If we have to leave our home for a long time, we feel agonized. That agony is multiplied manifold when we have to face death, for we have to leave home and everything it represents: love, comfort, security.

But death doesn’t have to be a departure from home – it can be an arrival home, provided we change our conception of home. As long as we misidentify with our body and consider material things to be our source of shelter, we equate our home with the material world, or more specifically a small corner within it. But when we learn to see ourselves as souls who are parts of Krishna and when we learn to love him, recognizing him to be our ultimate shelter, we understand his abode to be our eternal home. With this revised understanding of home, we see death not as a termination, but as a transition – as a journey that can take us home.

To convey this dramatic difference in approach to death, the erudite Gita commentator Vishvanath Chakravarti Thakura compares death to, astonishingly, a wedding. For a bride who doesn’t know her groom, the post-wedding transition is a journey away from home. But for a bride who has had a long loving courtship with her fiancé, the post-wedding relocation is a journey home.

Similarly, for those see life as an opportunity for developing a loving relationship with Krishna – akin to a courtship – death is an opportunity to go home to the beloved Lord of their heart. Pertinently, the Bhagavad-gita (08.05) assures that those who remember Krishna at the moment of death attain his eternal abode. Consequently, the Gita (08.07) urges us to cultivate Krishna’s remembrance throughout our life by practicing bhakti-yoga. Then death will take us home, not away from home.

Think it over:

  • How does spiritual knowledge change our conception of home?
  • Explain using a metaphor how we can re-envision our bhakti practice in this life?
  • How can death become a journey home for us?

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