The day of departure arrived. Dr. Winick was the only one informed. He said that he and his father would come to take Shri Nathji to the airport. Along with Priya Nath, that would make three persons who would be seeing Shri Nathji off. Three was an inauspicious number to Indians. And Shri Nathji wished that there be four persons.
Dr. Winick arrived at the appointed time. He had with him his father–and his eight-year old son, Lee!
Shri Nathji ran up to Lee and embraced him: So you came! he said with affection. Shri Nathji had willed that the youngster see him off as well.
At the airport, Shri Nathji said to Dr. Winick:
You can experience my presence even when I am very far from you. You cannot reach the moon, but your eyes can reach it! When I have gone far from you, I will have actually come closer. When I am before your eyes, you see me outside of yourself! But when I am no longer before your eyes, you can see me within yourself–within your heart!
It was thus that Shri Nathji left the shores of America. As his plane soared up into the skies, the teeming populations of Boston and New York appeared to look up at him; the skyscrapers appeared to reach out to him. Shri Nathji had entered and left the country like a breeze that came and went, stirring only gently and imperceptibly the hearts and souls into awakening.
In the years to come, America would look back at those moments when God had entered it in the guise of a human and had filled its atmosphere with his Blessings and Grace. Whether He would ever return to the land would depend upon the grand scheme of His creation, upon the dictates of a Divine Plan. Till then, the nation could wait and hope: “In God we trust.”
As the plane flew over the waters of the Atlantic, Shri Nathji recalled that imperceptible dividing line between light and darkness he had seen in these skies, when a vast sea of darkness appeared to recede from a rising sun.
He looked up at the Heavens, and he thought he saw a star.
The verse echoed in his mind:
Kal sitaare men nazar kuchh iss tarah jamti gayee
Ke huyee mafkood duniyaa leke apnaa vaar paar
Yesterday, my sight did alight upon a Star, in such a way,
That the world did vanish, with all its beginning and its end.
It was a measure of the spiritual benedictions left behind in America by Shri Nathji that the country began experiencing spiritual regeneration. Faith in God started becoming by far a common thing, in a country most advanced on the
material front.