THE EMPTY CHAIR

 
From May 1967 onwards, all the young Baba people who visited the (Myrtle Beach Baba) Center, who gathered for meetings and invited speakers to come and energize them, had one burning thought in mind. When will we get to meet Meher Baba? As Kathy Hill expressed it, "Of course we wanted to go to India. Everyone wanted to go to India, but Baba was still in deep seclusion. There was huge pent-up demand, and everyone who had come to Baba in recent years was waiting."...

Would Baba, then in poor health, be able to come to the United States? Kitty and others thought not. Kitty had been left in Myrtle Beach by Baba in 1952 to work with Elizabeth Patterson at the Center. She was from an educated family, but had lived much of her life in humble service to Meher Baba first in India and then in the wilds of primitive South Carolina .... Kitty was certain that we would all be called to India. How this might play out was anybody's guess. I had been on an airplane only once up to that point. I would have gladly undertaken foreign travel to explore such new frontiers as might still exist on the rapidly shrinking globe. But in my generation only very unusual women went globe-trotting....

Frustrated at times, we read in Baba's sister Mani's Family Letters that some people had been bold, had come to see Baba anyway, despite his orders against it, and had been admitted, had been granted a precious few minutes in his presence. Others were turned away. What made them different only Baba knew. He didn't neglect us, however. We faithfully obeyed and he rewarded us. He gave everyone some orders: to keep silence on the anniversary of his silence, July 10th (both in 1967 and 1968) and to recite the two prayers he had given (O Parvardigar and The Prayer of Repentance). By these tokens we knew we were in his particular thinking even as he did what he needed to do for the universe. And note: we were happy when we obeyed....

I never gave much rational thought to how we would get to Meher Baba, not really able to conceive of what that moment might be like. I was still puzzling over the dissonance between the inner and the outer Babas, so I had to conjure up a picture of Meher Baba from the films we'd seen and then put myself mentally in the queue of people patiently moving forward to touch his feet. It seemed highly implausible that I could perform any act of obeisance; to this day I am iconoclastic to an extreme, never having had the opportunity to devote myself physically to a personage greater than myself. I think the majority of us American kids-o-Baba were alike in this way. We had mostly been reared in hands-off non-demonstrative religions, with a vast separation implied between ourselves and the Big Guy Upstairs. How would we physically encounter the corporeal embodiment of Jesus?

So I waited for a call to do that impossible thing — get myself to the other side of the world and bow down to a man who called himself God.