HEROINES OF THE PATH

One may doubt it now, but the Russians have a long history of mystical and spiritual aspiration. One of the world's most famous spiritual treatises, The Way of a Pilgrim, describes the wanderings of a Russian saint, who focused on a single prayer, or mantra, the repetition of the Holy Name of Jesus. And Count Leo Tolstoy, the great writer, expressed his deep religious feelings in Resurrection, What Men Live By, etc., and inspired Gandhi very deeply. Once Baba told Nadine Tolstoy that she would receive what her father-in-law, Leo Tolstoy, had longed for . . . oneness with God.

Nadja had married Count Ilya, his son. It was a love match that endured to the end. She was his second wife. Both had been deep metaphysical students in search of truth, and undoubtedly this is what drew them together. Actually, Nadja had seen Ilya in a dream before meeting him in person.

Previous even to this inner encounter, she had had a remarkable dream in which she found herself on her knees in a deep cave, searching in the dark. There she came upon Leo Tolstoy, whom she had never met personally. Suddenly he solemnly handed her a rolled up parchment scroll. Greatly amazed, she unrolled it and in large gold letters it said, "High Truth is written". She never forgot the dream or its ambience of deep feeling. It foreshadowed her connection with the Tolstoy family.

She and her husband were white Russians of course, who had moved to America. There were financial and health problems and the loneliness of the displaced emigre. Nadia plunged into the spiritual search to dispel the darkness. She avidly studied the Gita. Occasionally there were spiritual glimpses, consoling experiences of inundating bliss. She took up the study of meditation and kriya yoga with Swami Yogananda and, "Inexperienced, I took the Higher Initiations," she says. But as the result of not having a perfected guide, she began to have some bad effects. "I prayed as never in my life to lift the dark shadows. I asked, I prayed constantly for help, for a true Master, a real guide." Several years passed in such struggles, until the day when an invitation arrived from their friend, Malcolm Schloss, to meet the "Perfect Master, Shri Meher Baba." She responded immediately. "My intuition was unquestioning and sure." she records. She went to Harmon on the Hudson, in 1931, to see Him.

Here is how she describes it: "I saw Christ before me, as He was seated on the couch, in the expression of all His figure and His divinely lit-up face, in His eyes beaming love . . . It was the fulfillment of a long-awaited meeting, the climax of my life . . . I declared as loud as I could: "Jesus Christ!" with all the solemnity of those great words. Something within me recognized in this dear shape of Meher Baba, the incarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. So the unbelievable became a revealed fact . . . I gave my will to His Will, my life to His cause of truth and love, knowing that to love the truth means to live it . . . "