Sutapa Chakraborty
Rudyard Kipling honoured motherhood with these words: "God could not be everywhere and, therefore, he made mothers." This is similar to what Sarada Devi, reffered to as Holy Mother by her disciples, would say quoting her husband, Ramakrishana Paramhansa: "He had the attitude of a mother towards all creations and he has left me behind to demonstrate this motherhood of God." That, she said, was her purpose in life.
A mother's role is multifaceted. She is also her child's first teacher. And Sarada Devi fully imbibed and imparted the philosophy of 'Vigyan Vedanta', demonstrating how all those teachings could be applied to make our own lives blessed.
In her own way, she taught "as many faiths, so many paths", Brahmn, according to her, was in all things and in all creatures. Though the realised souls have imparted different teachings, and they don't say the same thing, however, since there are many paths leading to the same goal, all of their teachings are true. She gave a unique analogy for this. Imagine a tree with birds of different colours and plumage sitting and singing a wide variety of notes in varying octaves. We do not say that any one particular bird's chirp is the chirp, and the rest are not. She would say that founders of all religions are realised souls and they have witnessed diffferent aspects of God on the basis of their own experience, and they are all correct as they have indeed known the truth. They are wrong in generalising it, though. Actually, they are only referring to different forms and aspects of one and the same infinite, divine reality.
Demonstrating harmony of religions in her day-to-day life and a mother's unconditional love for all, Sri Ma would say that the Muslim labourer called Amjad working for her was as much her son as was Sarat, Swami Saradananda, her personal attendant. When Sister Nivedita, Swami Vivekananda's disciple, came to visit her, Ma Sarada embraced and accepted her as her own daughter. She maintained that the infinite divine reality is nirgun formless, in one aspect, and also sagun, with form. Once, when asked by a monk, "Are you really the mother of all? Even the birds, insects and beasts?" She said, "Yes". At her home in Jayrambati, West Bengal, when a monk once hit a cat, the Holy Mother was deeply hurt and said, "Don't beat it. Feed it, so it will not steal food. I live in that cat."
Pray for desirelessness, was her advice. If one can entirely give up all wordly desires, they can get a vision of God right away, she believed. Her final and most profound teaching was that if you want peace of mind, do not find faults with others. Rather, learn to see your own faults. "Learn to accept the whole world as your own. No one is a stranger, my child," she would say.