Letting Go

I have always been afraid of death. It first hit me when I was thirteen. I was on my way to India with my family, and we'd stopped off in Paris, a city my father loves. My sister and I were sharing a room. Usually, I sleep quickly and deeply. But not those nights in Paris. I would lie down to rest and an image would come, part dreamlike, part real: my body drifting in a sea of black, away from the earth, from my mother and father and sister and everyone else I loved, floating away unstoppably, and I was filled with knowing that I would never see the familiar people and places I loved and knew. If I managed to get to sleep, I'd dream of my father, dying in a fiery crash. I would wake up screaming. My sister would go get my parents and they would try to console me. I tried explaining to them how I didn't want to die, how I didn't want to be separated from everything I loved about life on earth. It overwhelmed me: that one day I would no longer be a part of the stories that were everything to me.

When we arrived at Meherabad, my father suggested I go talk to Eruch about my fear. I didn't like the idea of taking up his time and I wasn't sure I'd be able to explain the feelings that were haunting me. Nonetheless, my father asked Eruch if he would talk to me, and so, one early morning, my father and I got in a rickshaw and bumped our way to Meherazad. I remember arriving at Meherazad before any other pilgrims were there and going to Eruch's room. We went inside and I sat at the foot of Eruch's bed while he sat at the head. "What is it?" Eruch asked me. I felt shy and wished I had something important to say. "I'm afraid to die," I told Eruch. He sat there silently for several minutes with one hand on his chest.

Then he told me the story of his own father's death. How he drove to the service with Meher Baba by his side, and ran to pay his respects so as not to leave Baba alone for too long in the car. When he returned, Baba faced him and explained that as food is to the body, the body is to the soul. When the body is through digesting the nourishment of the food, it shits out the waste and when it shits out the waste, it says 'whew, it feels good to be rid of that shit.' Similarly, when the soul is done digesting the nourishment of the body, it goes, 'whew.' The soul drops the body and it feels, 'I am glad to be rid of that shit.' The soul feels relief. "Shirley," he said, a name he had called me since I first visited India at age seven and he had decided, with all my curls, that I looked like Shirley Temple, "I can't wait to die."

At the time, I could not fathom why someone would want to die. The story seemed beyond my reach, meant for a soul much closer to the reality of things than I could imagine. But the nightmares never returned.

Now, death still seems unfathomable. Partly, I want to hang on because I've got a pretty good deal this time around: I am healthy and comfortable, I've known what it is to love and be loved, I've visited Meher Baba's home and get to say His name as many times as I can remember each day. Though all our lives bring us closer to Him, I know there is suffering on that road and I have little faith that the next life or the next will be as blessed as this one.

Lately, this fear has come clear in a deeper way: death is a form of surrender and it is surrendering that I really must face and embrace. When I feel afraid of death, it is partly my desire to hold on to what I think I have. The challenge to let go is not only about dying, it is about how we live. Death forces us to acknowledge how precious the present is, how fragile. That even the things closest to us don't belong to us at all. When I practice surrendering to how life is moment to moment, when I stop trying to correct my experience or muscle it in another direction by the will of my personality, I become less attached to myself and to being around to see and influence how it all turns out. At the same time, I feel more present, more connected to the dance of the world around me, more grateful. That death accompanies us through life suddenly seems like a reminder to not hold too tightly to who we think we are or how we think life should be.

Surrender is after all one of the instructions we have from Him. Meher Baba says, "If you attend to each daily activity with a spirit of detachment, leaving the results entirely to God, you are really loving Him." That does not mean the spirit retreats or grows dull. In fact, Baba explains, "For spontaneous surrender, the heart must, so to speak, be worn on one's sleeve." So goes the game we are here to play: to put our heart into all we do but to surrender the results of that vulnerability to Him. To be ready for anything but want nothing. To be in love with life and to know it can be gone in an instant.

Just today, I was walking home from work on a tree-lined street erupting with blooms. The wind picked up, shaking the trees' branches. A storm of white petals showered down on the sidewalk and on all of us busily walking on our way. As the trees shed their blooms, all I could think is, "How beautiful--both the blooming and the letting go."

Beads On One String

Since I've known Meher Baba, I have also known He was Christ, Buddha, Ram, Krishna, Mohammed and so on. This gives me comfort, as an exclusive God has always felt un-Godly to me. At the same time, religion has always made me nervous. The righteousness, the violence, dogmatic moral codes. I turn away from those aspects of organized religion and with that turning, away from other aspects of what religious people do: the prayer, the services, the communities formed around a shared notion of life for the Lord. Baba said He would bring all world religions together like beads on one string. I love the idea of that kind of unity, but somehow I never imagined that as His lover, I might have to personally put that into practice.

Lately, my resistance to religion has been challenged. Face-to-face with new friends from different faiths I've had to look deep at my own biases, my own conceptions of God and beliefs about what it means to love Him. I've realized that the same thing that offends me about most religions--the dismissal of how others strive to know Him--is in me, too. I look at churches, for example, and see things that I judge--beliefs about who can enter His kingdom and restrictive ideas about which aspects of our humanity are holy and which are not. But, when I pass that kind of judgement, I am showing my own narrowness, my own prescriptions about what loving God should look like.

As I write this, my mind leaps to defend its position: "But there are churches that have nothing to do with God!" it screams. "Think of all the killing that has been done in the name of religion," it implores, trying a new depth of persuasion. "And the hate--the categorical hatred for homosexuals or doctors who perform abortions or people who practice other religions," says the mind, gathering steam for its point of view. "I'm right not to trust these versions of God," the mind insists. And then, all revved up and nearly exhausting the rest of me, it falls quiet.

