Confessions of an Aging Sevadar

Some of us have an ambivalent relationship to seva. We want to do it, but we sometimes don’t have the same enthusiasm we had when we were young. Seva is hard on the ego, of course, but it also can be hard on the body if you’ve reached a certain age. Some of us who have been doing seva for decades start wearing out physically in our 60s or 70s, and we look at younger sevadars with envy (and awe), remembering when we too could stay up all night doing seva and still manage to go to work the next day and function just fine. Love, eagerness, and youth carried us through.

Now we see how sevadars younger than we are haul, hoist, hammer, saw, stir, and generally run around from dawn to dusk (or later), capable of working long hours for days on end. And what about all those old bibis in the seva films on the RSSB website, cooking chapatis over hot griddles in midsummer heat, squatting like 16-year-olds to sweep up leaves on walkways and roads, or breaking bricks with apparent joy and abandon?

Are we oldsters just being lazy? Maybe we don’t love the Master, or, God forbid, the path? We remember the older sevadars at the Dera in the 1960s and 70s: to us they were full of a wisdom and love we thought we could never achieve. Some of them had weathered the loss of Maharaj Sawan Singh, who had initiated them, and then they labored for Maharaj Jagat Singh, Maharaj Charan Singh, and even Baba Ji. Imagine doing seva for four satgurus! Hazur Maharaj Ji used to tease Professor Bhatnagar that the only retirement was death. And so it was for Hazur Maharaj Ji and soon after for Professor too.

We who are the elders now remember how eager and energetic we were back then, just like the younger sevadars. Some of us have retained that red-hot energy and gobble up all the seva we can get, juggling seva duties like acrobats swinging from ring to ring. Others of us have struggled with health diagnoses and conditions that prevent us from continuing our seva or have forced us to do much less than we did before. Some of us have been rotated out of certain sevas because of our age or to give others a chance for the privilege we may have enjoyed for decades.

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas told us: “Do not go gentle into that good night, … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” But we followers of Sant Mat are told instead to “die daily” in our meditation, to mould our lives around these teachings with our whole heart and thereby liberate ourselves from illusion and the torturous cycle of birth and death so that we can awaken to the light within. In the presence of that light, there is no rage; there is only love.

As we age on this path, we are in fact going gently into that “good night.” We are gradually letting go of so many illusions: that we will live forever, that we can achieve perfect happiness in this world of duality, that we can fulfill our dreams and desires, that life will unfold according to our expectations rather than our karmas, that we are important, and so on. It has been said that simran erases the books of our lives, and so with every round of simran our big fat life-books are growing slighter and emptier. We are realizing that we are on the exit ramp out of this world. We may not have gotten to where we want to be, spiritually speaking, but we are definitely not where we were. Our general direction seems to be in and up, despite our stumbles, bumbles, and occasional bad attitudes.

Maybe letting go of everything we have ever loved and lived for – as Hazur Maharaj Ji wrote to one initiate – isn’t so bad. We have been told that to fill a glass with tea one must first empty it of the water it now contains. We are indeed being emptied of all our dross – passions, karmas, concepts, illusions – so that we can be filled with love for the Master, the Lord, the Shabd. All the layers of darkness we have been collecting for lifetimes is being scraped out of us so that we can shed our egos and be filled with light – conscious awareness of the Master’s presence within us, in his Shabd form.

Our bodies may be aging – doing the surprising and unfamiliar things that aging bodies do – but our souls are growing forever young. Our physical strength, stamina, and agility may be waning, but a lifetime of seva, satsang, and meditation may, with the grace of our Master, fill us with the spiritual maturity that will help us let go once and for all into the mystery of merging with the light and love that have been chasing us for lifetimes. Now we can appreciate those younger sevadars working so hard and be grateful to them, and to the Master, for ushering us into that good night.