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Monday Morning Greetings 2024 #1 – The Miracle of Composition and Happy 8th Birthday Monday Morning Greetings

January 1st, 2024

The Miracle of Composition and Happy 8th Birthday Monday Morning Greetings[1]

 

This January 1st marks eight years since I started Monday Morning Greetings here in Śrīdhāma Māyāpur. That’s over four hundred original posts. What I usually do every year to commemorate the beginning of Monday Morning Greetings is to share my realizations about writing gleaned from the previous years’ experience of writing them.

 

Every week I write something that it is published and appreciated—not an easy task. The challenge for one on the spiritual path who has a service to accomplish something in his guru’s mission is how to be always humbler than their accomplishments. The answer in a sense seems simple: give credit where credit is due—God. As I continue writing these weekly posts, I have more and more experience of how often both the realizations on what to write and how to effectively express it manifest beyond my own agency or effort. Sure, like most writers I often struggle with the composition in this way, but it is specifically at those times, when I seem the most lost, that suddenly the solution arises. When this happens again and again over eight years, I have no other answer than it’s God. It is this experience of the miracle of composition, when the result is so far beyond my own effort, that helps me be humbler than what I achieved.

 

No answer but God? Perhaps we can propose other possible explanations, but from my personal experience the most reasonable conclusion is that the “miracle of composition” is transcendent. While I am sitting there late in the week stuck in my writing, neither being able to clearly express my week’s realization—and often not even being able to conceptualize it clearly—but suddenly and repeatedly the post inevitably flows to completion, I have no doubt that I am only the instrument and God is the agent. This miracle of composition over eight years, therefore, is a great source of faith.

 

I have often defined faith as trust by experience. Now whenever I am hopelessly stuck in my writing, I push forward with confidence watching the hand of God in the miracle of composition as a faith building experience.

 

I am neither saying here that I have no agency nor ability in what I write, nor that God has written the composition, but that within the limits of the instruments He is using, which is my karmic abilities, He is making the best of that tool to produce something beyond my ability and to observe this phenomenon of “the miracle of composition” is the privilege of any humble theistic composer.

 

I have coined the term “the miracle of composition”, but I am not the first one to describe this phenomenon. Just look at what Rāmānanda Rāya, the great Vaiṣṇava poet and dramatist, told Pradyumna Miśra:

 

“There is one other thing Rāmānanda Rāya said to me: ‘Do not consider me the speaker in these talks about Krishna. Whatever I speak is personally spoken by Lord Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu. Like a string instrument I vibrate whatever He causes me to speak.’ In this way, the Lord speaks through my mouth to preach the cult of Krishna consciousness. Within the world, who will understand this pastime of the Lord’s?” (Cc. Antya-līlā 5.72-74)

 

Thank you for sharing with me the 8th birthday of Monday Morning Greetings and hopefully another miracle of composition. I was again lost, but hopefully something of worth came.

 

My wishes to all for a New Year filled with devotion!

 

 


[1] Once a year on our Happy Birthday Monday Morning Greetings post I offer, if the reader so inclined, to write me and share any post during the year that you especially liked. Feedback from my readers helps me to understand my audience and informs me what to write.

 

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