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Sarada Devi The Crowning Glory of Indian Womanhood - Swami Ranganathananda

Woman as Wife to Grow into Woman as Mother

India’s spiritual heritage gently whispers to every woman, as also to every man, to utilize the marriage context to achieve the increasing liberation of the tremendous value of the Atman, the sexless Self, behind man and woman. Vedanta upholds this as the goal and direction of social evolution, or of evolution at the human stage.

So far as woman is concerned, this is achieved by the wife growing into the mother, not merely, or even necessarily, biologically, but certainly spiritually. Motherhood is a spiritual transformation of wifehood. If woman as wife is socially significant, woman as mother is spiritually glorious. If the spiritual is no more than coterminous with the biological, then woman as mother of a little genetic group

would have remained the highest possible moral and spiritual development for her sex. But Vedanta sees the spiritual as transcending the merely genetic and the biological, and even the social, and finding expression in an ideal of motherhood, where love and service break the barriers of family, race, and creed, and assume a universal aspect. It is this spiritual elevation in self-transcendence that enables woman, even as wife, to function effectively as a citizen of a free socio-political order, embracing with her mother-heart the millions of its body-politic. If this is called finding life—larger and fuller life—then the path to it lies through self-development by self-effacement. That is what a woman does when she grows from wifehood to motherhood. In this, no human value is neglected or negated, but there is only a growth from a smaller to a larger personality, and a progressive manifestation of the inherent divinity.

 

© `The Vedanta Kesari’ (December, 2003) published by Sri Ramakrishna Math, Mylapore, Chennai 600 004. Website: www.sriramakrishnamath.org. Reprinted with permission.

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