JOURNEY OUT OF DARKNESS

 
I needed time to think. I knew the one person who felt very much as I did was my friend, Tom Riley, and it was presumably Meher Baba who created this for us. Tom wanted what I wanted. It was simply to have time now to pursue the path of Meher Baba.

Phyllis and I did not see each other for a couple of weeks, while I continued working on the cabin. It remained my ongoing dream, this cabin. I went on feeling satisfaction in the fact that I had put every nail into it. It seemed now even more my own than my paintings did. My paintings, on the other hand, made me feel lost in that incredible sea of paint imagery. But here, at work on this cabin, I was not lost. This cabin was something real, or so I imagined. I was forgetting that to think of this as real meant possibly to overlook the Reality of Meher Baba's Truth. I felt only Tom could help me sift out all these thoughts and feelings.

And then Tom came by to see how I was doing as if almost in response to my confusion. "Why is life such a jumble?" I asked Tom.

"It's all nothing but sanskaras," he said thoughtfully. "You know," he went on, "the saints don't have such confusion in their lives, not like you and I. You know, when a saint looks around him, he sees everything replete with meaning, and that produces in him great bliss, because he knows he is the Friend of God."

"Yes," I laughed, already lured into the enchantment of Tom's quietly compelling voice.

He also laughed. "And what do you see when you look around? You see nothing but these random scraps of lumber." Then Tom said once again, quite seriously, "When you are with Meher Baba, you actually feel as though you have stepped out of your sanskaras. Somehow, by His grace, this feeling comes over you and you don't want to be anywhere but there. If you are not a saint, nothing can have meaning, except in Baba's presence. The saint knows why he is alive."

"There was a time back in sixty-two, when I could not took at a photograph of Baba without breaking into tears. That's a fact. This was before the East-West gathering in India, and I knew I had to go there, go to India. I have no doubt, Baba was pulling me there. At that point it was utterly impossible for me not to go. You can't go on pilgrimage to Baba on your own, you know; He has to bring you there Himself. We continue to keep the heart bound in chains, so that we may go on flexing the muscles of our minds in our meaningless pursuits. No one wishes to love, because it's so much easier just to think, and so to speak empty words."

I could have stood there all day listening to Tom. I remember now even more so clearly all we talked about that day.

I felt happy that Phyllis and I would soon be going to see Meher Baba. I was thinking deeply — one comes out of darkness, not knowing from whence he has come or where he is going. And then all of a sudden, the darkness breaks. It seems as though Grace suddenly descends, and there is light and hope, all in an explosion of awakening joy. Now I understood just a spark of the meaning of it all. That spark was my awakened understanding of the descent of God in human form, the God-Man. God existed, and God was one of us and one with us. There was nothing to fear, for we existed in Him. And the immense journey was leading me toward the Light, its Glory, its Truth. Each day I felt with ever greater clarity, I had hold of the garment of Truth.