MEHER SPIRITUAL CENTER
Meher Baba's Home in the West
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Meher Nazar Publications collection |
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"What I want from you is your love, and I have always been saying it. But I must first give you the gift of my love; otherwise, how can you love me! To love me is no joke. Volumes have been written on the spiritual path and its first step. In the end, it is mentioned that for one to realize God, cycles and cycles of time are required to achieve Union."
Meher Baba
Lord Meher Online, p. 3858
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Dear Meher Center Family and Friends,
Greetings from Meher Baba’s home in the West.
We want to inform you of a few things as we continue to gradually open the Center to more activity.
First, beginning tomorrow, Center hours on the weekends will return to normal times: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Second, Baba’s House will reopen to guests and the local community beginning on April 2nd. There will be a special schedule for the first six days that Baba's House will be open, on its regular days, April 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th, 9th, and 10th, with a three-hour opening each time (instead of the usual two hours). The first hour of every day will be reserved for retreat guests staying on Center. The remaining two hours will be for the nearby community. Because there are so many who will want to come, we will be taking nearby community reservations—one per person, for one hour only, during these first six open days. After that, we hope and plan to resume normal Baba's House availability!
Below are the days and times available for nearby community reservations the first six days:
* Saturday, April 2nd: 10-11 a.m or 11 a.m.-12 noon
* Sunday, April 3rd: 11 a.m-12 p.m. or 12-1 p.m.
* Tuesday, April 5th: 11 a.m.-12 p.m. or 12-1 p.m.
* Friday, April 8th: 4-5 p.m. or 5-6 p.m.
* Saturday, April 9th: 10-11 a.m. or 11 a.m.-12 noon
* Sunday, April 10th: 11 a.m.-12 p.m. or 12-1 p.m.
To make a reservation, please call 843-272-5295 during the following three days and times when Center staff will be available on that designated phone line. Do not call the Gateway because they aren't taking reservations. The days and times to call 843-272-5295 to make a reservation are:
*Friday, March 25th: 9:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.
*Tuesday, March 29th: 9:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
*Friday, April 1st: 10:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.
Third, Meher Center’s board of directors will host a virtual community meeting on April 3rd at 2 p.m. An announcement will go out next week with a link for the event. Please join us for this unique gathering.
Fourth, for those living in the nearby community, please click here and check "Weekly Schedule and Nearby Community Updates" to receive information specifically for those living in the area.
In Baba’s love and service,
Buz Connor
For Meher Center board and staff
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In this short video from Mandali Hall, Mani shares stories of times with Baba. She reflects upon His unfathomable orders, following them without question, surrendering to Him with joy and never feeling bereft in His discipleship. Eloquently, she comes directly to 'the simple point,' we either accept our way or we accept His way.
Video, 27:15
Mandali Hall, Meherazad, India, September 19, 1989
Courtesy of the Sheriar Foundation
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God's Father
By Jamie Leonard
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Meher Nazar Publications collection |
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It is Sheriar Moondegar Irani’s 169th birthday this month. Meher Baba’s sister, Mani, recalled that their father “was a living example of what Baba tells us to do, to be in the world but not of it.”[i]
It started early. By age twelve, Sheriar’s longing for God was so intense that he left his home in Iran to seek Him. The boy became a wandering ascetic, filling the role desperately, authentically, and devotedly. For eighteen years he roamed throughout Iran and then India, owning almost nothing, living on alms, and constantly repeating his lovesong—the name of his beloved God, Yezdan. Baba later said to the women Mandali on the Blue Bus tour as they chugged through rugged patches of desert and mountain: “He wandered all around here on foot looking for Me. In search of Me.”[ii]
There were moments during Sheriar’s travels when Yezdan announced His hidden presence. Like the incident that Sheriar loved to tell his daughter decades later when she requested a “true story”: that he was wandering through the scorching Sind desert when he realized he had gone too far, that he was going to die of thirst. A man and a boy suddenly walked up to him out of nowhere, carrying flasks of water. The man admonished him, “Why have you come here? Why do you distress the Almighty with your foolish behavior?”[iii] But the two eventually let him drink his fill. Then they disappeared, suddenly nowhere to be seen in the vast exposed expanse of the desert. Sheriar knew that Yezdan Himself had saved him and sang His praises alone in the desert.
