
And inspires me in silence supreme
To dive within.[47]