MEHER SPIRITUAL CENTER

Meher Baba's Home in the West

March Newsletter 2024

Meher Nazar Collection

"I know everything. I am infinitely intelligent and so am beyond intellect; I am in eternal bliss, though every moment of my life I am being crucified. This is absolutely true. At the same time I am one in you all. There is absolutely no difference. Once you experience it, the awareness remains and is always there. Neither am I great, nor are you small. We are all One."


Meher Baba

Lord Meher, Online edition, by Bhau Kalchuri, p. 3787

Dear Meher Center Family and Friends,


Greetings from Meher Center. We are so looking forward to the activity and joyous bustle that Easter weekend brings here on Center.


Baba said, "Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. But did it change his state? No. The truth is, he who is Perfect is not moved by any disaster. He remains Perfect even if the whole world speaks against him.


"How would the sun be affected if men were to shoot arrows at it? The arrows will rebound and come raining down on the persons who shot them.


"The Avatar or the Sadgurus are thus like the sun. They are not going to be impressed or influenced in any way by the arrows of slander." *


Happy Easter in Baba's love.


In His Love and Service,

 

 

Buz Connor

For Meher Center board and staff

*Lord Meher, Volume 6, by Bhau Kalchuri, p.1917

1938 Meherabad Birthday Celebration

In this incredible early footage filmed by Elizabeth Patterson, we have the privilege to join Meher Baba's birthday celebration in 1938 at Meherabad. Surrounded by some of his dearest women mandali and other female disciples, Baba looks magnificent in a long white sahdra and crown.


Video, 0:29

Meherabad, India, 1938

Courtesy of ECPPA

A Virtual Conversation with Meher Center Board

The Meher Center board hosted a virtual conversation with the Baba community on March 24th. Board members gave updates on Center programs, operations and finances, and community members had the opportunity to share about their experience of the Center and ask questions of board members in breakout rooms.


If you were unable to join us, you can watch a recording of the meeting here.


Video, 24:52

Meher Center Virtual Event, March 24th, 2024

From the Meher Spiritual Center, Inc. Archives

Practical Spirituality

By Preeti Hay

In 1993, on her way to the Center for the first time, Geri Craddock stopped by Sheriar Bookstore. There, while browsing, her eyes fell on pictures of Elizabeth Patterson and Mani S. Irani. She did not know these women but felt an instant connection with them. She went on to buy the pictures and off she went to the first place she ever called home. 


Geri Craddock is the HR Manager and Finance Officer at the Center. She is astute, upbeat and precise. As staff members, I realized that we all knew how well Geri can get a job done, but none of us really knew her Baba story. Before I chatted with Geri, she said to me that she does not have a story. I begged to differ. 


She grew up in many places across the country. Her father was in the military and by fourth grade she had lived in eleven places! Due to such a transient presence in any given place, Geri went to church but never stuck around. “As a child I was always excited to go to church expecting to see God, but He wasn’t there,” says Geri. This intrinsic search of a child transformed into a desire to read about different world regions and traditions for her.


On this ongoing journey, one day Geri found a pamphlet on the floor at a Natural Foods expo in the D.C. area. “I like things to be neat. So, I bent down and picked up the pamphlet. It was Meher Baba’s “Universal Message.” I recognized Him immediately. But simultaneously I said to myself, ‘I am not ready for that.’”


Geri took the pamphlet home with her and tucked it away. Two years later, she was talking to a person she admired very much. Suddenly, she felt the need to say, “You know something I want to know, but you are not telling me!” Indeed, the woman knew something, something that would lead Geri back to Meher Baba. The woman replied, “If I could read one book in my life, it would be Discourses by Meher Baba.” Geri went out and bought a copy of the Discourses. “I realized it was a substantial read. I put the pamphlet and the book under my pillow to absorb it through osmosis,” laughs Geri.


In 1992, about a year after finding Baba’s Discourses, Geri was attending a meeting with a women’s group. “All of a sudden, I felt Baba next to my shoulder and He kissed me on the cheek,” says Geri as a matter of fact. How often does one who does not think she has a story, get kissed by Baba? Was that when she believed He was God? “No,” she says swiftly, “I knew He was God when I first picked up the ‘Universal Message.’”


Two weeks later, Geri found a periodical titled, Fellowship in Prayer. In the periodical was an article written by the editor who had been invited by Bill and Peggy Stevens to stay at Meher Center for two weeks. Geri had never heard of the Center before. Now there was a place associated with Baba that she had to visit.


In April of 1993, just a few months after her discovery of the Center, she arrived at the Center with her newly bought pictures of Elizabeth and Mani. “I stayed in Cabin-on-the Hill and did not want to leave. For the very first time, I had found a place that felt like home,” she says. The next day, Geri was invited to have tea with Jane Barry Haynes, the then President of the Center. Jane asked her, “Now dear, what do you do for work?” When Geri replied that she worked for Marsh McLennan, Jane said, “Did you know Elizabeth Patterson was the very first female broker for Marsh McLennan?” This information warmed Geri’s heart and deepened her bond with Elizabeth.


