In a talk honoring the fifteenth year of Baba’s Amartithi in 1984, Kitty Davy spoke to the crowd about remembrance and joy. Quoting the dictionary, Kitty defines joy as “a forceful, sustained state of happiness that is associated with sharing, self-realization, and high-mindedness—an exultation of the spirit.” She then goes on to quote Mani, who points out that both joy and sorrow reveal glimpses of the poignancy of human experiences thus drawing one closer to God.1
Reflecting on Kitty’s words, one wonders how joy can be identified. A very simplistic answer can be this: one knows it when one sees it. And if joy is such a forceful experience, would it not, like love, be experiential and therefore contagious? If you have met Ken Richard and Betty Kornitzer, you would know what I am talking about.
Ken and Betty live in Rhode Island but are winter volunteers here at the Center. This is the seventh year of their working with the Cabin Crew. I remember seeing them when they first arrived to serve the Beloved; it appeared they were floating on clouds. Their joy was palpable and so was a sense of good fortune and marvel that oozed out of them. The same sense continues today. Volunteering together had been their dream and now it has come true.
It is no wonder that their story is sprinkled with the sparkle dust of wonder. Ken first came to Baba in 1970. He was part of a group of seekers of truth in Mystic, Connecticut whom Kitty affectionately called “Mystic mystics.” Betty, on the other hand, heard about Baba through Ken. She had always been a seeker but found herself trapped in an unrewarding job as a lawyer. One fine day she decided to give it all up for something that made her heart sing. That thing was to serve God with people. With that yearning she went to seminary to become a minister when she was fifty years old. Due to visual problems, it took her six years until she finished her degree and became a preacher at a Unitarian church.
How then did the two of them meet? They chuckle with a twinkle in their eyes when I ask this question. “Should we tell her?” they say to each other. Turns out they met on a dating website! Both of them had a profile that made it clear that God was important in their lives. Before they knew it, Ken had told Betty about Meher Baba and during the first year of their courtship they came to the Center. There was no looking back for Betty. She was compelled to go every three months from then on.
They married soon after. When they came back as a married couple, it was natural for Ken to spend time with his old friend Arthur Kimball, also one of the “Mystic mystics.” Arthur was then the head of Cabin Crew and, as it would happen, Betty and Ken landed the job of not just cleaning cabins but specializing in Intensives. “You can either clean a cabin in between guest occupation or when the cabin is closed down for intensive cleaning and that is what we do,” says Ken.
What does an Intensive involve? “We clean every inch of the cabin for several days. This includes ceilings, walls, kitchen counters and refrigerators. We also take lamps and beds apart and put them all together after we have cleaned,” says Ken. “And my specialty is kitchens, I love to make them shiny,” adds Betty.
They speak of cleaning with such passion that I assume they must have a proclivity for such work but when I ask them, they both vehemently debunk my assumption. “It is rewarding because it is a way of doing something the way Baba wanted—keeping the cabins ready as if He were coming tomorrow. It is an opportunity to follow His direction. Knowing that the next pilgrim will be happier makes us happy,” says Ken. I can’t help but ask if they are cleaners at home. “No,” laughs Betty. “One year we decided to try intensives at home. We did two Saturday mornings and never, ever brought it up again! It was not rewarding like it is here because we don’t do it for ourselves here,” she says.
While both of them see their work as service, they go about it slightly differently. Ken finds the work meditative in his conscious repetition of Baba’s name while doing it. “Remembrance of His name is the receptive self but the way you become something is the expressive self and this work allows the integration of those two elements,” says Ken.
As for Betty, while she is hunched over cleaning surfaces with toothbrushes to achieve minute perfection, her heart is overflowing with gratitude. She inwardly talks to the pictures of Baba in the cabin, basking in a sense of living in the midst of a great miracle. She remembers a line from one of Ken’s songs, “Who am I that I should happen to be at the threshold of Your kindness?” For Betty, it is nothing short of a miracle that Baba has brought her here with a partner who will serve Him with her.
In the same talk about remembrance and joy, Kitty quotes Bal Natu who says that with remembrance, one’s inward journey becomes, “not a matter of mechanical effort, but a natural and spontaneous remembrance of the One whose love makes it easy. Our meditation on Him becomes a delightful companionship with Him, overflowing into gratitude and praise.”2
Forty years after Kitty’s talk on the subject, when Ken and Betty leave the Center after our little chat, I see them frolicking away, hand in hand like children leaving a candy shop. In joy. In remembrance. In praise.
1 One Fine Thread, by Kitty Davy, p.194
2 Glimpses of the Godman, Vol. 5, by Bal Natu, p.26
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