Prayer of a Sikh

Prayer of a Sikh

( Source : Book - The spirit born People by Puran Singh)

 

A poor Sikh retailer was once arrested in that wild savage Kabul, in those old days of Guru Har Rai ji, the Master of Amritsar. The charge against him, the shopkeeper, was that he weighed less. His particular weight was not up to the right legal standard. The law makers of Kabul were bent upon throwing the Sikh, the disciple of the Master, into the burning oven, for he was weighing less than the material needed for making bread. The law of Kabul had neither pity nor sympathy for him. But whatever his fault, his wife and daughter and children were all dependent upon him and they cried. He, if alone, could have endured any punishment, but seeing the piteous condition of his family, he too cried out to the Master. With all his faults, he had the unique distinction of being His disciple. The cry reaches the throne of Amritsar, for the Master is so close to his disciples. He hears the soft moaning of his children that went crying to sleep in the street dust of Kabul. He hears the soft sobs of a wife that lay fainting on the floor of her house at Kabul, crying to the Master, "Save him, pray, save him!" and so intensely that her cry stabbed her dead on the floor.

The Master sat at Amritsar. It is written that a devotee had just then come and offered five copper pice to Him. The Master did not notice the corner, but took his five pice and began, in a meaningless way, putting them now in his right, then in his left hand and went on doing this wayward act for a couple of hours or so. As he threw the pice down he said, "Thank God, My Sikh is saved."

And there in Kabul, at that very time, the balance was trembling in favour of the disciple. His weight was being tested, now on the right pan, then on the left. They found at last that the weight was quite accurate. It was certainly immaterial whether the man or his family was destroyed or not, but when the Man of Prayer chose to throw the weight of his faith into the balance for being weighed along with the disciple as a reality of the soul, and not as a mere illusion, like many things of the earth earthly, he was saved. The Response of the Guru is varied and, at all times, living. The mother covers all the faults of her child. As justice is tempered with mercy, so it is with the Guru, the Personal God of men. A thief no more remains a thief after having obtained faith and a thief, too, is bound to be saved when he, in some unknown strange kind of distress, calls upon Him for His Mercy in such an undetermined way that he himself does not know to repeat it in that way at another time. Prayers like this, too, are forms of inspiration.