There was no more looking back for Geri. She was deep in Baba’s fold. On her next visit to the Center, she met her husband-to-be, Jeff. After they married, they lived in the D.C. area for seventeen years, where they participated in and hosted Baba gatherings.


In 2010 Geri and Jeff moved to Myrtle Beach. She joined the board at Meher Center and helped the Center in different volunteer capacities, until Baba called her to be staff at the Center in 2015. Like a true Karma yogi, she says, “I like to work. I am a worker bee. Work is my way to Him. When I first started working at the Center, I could see how each job I had ever had, prepared me for working here one day.”


What I found interesting about our chat was that while at work, she is methodical, extremely practical with a lawyer-like mind, in her relationship with Baba and her inner life, she does not use a conscious process to arrive at things. Geri relies on intuition and uses it every day in her life and work. She practices Karma Yoga without even knowing it. “I need to put in the effort, but results are always His.” How then does she integrate her lesser known but very active intuitive side with the biddings of her practical side? “I make plans with the willingness to turn on a dime. If they don’t work out, I move to whatever door opens.”


She has loved working at Dilruba – the home of Elizabeth Patterson. After having worked there for some years now, what does she feel about her initial connection with Elizabeth? “Perhaps our temperaments were similar,” she guesses. As for Mani, Geri was present at Mani’s funeral and having met her, although only once, she was deeply moved by Mani’s presence. 


It is hard not to notice Geri’s positivity, something that Mani exuded as well. “I decided a long time ago to not be “garlic faced” as Baba called it. There is no reason to wreck somebody else’s day if I am having a bad day. I work on choosing the positive way of looking at things. I don’t wallow in anything anymore,” she confesses. I am sure Elizabeth and Mani would agree with that!

Life on the Center: Gatekeeper and Caretaker Retreat

There is a very special group of volunteers who are absolutely essential to the functioning of Meher Center. They are currently a team of 25 dedicated and trained men and women who serve as Evening and Overnight Gatekeepers and Caretakers. There is always an Evening Gatekeeper at the Gateway from  6  to 10 p.m. every evening, and an Overnight Gatekeeper in the little cabin right by the front gate, from 10 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. the next morning. These Gatekeepers work as a team with the Evening Caretaker who is inside the Center from 6 to 9:30 p.m., and the Overnight Caretaker who is inside the Center from 9:30 pm to 8:30 a.m. the next morning.


Their responsibilities are vast. They are the heartbeat of evening and overnight coverage and security of Baba’s home in the West, holding the safety and care of His guests and visitors in their hands---every single night, all night long.


We do our best to gather these volunteers together annually, to revisit and refresh our guidelines, tasks, and protocols, and to air out problems, concerns and issues. Over a weekend, usually in March, we have a few meetings, a few meals together, and always sharing about some compelling and relevant topic. This year it was:  “What role do we as volunteers have in helping to maintain Baba’s love and presence on the Center?” This topic brought out the deep gratitude that all these volunteers feel for the privilege of serving the Center and Baba’s guests in their Caretaker and Gatekeeper roles.


In the past we have also included some training and retraining, and introduction of new processes. This year, at our March 9th and 10th gathering, we began to focus on a newly organized Emergency Response Protocol, for seven different types of emergencies.  Staff member John Collins is now assigned to spend part of his work time on Center safety and security. During the meeting he led, his question to the group about their interest in training sessions, related to these protocols for the seven types of emergencies, brought forth a resounding “YES”.  These folks are really dedicated!!  We look forward to these upcoming training sessions, and our gratitude and trust in them is profound.

Baba’s Jane and St. Teresa of Jesus

By Christopher Wilson

Figure 1- The stone from Meher Baba's trip to Avila in 1933 and Mani's note that accompanied it when she gifted it to Jane

Figure 2- Flemish engraving of St. Teresa’s vision of Christ giving her a nail of His Crucifixion as a token of mystical marriage, 1613

Figure 3- Jane's prayer, which she herself composed and kept inside her copy of St. Teresa's book The Interior Castle

Figure 4- Baba embracing Jane at East West Gathering November 1 1962 Guruprasad

Figure 5- Jane holding the bridal bouquet that Baba sent to her at the East West Gathering. Photo taken at Turf Club in Pune, November 9, 1962

 Jane_s annotations in the copy of St. Teresa_s book _The Interior Castle_ that Charles Purdom gave to her

Figure 6- Jane's annotations in the copy of St. Teresa's book The Interior Castle that Charles Purdom gave to her: “November 8, 1962. Turf Club, Poona, India. Wedding garland worn by Meher Baba, Bouquet.” 

