Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The One hears every ache of the heart — nothing is too quiet for it to catch.
In living and in dying, hold onto it. The soul belongs to its Beloved, who keeps an endless family and leaves no one out. It is high beyond reaching, wiser than we can fathom, with no edge anywhere — and the service it loves best is the kind that makes you humble, low as the dust at the feet of the good.
It is the protector of the poor, the friend of those who've stumbled, the rescuer. From the very beginning, the True Name has been what saves us. No one can measure how great it is — and yet it lives right inside you. I'd give anything for the people who serve it, day and night.
This stanza opens with one of the most comforting attributes the tradition gives the One: the Lord hears the anguish of the soul. Nothing you suffer is too small, too quiet, or too hidden for the One to catch. The ache you think no one notices is heard. This is the tender ground beneath the whole prayer — you are not crying out into an empty sky.
The stanza then holds together, as this raag loves to do, the One's immensity and its intimacy. On one side: Lofty and Inaccessible, with Unfathomable wisdom and no end or limitation — and a value no one can know or weigh. On the other side, this same boundless One is the Patron of the poor and the Redeemer of sinners — the patit-pavan, who lifts exactly those the world writes off: the poor, the fallen, the ones who have stumbled. The God too vast to measure is also the God who stoops to the lowest. That is the heart of grace in this tradition: greatness and tenderness are not opposites in the One; they are the same love seen from two sides.
And notice the kind of service the One prefers: that service is pleasing to Him, which makes one humble, like the dust of the feet of the Saints. Not grand or showy service, but the kind that lowers you. The boundless One is reached not by impressive offerings but by becoming small — which is why the poor and the fallen, who have no grandeur to cling to, are precisely the ones grace reaches.
Does it change your picture of the divine to imagine it stooping to those the world overlooks?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI