Question: When you speak about serving the United Nations with gratitude, could you please elaborate on this?⁵¹

Sri Chinmoy: We serve the United Nations because we feel it offers us a unique opportunity to help bring about world peace, world harmony, and world-oneness. But people who are working at the United Nations and serving the United Nations are at times assailed by fears, doubts and anxieties that their services will be dispensed with. Misunderstanding, controversy and other unfortunate experiences they get quite often. So we have come to realise that there should be a new method of serving the United Nations, and that new method is with the heart’s gratitude.

So far, in spite of our teeming ignorance, limitations and imperfections, we have done something for mankind by serving the United Nations. We have achieved something for ourselves, something for the United Nations and something for the world at large.

If we cannot take the world, the United Nations and the individual person who works at the United Nations as one single reality, let us take them as three intimate friends. These three intimate friends may at times find it difficult to see eye to eye with each other. At times the world or the individual worker sees something wrong with the United Nations or the United Nations sees something wrong with the world or with the individual. But although they find fault with each other, they are still friends.

The different countries will not always agree with one another, but they maintain their mutual respect because they care for peace. If they did not, they would not be involved in United Nations activities. They do believe in the United Nations, they have faith in the United Nations, but they also have individual problems that they are trying to work out.

The individual workers, countries of the world and the United Nations can become one on the strength of their gratitude to each other. Once they feel true gratitude towards one another, their hearts will expand. And in the heart’s gradual expansion they will become universal. At that time, we will not be able to separate an individual member of the United Nations from the United Nations proper because they will be integrally one. We will not be able to separate the United Nations from the world because it will be part and parcel of the world. By offering constant gratitude, the world, the United Nations and the United Nations workers will become one.

As long as they remain separate, they should try to offer their gratitude to each other. They cannot remain separate forever. The day will come when they will become totally one in the inner and outer life. Then they will feel boundless gratitude to the Supreme for it was He who, out of His infinite Bounty, gave them the opportunity to become His conscious and perfect instruments.