Real Love for Srila Prabhupada

If we are to love Prabhupada, we have to actually care about his interests as much as we care about our own.  What does he want?  He wants us to become Krishna conscious.  He wants us to cooperate with his other disciples, to maintain his movement and expand it by preaching.  Loving Srila Prabhupada means carrying out these aims, even at the expense of some of our more personal aims.  There is room for us to develop our interests in serving him.  But our own aims should not be separate from his expressed desires; they have to fall within the parameters of his teachings. 

This is, at least, a working definition of love for Srila Prabhupada.  One will be ready to forgo one’s own conveniences, to invest one’s own time, and even to risk one’s own security to promote the desires of Srila Prabhupada.  Our love is not just a feeling, but feeling translated into action.  Feelings are fickle.  Sometimes they are deep, and at other times, they are distracted.  It is the constant sacrifice for the sake of love that makes those feelings profound and steady.

It is impossible to love all the different people in our lives with equal intensity.  The spiritual master has a special place, and he is given special love.  Srila Prabhupada said, “To be everyone’s servant means that you are no one’s servant.”  We give him more respect, more credence, more attention than anyone else we may have love for.  And by loving Srila Prabhupada, Krishna consciousness gets distributed and the love is spread around to all living entities.  That is the special quality of loving a pure devotee – the love gets spread around: people can eternally benefit just by our loving Srila Prabhupada.