In the summer of 1978, Jane Barry Haynes received one of her most cherished Meher Baba treasures, sent to her at Meher Center by Baba’s sister, Mani. It was something unusual: an ivory-colored stone with tan veins, about two inches long. The stone immediately pierced Jane’s heart because, in an accompanying note, Mani explained that it “was picked up from ground trod by Beloved Meher Baba when He was in Avila in October of 1933.” Aware of Jane’s deep love for St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) – the extraordinary Spanish mystic, author, and reformer of the Carmelite Order, whose name as a nun was Teresa de Jesús – Mani entrusted this precious relic to Jane. “It is sent through dear Charles to my sister Jane,” Mani wrote, “for I know it belongs to her” (figure 1).


Why should this stone, touched by the feet of the Beloved in the place where St. Teresa grew up, founded her first convent, and had visions of the Lord, “belong” to Jane?


Jane first heard the saint’s name on May 26th, 1958, in the Barn at Meher Center. Seated in Norina’s high-backed yellow chair, Baba asked several around Him if they knew of St. Teresa of Avila. Some commented on her founding of convents, others mentioned her spiritual writings on prayer and the journey toward union with God. Baba gestured, “Yes, all these things are true. But the most important thing was that she devoted her entire life to Jesus Christ – to Me.”


Jane describes her reaction to Baba’s words in her book, Letters of Love for Meher Baba, The Ancient One: 


I had never before heard the words ‘St. Teresa.’ At that moment when Baba spoke of her great love for Christ, He gave me a deep inner longing to know about her and study her works…the happiness in his eyes, and the exquisite gesture of His hand when He said that she devoted her entire life to Christ, to Baba. [My] heart simply surged with the impulse to cry out: I would do so too. I want to try to love you that way.


Jane soon discovered that St. Teresa was one of Baba’s four favorite saints. He said that Avila, the city where Teresa lived and worked during the sixteenth century, is one of the four great spiritual centers of the Western world. When visiting there in 1933 with some of His Eastern and Western disciples, He said: “I am so happy here.” He also told Norina Matchabelli, as they walked around the Medieval wall that surrounds the city and looked down toward the Cathedral: “I was here long before that Cathedral was built.”


Jane was guided to learn more about Teresa by Charles Purdom, Baba’s longtime English disciple and biographer, whom she befriended at the 1958 Sahavas at Meher Center. He gave her his own copies of Teresa’s books, underlined and worn from years of use. Jane and Charles became close friends and through frequent correspondence shared their love for Baba and St. Teresa. On October 19th, 1958, Purdom wrote to Jane: 


Dear Jane: I wonder what you are doing and try to picture you at home, not very successfully. I read St. Teresa every night and have nearly completed it. I shall then read for the hundredth time her Way of Perfection. I find the echo of your voice in Saint Teresa’s words. It is very strange. It might be you speaking; that has given me an added pleasure in reading [her works.]


Jane not only read, but deeply studied, all of Teresa’s writings. During her years building an acting career in New York and, beginning in 1965 after her family’s move to Myrtle Beach, working alongside Elizabeth Patterson and Kitty Davy at the Center, she underlined and made notes in the margins, finding in Teresa’s words a map for her own aspirations as a disciple of Meher Baba (one of His “innermost Circle,” as Mani once put it in correspond to Jane). She accumulated a large library of books on Teresa and became an authority on the saint and her protégé and confessor, St. John of the Cross. Beginning in the 1960s, she and Elizabeth traveled to Spain, visiting the seventeen convents that Teresa founded in her lifetime. Jane built close friendships with several of the cloistered nuns of Teresa’s Order, corresponding with them regularly until her death in 1997. 


In her study of St. Teresa as an exemplar of the spiritual life, Jane had one aim: to please Baba by loving Him as Teresa had loved Jesus. One passage in Teresa’s writings held special significance for her. It’s the saint’s description of her mystical marriage to Christ, a vision that she experienced in 1572 at the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila after receiving Communion from St. John of the Cross. Jesus appeared to her and, instead of a wedding ring, He gave her one of the nails with which He had been crucified and said to her:


Behold this nail; it is a sign that you will be My bride from today on. Until now you have not merited this; from now on not only will you look after My honor as being the honor of your Creator, King, and God, but you will look after it as my true bride. My honor is yours, and yours mine (figure 2).


Inspired by Teresa, Jane prayed constantly to Baba: “If I couldst be Thy Bride.” Tucked into her copy of Teresa’s masterwork, The Interior Castle – given to her by Charles Purdom –is a card on which Jane wrote the full text of her prayer to Baba (figure 3):


This is all

Nothing matters,

Oh Beloved –

do not be indifferent to me – Oh Beloved

suffer me not to 

be separated from 

Thee – forever and ever.

