Chapter (অধ্যায়): XXVII THE END PAGE-335Page: 335 of 336
would fain have believed that his actual presence had been with us!
"He was known unto them in the breaking of bread' - Even so. Only a touch here, a word there, a moment of sweetness, or a flash of inner clearness and knowledge, any of these had been sufficient, at various times in those early weeks, to bring back the throbbing awareness of the beloved presence, with the mingling of doubt and assurance in its poignant longing.
We passed over, that night at Khandagiri, those features of the Resurrection that would seem to have been added later by minds that believed in the hard and fast, black and white, character of the story. It was the older record, shining through this palimpsest, on which our thoughts were fastened, that simple old record, full of the pathos of sudden sights and vanishings, with its gatherings of the Eleven, whispering amongst themselves "The Lord is risen indeed!" with its tale, at the last, of a parting in the midst of a benediction.
It was not of any re-appearances of the body at all, as it seemed to us reading, that this older story had told, but of sudden and unforeseen meetings of the will, returns of thought and love, brief upliftings of prayer, from One who in the Vedic phrase, had been 'resumed into His shining Self,' and moved now on subtler and more penetrative planes of action than we, entangled amidst the senses, could conceive.