MEHER SPIRITUAL CENTER
Meher Baba's Home in the West
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Meher Nazar Publications collection |
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"Love is its own excuse for being. It is complete in itself and does not need to be supplemented by anything. The greatest saints have been content with their love for God, desiring nothing else. Love is not love if it is based upon any expectation. In the intensity of divine love, the lover becomes one with the divine Beloved. There is no sadhana [practice] greater than love, there is no law higher than love, and there is no goal that is beyond love—for love in its divine state becomes infinite. God and love are identical, and one who has divine love already has God."
Meher Baba
Discourses, Seventh Edition, p. 264
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Dear Meher Center Family and Friends,
Happy New Year from Meher Center to all of the many friends and supporters of His home in the West. We pray the coming year is filled with the company of His loving and guiding presence.
As a last reminder, you can still attend today's virtual New Year’s Eve Sahavas any time until after midnight! Please click here to register.
We are happy to announce, as mentioned later in this newsletter, that Caran Bramlett of Atlanta, GA, will be joining the Center’s board of directors beginning in January. Welcome Caran. Caran will be replacing the wonderful and creative Annie Fahy Lawn from Asheville, NC, who has been a loving and guiding force on the board for the past four years. We will miss you, Annie.
In Baba’s love and service,
Buz Connor
For Meher Center board and staff
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Celebrate the new year with this video by Bob Fredericks, a "photographic journey through the life of Avatar Meher Baba."
Video, 16:54
Courtesy of Bob Fredericks
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Dancing Together
by Jamie Leonard
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In the winter of 1988, Beverly Smith asked Meher Center staff if she could call a square dance at the Center’s then-small New Year’s Eve program. They told her to wait while they asked Kitty Davy, one of Baba’s close Mandali who was then 97, whether she thought it was appropriate. “Yes,” she said, “As long as there’s no waltzing.” Beverly was told that she would have five minutes for the dance. And the seed was planted.
On December 31, after a stunning video of Baba was shown and a chorus of “Sat Chit Anand” was sung, Beverly stood alone on the stage of the Meeting Place, facing the community gathered there. She began playing a rousing tune, calling out moves and describing them so that even the most leaden-footed of beginners could follow. And they started dancing.
As the five minutes waned and Beverly looked down at that small group of community members swinging each other around, holding hands and letting go, she was hit with a powerful and unexpected feeling. “You hear about these healing circle dances and Sufi dances and things like that, where it’s more of a spiritual sort of idea, and I had never really thought about square dancing in that context. But when I saw everybody out there holding hands…these people had so much history, so much complicated history, and there they were just taking hands with each other, going on to the next, to ex-partners, businesspeople, everyone… I just could feel so much healing going on. And that is what dances are used for.”
The next year, Beverly was asked to do her dance again— and given slightly more than five minutes. The next year it got a little longer. Then, when Youth Sahavas began, she was also asked to call a dance at that event—the teens specifically requested it at the beginning of the week, as an icebreaker, so that everyone would start Sahavas feeling included and involved. And as participants graduated from Youth Sahavas, they began coming to New Year’s as a kind of reunion, for the dancing and the connection. And so the influx of teenagers and youth mingled with the crowd that had been coming for years, teens dancing with older adults dancing with young adults dancing with their children.
A few years later, after hundreds of people were coming to the Center for New Year’s and the dancing had gotten “really crowded and crazy and lovely,” Beverly got a call from the celebrated folk musician Jay Ungar asking her to do a gig with him on New Year’s Eve. She agonized over whether to take it, but finally decided that the Center could do without her that year and said yes. Almost instantly she pictured the Center square dance and knew she had made a mistake, but she couldn’t go back on a gig. The next morning, Jay called her out of the blue. “I just want to make sure—do you really want to do this?” he asked her. “No,” she said in relief. “No, I don’t.”
From then on, until just a few years ago, Beverly and her band came to the Center for New Year’s every year, calling dances from the Meeting Place stage. And she has always remembered what a privilege it is, not just a responsibility but a deep honor: to provide this yearly moment for the Baba community, of connection, of healing, of a fresh start together. Now Anna Lena Phillips Bell, another talented musician and caller, carries on the tradition with her.
Soon after the New Year’s Eve dances started at the Center, in February of 1991, Beverly found herself in Meherazad with a banjo player and a guitarist. They played for the women Mandali, and soon there was a vibrant square dance being called in front of Mehera’s porch, the women clapping along joyously and Mani even trying her hand at the fiddle. Then it was time to play for Eruch. Into the quiet of Mandali Hall, they started playing a traditional tune, over and over, like we hear every year at the Center as we swing each other around, young and old, dear friends or historic adversaries, as the old year closes and a new beginning approaches. The music rose up and up to the ceiling, repeating and repeating. As the last note died out, Eruch sat looking at them, his eyes half closed. He said, “It’s like repeating the name of God.”
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From the Meher Center Board of Directors |
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Caran Bramlette of Atlanta has been elected as a new member of the Meher Center Board of Directors, beginning January 1. Caran is a long-time Baba-lover who has been making the pilgrimage to the Center since the 1970s. She has been an active member of the Atlanta/Athens Meher Baba group for many years. We’re very happy she will be bringing her knowledge of governance and her deep love for the Center and Meher Baba to the table. Jai Baba!