But despite these moments of enticing nearness, God remained hidden. Finally, after eighteen years of seeking, Sheriar reached the end of his capacity and hope, unsure if he would ever find the One he was looking for. He decided to do a chilla-nashini, a severe spiritual penance where seekers desperate for their goal draw a small circle and then stay inside it, not eating, sleeping, or drinking, for forty days. After thirty days, Sheriar had to stop. He stumbled, anguished, heartbroken, and wishing for death, to a riverbank where he fell asleep.
In that moment, Yezdan reached down again. Sheriar heard a clear voice: "O Sheriar! He whom you seek—He whom you wish to see—His attainment is not your destiny. It is your son who will attain it. And through your son—you."[iv]
Sheriar had not been “of the world” since he was twelve; his intention and his devotion were only for God. But he had also not been “in the world.” He didn’t know what this divine message could mean, but it was a harbinger of what I find the most inspiring part of his life—and the part that allowed him to become the father of the Avatar, God in human form.
About a year later, despite never having intended to lead a family life, Sheriar found himself engaged to a girl much younger than he (a tricky twist of circumstances that Mani always loved to tell in Mandali Hall). They were married nine years later. And taking it as the will of God, as Mani put it, he “kept to his pledge not only in word but in spirit.”[v]
Sheriar went to work to support his family. He started out at as a gardener (“anything he touched just bloomed…”[vi]), then ran a tea shop, then a toddy shop, then many toddy shops, always with an ineffable presence that made people seek him out “just for the peace of mind”[vii] they felt around him. The only fault in his work was one that Shireen sometimes noted—he would often leave for work with a blanket and return home without one. “Oh Shireen, he was so cold,” he would say to her when explaining his irrepressible charitable impulses. “But Shireen, she was so old.”[viii]
Sheriar did not attend only to the material needs of his family. Despite their immense difference in age and experience, he treated Shireen with exquisite attention, devotion and care. He taught her Persian, and they would often read Hafiz together in the evenings. He conversed with her each night about all the mundane elements of her day. And, as Mani remembered, he always gently drew out the deeper meaning, the truth, the spiritual element of whatever story Shireen happened to be recounting—a perspective that would invariably “comfort and soothe”[ix] her.
Over time, Sheriar became father to six children. Even down to the last, his little girl Mani, he was a caring, calm, constant presence. They would go on walks together, the stocky man in his late sixties hand in hand with his tiny daughter. When Mani asked him for prayers, he shared them with her—including the one that struck her most deeply, the prayer of never wishing ill of anybody. And in the midst of this regular and meticulous care, she would sometimes look up at him from her childhood pursuits to see his lips moving—still moving to the name of his constant companion, Yezdan.
Of course, it was through this being “in the world but not of it” that Sheriar finally found what he had been looking for. Meher Baba said of His father, “in the whole world there’s no match for him. There’s none like him. That is why I was born to him.”[x] Sheriar knew who was coming when Shireen became pregnant with their second son. Mani describes that once, when Shireen recounted a dream she had about the baby in her womb, “he just looked at her and said, with great feeling and reverence, ‘Shireen, you do not know who this child is that is to be born to us!’”[xi]
The child came on February 25, 1894. Sheriar continued his life of fathomless devotion to God and fathomless commitment to his worldly responsibilities—and God, in human form, joined him in the very midst of it all. Mehera put it simply in the name she chose for a play about Sheriar, Shireen, and Merwan’s birth. She called it: “Sheriarji’s Wish is Granted.”
[i] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 14
[ii] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 7
[iii] Lord Meher Online, p. 92
[iv] Lord Meher Online, p. 98
[v] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 9
[vi] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 14
[vii] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 64
[viii] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 24
[ix] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 63
[x] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 6
[xi] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 10
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Caring for Meher Center: The Drainage Project |
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In the late 1940s, while the Center was still being developed, Meher Baba indicated that the two most important projects were building His house and “the drainage project.” This latter project was an attempt to minimize mosquitoes on Center by reducing swampy areas and standing water. Extensive exchange through letters and cables took place between Darwin Shaw who was on Center and Elizabeth Patterson who was in India with Baba. Baba weighed in on every detail and a plan was decided upon. It involved digging drainage ditches, the main one a few hundred feet from Highway 17. The plan was completed in the fall of 1949.