I wouldst by Thy bride,

Thou art the Christ –



Jane kept her bridal aspiration a secret. But when she went for Baba’s darshan at the East-West Gathering in 1962, she discovered that the Beloved – who tells us that “every moment I respond to the whole of creation” – knew the prayer in her heart. 


During the darshan program on the afternoon of November 1st, a sudden rainstorm drenched the crowd seated before Baba. He directed the Western women to go into Guruprasad to change into dry clothes. The women mandali opened their trunks and provided dry clothes. Jane was given a yellow dress with a floral pattern, which she wears in a photo of Baba embracing her on the platform (figure 4). When darshan ended, the Western women went back inside to gather their belongings before returning to their hotels. In all the confusion, Jane had misplaced her scarf. At one point, Mehera picked up Jane’s scarf, held it aloft, and asked the group: “Who belongs to this? It doesn’t belong here. Take it.”


Mehera, of course, was merely trying to match the stray scarf to its owner. But Jane heard Mehera’s words as being about far more than the scarf. All her anxiety about not being worthy of Baba or Mehera came to the surface. Before coming to India, Jane so deeply wanted to be loved and accepted by His close ones, especially Mehera. With her painful history and what she perceived as her many faults and limitations, did she really belong there? The words about the scarf brought opened old wounds dating back to childhood of being an unworthy outsider. 


As happens with Baba, Jane’s painful rupture, which left her feeling fragile and rejected, became the doorway to a transformational experience of the Beloved.


One morning during the darshan session with the Westerners, a few days after the incident with the scarf, Baba asked for a wedding song to be played. Baba translated the lyrics, saying, “the bride is leaving her home.” Those words struck Jane deeply. The bridal imagery echoed her secret prayer, expressing out loud what she had held within for so long. 


After the Sahavas ended, as the Westerners prepared to leave, a wedding of an Indian Baba family took place in Poona. The couple came to Guruprasad to receive Baba’s blessing and offer the wedding garland and bouquet to Him. Baba blessed and embraced the couple and placed the wedding garland around His neck. After the family left, Baba instructed Minoo and Adi Sr., two close disciples, to take the wedding garland and bouquet to Jane at the Turf Club where she was staying. Baba said that Jane was to keep the garland and bouquet in her room overnight. Jane described what happened next in a letter she wrote to Baba the next day:


Dearest Beloved Baba: If only I can retain in my heart the beauty of last night and dawn this morning. When Minoo and Adi came running down the walk to tell me that You said I was to keep the bridal Bouquet and Garland in my room all night, I knew in my heart of hearts why you had sent them to me. The fragrance of Your Love filled my room; I looked at them through the white of the netting and I knew that it was my bridal chamber. What else could you have meant? When the dawn woke me, soft light filled the room with diffused splendor, and I felt your sweet fragrance near me. My secret inner prayers to You are now answered: ‘If I couldst be Thy bride’.


The next morning, a photo was taken of Jane holding the wedding bouquet, an image she called her “bridal picture.” (figure 5) Her son Charles urged her to keep a few of the flowers which she did. After returning home, Jane made note of her bridal experience in St. Teresa’s Interior Castle on a page that mentions “Spouse” and “her Bridegroom.” In the margins, Jane writes, “November 8th, 1962. Turf Club, Poona, India. Wedding garland worn by Meher Baba, Bouquet.” (figure 6)


Although Jane had many public roles in her life, including succeeding Elizabeth as president of Meher Center, she was by temperament a very private person drawn to quietude and contemplation. Administering the Center, therefore, was a challenge that often left her exhausted mentally and physically. Like Teresa, who was sometimes frustrated by having to journey outside the convent walls to expand the Discalced Carmelite Order, Jane would have preferred a life of solitude and prayer. But like St. Teresa of Jesus, Jane knew that her Beloved gave her the gift of participating in His work – and that knowledge was her joy. Jane – Baba’s Jane – longed only to please Him as Teresa of Jesus had pleased Jesus. 


Captions for illustrations:


Figure 1. The stone from Meher Baba's trip to Avila in 1933 and Mani's note that accompanied it when she gifted it to Jane.


Figure 2. Flemish engraving of St. Teresa’s vision of Christ giving her a nail of His Crucifixion as a token of mystical marriage, 1613.


Figure 3. Jane's prayer, which she herself composed and kept inside her copy of St. Teresa's book The Interior Castle.


Figure 4. Meher Baba embracing Jane at the East-West Gathering, November 1st, 1962 at Guruprasad in Pune, India.


Figure 5. Jane holding the bridal bouquet that Baba sent to her at the East-West Gathering, photo taken at Turf Club in Pune, November 9th, 1962.


Figure 6. Jane's annotations in the copy of St. Teresa's book The Interior Castle that Charles Purdom gave to her: “November 8th, 1962. Turf Club, Poona, India. Wedding garland worn by Meher Baba, Bouquet.”