-Bob Ahrens, Presiding Officer, Board of Directors
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Caring for Meher Center: The Meeting Place |
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For decades now, the Meeting Place has gotten a lot of attention during New Year’s—from foot-stomping square dancing to speakers and Baba movies to the joyous chorus of “Happy New Year!” and “Jai Baba!” right at midnight. This year, the building is receiving a different kind of attention, which will keep it a cherished place to gather in the decades to come.
Center staff and contractors have been working diligently to replace the Meeting Place ceiling, redo the floors and revamp the heating and air conditioning system. The ceiling, which has been in place since the building was built in the 1970s and was originally made of absorbent acoustic tile, was entirely replaced with new high-quality painted plywood. The floor, after many decades of being scuffed with feet and chairs, will soon be covered in new plank flooring. The heating and air conditioning system will be replaced with units that are quiet and don’t involve ducts, reducing any issues with mildew. And this is in addition to all the details that always accompany work at the Center— sanding and refinishing the iron work that holds the roof trusses together, repainting the light fixtures, refinishing the doors, redoing some of the cabinets.
Gabe Wood has been one of the staff working on the Meeting Place over the past months. “It’s been a big project,” he says. But he adds that ultimately, like all work on the Center, “when we do our job the best, you have no idea we did anything.”
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Divine Love in Action
By Preeti Hay
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It is unlikely that one has stayed at Meher Center and not met Jeff Wolverton. It is more unlikely that one has met him and forgotten him. For so many, Jeff Wolverton has been and continues to be an essential and noteworthy figure at the Center.
Like countless children in the Baba world, I remember being a child in India and looking forward, with breathless anticipation, to Jeff’s yearly visits to Meherabad. His playfulness mixed with the profound depth of love was unmissable even to a child’s eye. “Oh please, please could you tell your Baba story one more time?” I would plead with him. And he would oblige, each time. His coming to Baba experience was so remarkable that it could make any mind, even a doubting one, pause in utter awe.
But now, watching him work here at the Center and seeing his role evolve over the years, in the perfect realization of the path destined for him, that story becomes the anchor for both the life leading up to it and as a result of it.
Jeff grew up in an agnostic environment where his family proceeded experientially. His only experience of religion was when he went to visit his grandparents one summer, as a child. While he didn’t have words for it then, what he observed was that his grandmother simply had Jesus’ companionship. “After spending that summer with her, when I went back, I felt that Jesus was watching over me. His presence was very loving, and I enjoyed it. Years passed and I forgot all about it,” says Jeff.
While in college in New York City, in 1968, Jeff was invited to a Baba meeting by a friend on West 57th street at Little Carnegie Hall. “When I arrived, all the women hugged me first and then all the men hugged me. It took about half an hour to just get through the hugs. This was so rare in New York City, it felt like a family reunion,” chuckles Jeff.
After the Baba movie there were three minutes of silence. Not knowing what to do, Jeff stared at the large picture of Baba. “In His eyes was the love that I had suspected was at the core of life. Just then the eyes came to life. I knew He was God and my whole life was meant to be lived for Him.
Baba’s love glances were on everyone, each one meant the world to Him. I thought ‘If they only knew how dearly He loves them.’ Next thing I knew, all of Baba (not just His eyes) was right in front of me. I was lifted out of my chair into the being of God and as I was leaving creation, I saw that creation was just a finite place. I had been to a place beyond memory. I knew right away that He wanted me to serve His people.”
Fast forward half a century, that foresight has come to be. Jeff has lived his life for Meher Baba and is serving His people. His greatest role at the Center has been to keep the personal element of familial connection alive and continue the legacy of Elizabeth, Kitty, Jane.
A core part of Jeff’s belief is that Baba came as a person because the world is getting too impersonal. “The Mandali related to me as I had always known myself. They saw the essence of who I was. I witnessed Eruch year after year and how he related to people. His responses were things that were not even in my vocabulary.”
Not just the Eastern Mandali, Jeff was influenced by many Western Baba stalwarts including Darwin Shaw, Fred and Ella Winterfeldt, and Harry Kenmore. From Harry he learned that all human beings have a current. In most cases, the current going in from the world is stronger than the current going out and that we have to switch the flow to move outwards.
He finds that to awaken this outward current, he has to use something powerful like Baba’s name to transmute the heaviness of the day. “When the current stalls out, then the day becomes ordinary, but when the flow is re-kindled with Baba, the moment becomes timeless—there is a carbonation—life is not flat.”
Being a people person, Jeff finds a natural joy in connecting with people to find out what makes them tick. “These people (Baba’s lovers and those who come to His home) are all familiar to me. It is fascinating to watch them through their stays on Center and through their lives with Baba. I always say that I have a front row seat to seeing divine love in action.”
Whether you see Jeff giving elated children a ride in his golf cart or handing out profound spiritual quotes at chatty refectory lunches, he has joie de vivre that has made some people call him an icon. He does not like that term, nor does he see himself in an assigned spiritual role. “It is simply the giving and receiving of love,” he says.
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