In Savitri we have the following lines with an obvious reference to Christ’s crucifixion. Narad was asked about the why of pain in this world and if it was his God who was responsible for it. This earth is full of labour, packed with pain; but it is Nature who is using it to sculpt man. But the saviour who comes to redeem it must share it first. Then only the dark account can be settled. He who has found identity with God pays with the body’s death his soul’s vast light. And then he says:

His crucified voice proclaims, “I, I am God.”

“Yes, all is God,” peals back Heaven’s deathless call.

Could this be connected with the hour that arrives “when fail all Nature’s means”? Possibly. In St Matthew we have: “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying E’-li, E’-li, la’-ma sa-bach’-tha-ni? That is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The sun darkened at the death of Jesus. An absolute supernatural darkness falls on man sometimes when he draws near to God. Jesus had offered up himself as the Passover Lamb, and there were supernatural signs, and wonders were witnessed on that day. And there was darkness over the land, over Jerusalem from noon till 3 pm. There was heavy darkness, skotos, more than the physical, the spiritual, the darkness itself could bear. In that darkness the Saviour had to deal with the evil that is present at the root of the cosmos. His “loud voice”, in spite of having been severely scourged, was the cry of agony, cry for the soul of man, and therefore Heaven’s response: “Yes, all is God.” Man’s hope on the cross is in it, that all is God; if it were not so, there would be no hope for man,—yet if only we know how to live in it. That is the revelation on the Cross.

The Lord said to Moses: “Stretch out your hand toward the sky.” And there was the darkness that helped Moses. There was darkness for three days over the land of Egypt. And behind that darkness was the God of Moses.

And Abraham—a good man who owned many sheep and cattle. One day God said to him: “Pack up all your things and go the land where all the families of the earth will be blessed.” He trusted God, and everything was settled for him. One night God appeared again, and said to Abraham: “Look up at the stars in the sky, and you will have a son.” The 75-year old man had faith in God, and God led him out of the darkness of the night. And the word of God came true.

In the Bhakti tradition of India there are any number of instances when the helpless and the desperate Bhakta is helped in one or the other by his friendly and intimate deity. Nothing of the world or of cosmic working comes to help, and the only thing that saves is the grace of the God of Belief, and he does not fail him.

The demanding Yoga of Savitri was carried out by her through unknown and difficult stages, carried out entirely under the instructions she received at every stage from her presiding Goddess, the Divine Shakti, the Consciousness-Force herself. For instance, Savitri had discovered her soul and it looked as though nothing more was needed to be done. But (Savitri, p. 534)

An abyss yawned suddenly beneath her heart.

A vast and nameless fear dragged at her nerves

As drags a wild beast its half-slaughtered prey;

It seemed to have no den from which it sprang:

It was not hers, but hid its unseen cause.

Then rushing came its vast and fearful Fount.

A formless Dread with shapeless endless wings

Filling the universe with its dangerous breath,

A denser darkness than the Night could bear,

Enveloped the heavens and possessed the earth.

A rolling surge of silent death, it came

Curving round the far edge of the quaking globe;

Effacing heaven with its enormous stride

It willed to expunge the choked and anguished air

And end the fable of the joy of life.

It seemed her very being to forbid,

Abolishing all by which her nature lived,

And laboured to blot out her body and soul,

A clutch of some half-seen Invisible,

An ocean of terror and of sovereign might,

A person and a black infinity.

It seemed to cry to her without thought or word

The message of its dark eternity

And the awful meaning of its silences:

Out of some sullen monstrous vast arisen,

Out of an abysmal deep of grief and fear

Imagined by some blind regardless self,

A consciousness of being without its joy,

Empty of thought, incapable of bliss,

That felt life blank and nowhere found a soul,

A voice to the dumb anguish of the heart

Conveyed a stark sense of unspoken words;

In her own depths she heard the unuttered thought

That made unreal the world and all life meant.

The answering Voice instructs Savitri what exactly she is to do in this situation. Her yogic journey moves to yet another realm of transcendence where nothing remains of hers; and all becomes God’s.

Direr yet are the moments when no knowledge of the future is given, and the only supreme Mantra that comes to help is: “What Thou willest, Lord, what Thou willest.” In it is the entire assurance of the work that is to be done, and the way it is to be done, and what the work is to achieve in the Will of the Lord, Samkalpa of Ishwara. The Mother’s work of transformation of the physical had reached that glorious point and she achieved all that was to be achieved in it, in “What Thou willest, Lord, what Thou willest.” How marvellous! Tremendous yogic capacity is needed to reach that stage of working in the Will of Ishwara and leaving everything to it. The Mother did it. The hour in which all Nature's means would have failed becomes the blessed hour.