THE SOUL OF THE GOSPEL

Fear of punishment, and hope of rewards, are relatively necessary expectations for all human souls whose evolution has not yet reached its fullness and perfection but which must not, for this reason, be destroyed in them. What is condemned is that these motives are presented as the quintessence of Christianity, as the culmination of Christian ethics. The transition from the motives of fear and hope, viscerally dualistic, to the motive of love, essentially unifying, is inevitable, creating a climate of perfect identity with God in the soul. Faith and hope are for the good souls who are still on the path to spiritual evolution - but absolute love is for the perfect ones who have reached the end of the pilgrimage. In heaven, no one has faith or hope because, in them, faith has been transformed into the vision or intuitive knowledge, and hope has been conquered - love, however, continues, and its strength increases. Hence the “greatest of the three is love”, as the apostle Paul affirmed.

Unfortunately - it is here that we touch one of the living wounds of our modern Christianity - we study the body of Christianity, or rather, Christian theology, and we do not live the soul of the Gospel. Some are content with the blind routine of orders issued by the ecclesiastical authority and they identify this obedience with Christianity; others spend their whole lives analyzing the Bible, each word and page without perceiving its spirit, and they think they are perfect Christians for they have studied every paragraph in this book. They live and die without having discovered the soul of the Gospel, without having found Jesus and the essence of his message within Christianity, the message which is contained in the first two commandments, that of integral love in God and universal love among men: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all your heart and with all your strength - and love your neighbour as yourself - on these two commandments are the whole law.”

These two commandments represent the mystical consciousness of God's unique paternity manifested by the ethical experience of universal fraternity among men - this is the quintessence of his message; this is the only true Gospel. This is the true and only religion; the others are fragmented, illusory and arbitrary theologies.

Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), an influential Christian leader of India wrote that she converted from Brahmanism to Christianity and lived in it for 10 years, meticulously observing all the precepts of her church without ever meeting Jesus. Only later, in London, when she gave herself to an intense life of communion with God through prayer and meditation did she finally discovers Christ.

Millions of Christians are in the case of Pandita Ramabai, with the difference perhaps in not even discovering Jesus after ten years of Christianity. These Christians who ignore him are incapable of comprehending that the experience of their identity with God - of the “kingdom of God within them”, of their “naturally Christian soul” - can be effective and infallible reason to avoid sin; are even capable of thinking that the experience of this identity can rob them of the horror of sin.

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Pandita Ramabai was an important social activist in nineteenth-century India with an immense contribution to the emancipation of women; against the ideology of castes, child marriages, conditions of women's health, freedom and other social issues. She was orphaned at the age of 16 with the death of her parents during the great famine that fell in parts of India from 1876 to 1878 and began to travel around the country, exposing her ideas and wisdom gained during her experience with the father who taught her Sanskrit texts which she spoke for the communities where she passed. She travelled to The United States and Canada, where she lectured on her knowledge, publishing one of her most important books, The High-Caste Hindu Woman, which was the first book she wrote in English. Being from a Brahmin caste, she denounced in this book the darker aspects of Indian women's lives, including bridal children and child widows, exposing their oppression in India under British rule. One of her comments on the question of women, made in 1882, was summed up in the following phrase: “In ninety-nine cases, out of a hundred, the educated men of this country are opposed to female education and the proper position of women. If they observe the slightest fault, they magnify the grain of mustard-seed into a mountain and try to ruin the character of a woman.”

Unfortunately, every idealistic effort in any sphere always comes up against mediocre criticism and condemnation. Today, almost 100 years after her death, India is one of the countries that most oppress women in all fields, and the statistics of rape in Indian society are alarming and the largest in the world!