jaya om visnu-pada paramahamsa parivarjakacarya astottara-sata sri srimad a. c. bhaktivedanta svami maharaja –ki jaya!
My Dearly Beloved Spiritual Master, Srila Prabhupada – eternal father of my eternal soul …
I prostrate this broken, nearly useless body at your lotus feet. My body, my mind, my heart –these are temporary things –but they belong to you, as long as breathing remains … fit for nothing, but ever-ready to serve you.
jaya om visnu-pada paramahamsa parivarjakacarya astottara-sata sri srimad a. c. bhaktivedanta svami maharaja –ki jaya!
My Dearly Beloved Spiritual Master, Srila Prabhupada – eternal father of my eternal soul …
I prostrate this broken, nearly useless body at your lotus feet. My body, my mind, my heart –these are temporary things –but they belong to you, as long as breathing remains … fit for nothing, but ever-ready to serve you.
The only lasting thing of me is my soul. Take it please, and make it right, good, pure and useful: fashion it somehow into a proper thing so that I may be of some usefulness in your eternally-perfect, heavenly mission.
You somehow deigned to enter this terrible and dangerous material world for a little time, in order to bring us news of your friend, Krishna.
Without you, the world would be an even lesser place than it is, without any hope at all.
It is so difficult to imagine how you eagerly chose to leave that eternally-ecstatic Goloka world named for the Supreme Person of persons, Sri Krishna … where every “thing” is actually a living personality, whose only thought is of Krishna … just to guide the lost souls of this insignificant planet back home – Back to Godhead.
How odd, how strange, how confining this place must have been for you!…
You, who have known unlimited sporting pastimes in the forest bowers of Goloka Vrindavan with Sri Sri Radha-Krishna for a whole eternity of endless time!
Yet by your unimaginable mercy you chose to come – to save all of us imprisoned here – helplessly caught up in the never-ending cycle-web of Samsara. Caught up by our own sins! We so ignorantly spend-out our lives trying to avoid accepting the truth: everything here in this material world dies … time-after-time; life-after-life; birth-after-death after death-after-birth.
You so generously spent-out a whole entire lifetime, tirelessly serving Lord Krishna, by serving His lost and bewildered prodigal children.
Telling us who we really are, and where we really belong, day-after-day; year-after-year; book-by-book. Ten thousand years’ worth of Truth!
So simple a Truth!
And so simple and easy are your Instructions of how to get (the literal HELL) out of this miserable place –how to go back home: Back to Godhead!
Oh! The ecstatic transcendental love in every Krishna-filled word you have spoken, each book you have so carefully written … in your simple, grace-filled instructions!
Even just a little thing: the picking up of a pen – such an ordinary act – yet filled with the grace and dignity of an intimate associate of God Himself!
Is that how one picks up a pen in heaven? It certainly appears so!
I have loved to hear your voice, filled with such confidence, power and authority, from the moment I first heard you in that little storefront temple of heavenly bliss, in San Francisco!
Your words are always perfectly chosen according to time, place and circumstance: easy to understand, sweet nectar to even these dirty ears.
Each note of every one of your Bhajanas is filled with the potential hearing of the transcendental sound of Lord Krishna’s flute!
That old, dirty-golden curtain cord rope-belt that inspired you to bind my heart to Krishna with the transcendentally-golden Lila–Name of His rope-binding by Mother Yasoda is gone now.
Yet the dasa-name remains … as does my spoiled-child rebelliously-prodigal nature.
But by your unfathomable, merciful grace, there is hope … even for one as fallen as me.
My dear Srila Prabhupada, this offering will remain just what it is –an incomplete, half-offering, until I finally actually grow up, becoming a little genuine, and am able to get Back Home, and give it to you in person.
Until that day, please stick to me, don’t give up on me: somehow keep me enthused and on-course.
Your love is the only lifeline I’ve got.
I love you, Srila Prabhupada, beyond anything any words can tell.
Your always-fallen, ever-hopeful prodigal son,
Damodara dasa