Now, after more than seventy years, this main ditch remains—and Center staff are currently working to make sure that it is clear of plants and debris so that it continues to be useful for drainage (and as a firebreak). Regina Marks is one of the staff members hard at work on the project. Using a chainsaw, she and her co-workers clear brush and fallen trees, tie them together with rope (“like a bouquet”), then affix the rope to an ATV and haul the debris to the road. It’s grueling work, but Regina says that it’s also fun. She enjoys being out in parts of the Center that almost nobody sees, among the quiet pine trees and huge old oaks, working as part of a team on the project that Baba placed such importance on those many years ago.
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The True Source of Love
By Preeti Hay
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When I heard Caroline Mazel-Carlton’s Baba story it sparked an innate curiosity in me about the relationship between material items used or associated with Baba during His lifetime, and the subsequent spiritual importance of those objects over time. Are these precious reminders from the Avatar’s life simply relics that contain some notable historical significance? Is it possible that these things contain a spiritual charge or energy that is part of His work in this advent? If so, then when and how does an object turn into a medium for Him to turn the key?
Caroline’s journey with Meher Baba began at Meher Center in the spring of 2012. At the time, she lived in Asheville, North Carolina, where she heard about Baba through friends who were old time Baba lovers. “I was going through a really difficult time in all areas of my life—work and relationships. I was twenty-nine years old and in deep despair,” she says. When her friend mentioned a place of rest and reflection, Caroline found herself saying yes. Lines from a poem by Wallace Stevens came to her mind: “After the final no, comes a yes. And on that yes the future world depends.”
Caroline really needed the rest, so she took a chance. She came to Meher Center and visited many places on Center that she has now come to know and love. But her story was to take a leaping flight into the unknown at Baba’s house. At the house, her friends left her in the men Mandali’s room before going into Baba’s bedroom themselves. She observed the two beds in the room and then her eyes fell on a box which held what looked like a slab or a rock with a jagged edge. Something inside her told her to touch it. “As soon as I came in contact with it, I was radioactive. All of a sudden, the world dissolved. I just became aware of the most intensely transforming love and peace. In that moment I knew what true love was. I experienced a drop of true love from the ocean of love. I was floating in the ocean, it was warm and intense, all at once,” she says, trying to give words to the indescribable.
What followed was a continuing physical jolt. “I couldn’t stand. I ended up on the floor between the beds. I sank. It felt as if I didn’t need my legs anymore.” From the floor she stared at Baba’s picture, knowing fully that He had caused her to feel this way. Caroline had not noticed, but there was an older Iranian woman in the room. She was sitting in the corner and had watched the entire spectacle. She came to a dazed Caroline’s rescue and helped her up. She put her hands on her shoulders and said, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Just love Him. Don’t worry.” She assisted Caroline out to the porch.
On that trip, Caroline never even made it to Baba’s room. Only later did she learn that the slab she touched was an original stone from Baba’s tomb in India that Baba’s sister Mani had sent to the Center in Myrtle Beach.
Sometimes we stop telling stories at their high points. But what happens after? How does one integrate such an experience into one’s life? For Caroline, she initially questioned within herself if she was crazy to have felt what she felt. But soon she started meeting other people and hearing stories about their experiences. Someone gave her the book Souls on Fire and it had a deep impact on her to realize that God is not just in texts and history. That people continue to experience God just as she did.
For ten years, Caroline has returned to the Center regularly. She was just here to mark the anniversary of this life-altering experience. So how has this changed her? “When you know what the true source of love is, it changes every aspect of your life. Baba changed my life and did so very quickly,” she says. She moved, changed jobs and became committed on her path with Baba. He became her best friend and guide. Subsequently, her deep despair lifted, “I have never again thought that my life was meaningless.”
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