Out of the silence, another voice pipes up. This one speaks more softly, with less urgency. "He asks us to love each other, no matter what," it says, cooling down the heat in my chest. "Who are you to say how others show their love for God or find their way to Him?" it asks, with a stern smile. "We are all arrows being shot toward God," it reminds me. When I map my resistance to religion on those who practice it, I am moving away from the goal. The mind is suddenly like a runner doubling over after doing everything possible to win the race but still coming up short.

And then I realize what this battle is about, the challenge is a familiar one for me: the movement from mind to heart, letting the lighter side of me lead for once. When I do, I can see how all the ideas I hold so dearly, because they make me who I am, also separate me from others who challenge those ideas by being too much of this or too little of that. And the only way out of that bind is: Love. To love those whom we cannot love. To see Him in all things. To trust that we truly are all connected. To know, at the heart of it, He is sowing those seeds of Love in us all.

God, Please Give me a Job

Growing up in a Baba family, I got early doses of the good stuff: love, humor, spiritual serendipity, exposure to people who were doing their best to live from the heart, the unbelievable fortune of getting to mingle with His mandali and be in the presence of truly great souls. I wrote poems and did art and swam in the ocean by His home in the West.

Somewhere in the crossroads of being a child in the embrace of His family and my life now, it dawned on me that most of my time would be spent at work and the work I chose would matter very much to the life I had, the person I would become. This was something worth deep consideration, I decided, and so I began asking Him what my life's work was - hoping that an answer would rise up from the wells of the heart, where our best conversations usually unfold. But no answer came clear; the well took those questions into the dark and surfaced no clear path in return.

I wanted a God who told me to serve the poor, or write novels, or bake bread. Sweep this floor every day for forty years because it is good work, it is what I want you to do. A sense of divine purpose, freedom from waking up one day and realizing I made the wrong choice, I'd lost my life in work that had done nothing for me or for the world.

But Baba didn't seem to work that way, at least for me. In my twenties, I , like many Baba lovers I know, considered a life in India, close to His home and His body, where service to Him could be abundantly clear. Inside though, I felt a calling into the world. And here I am. My job now, as a lawyer, often feels crushingly intellectual and stressful enough that I go whole days when I barely take a breath. Beside my computer, is a Baba card, the one that reads "Do Your Best and Don't Worry Be Happy...Leave the Rest to Me." He smiles out at me as I cradle the phone, type away, shift endless piles of paper from one stack to another on my desk. And sometimes I ask Him, especially on the days when the heart quality I long for seems to recede behind the press of deadlines and demands, "Is this really where you want me to be?"

Of course, this question itself may be one of the lessons that life in the world offers us. Finding, in the moments that feel distant from whatever it is that makes us feel spiritually alive, a trust that we are exactly where He wants us to be. As Hafiz wrote, knowing that, "this place where you are right now God circled on a map for you" even if that place is a courtroom or a line at the post office or at a baseball game. Recently, I received a sweet reminder of how Baba is always with us, guiding us in ways that deepen that dependence on Him. It was a frantic day in the office, one where each task hurtled me full force toward the next, and I was tired, definitely not at my multi-tasking best. My supervisor, frantic herself, rolled a chair up to my desk for a difficult conference call we had scheduled. Out of nowhere, she said, "And does He help you?" "What?" I answered, having no idea what she was talking about. "Does He help you?" she repeated, gesturing to the Baba card. "Yes," I answered, surprised and delighted that after two years of working together she was suddenly asking me about Baba, "He does." "How?" she asked, genuinely curious. "Well," I said, "take today. I was tired this morning and had so many responsibilities. I knew I didn't have the energy to get everything done. So, I turned to Him inside, and let Him know that I needed some help, that I couldn't do today on my own. And then little things happened. I got a swell of energy from some unknown place, you helped me get that assignment done, others stepped in and made the way easier. And I was no longer worried that I'd fail or disappoint." "Oh," she said, "that must be very comforting, to have someone to rest in like that."

That was the end of the conversation. We made the phone call, the day hurtled forward and I went home tired, but refreshed. She helped me realize something that I sometimes forget. That maybe the work we do is not the important thing. That He puts us in situations that urge us to lean on Him. And, most of all, that life's work with Him is not about finding the right job but about remembering that He is the doer and we need only keep Him close. That the real job is to keep His company, do our Best, and leave the rest to Him.

Winking Back

The number 225 has always been big in my family. Meher Baba's birthdate was like a secret code, a password between us and the universe, the digits that turn the combination lock to its sweetest spot, reminding us to remember Him. We would look for it everywhere: on mailboxes and buildings, among the long list of numbers on a credit card, in the phone number of a new friend or first date, in flight numbers and on hotel room doors. And, of course, on clocks--the one place we had a twice a day chance to catch the magic number, look again at our surroundings and suddenly feel connected to what was mundane a moment ago: the glint of the sun off the car's hood, the gait of a teenager swaggering home, the curve of a tree branch, a bird singing love songs in the afternoon . . . all as if Baba was personally saying, "did you notice that . . . ?" with a wink and a caress, His hand gracing the exact place and time where we happened to be.

Tonight, for instance, I was in a hotel in Los Angeles, a roadside chain near LAX. After a day's work, I was on the treadmill, wondering how it was that my physical life was getting its play by running on a belt and staring at a wall. It doesn't get more unholy than a hotel gym by the Los Angeles airport. I was listening to my iPod like a good young professional and playing it on "shuffle," so as not to have to make one more decision that day. Plus, I like the randomness of a machine flipping through 4000 songs I at some point chose and liked: Jurassic Five next to Louis Armstrong. The Gypsy Kings opening for Sam Cooke. Right (and I mean to the second) as I hit mile 2.25 on the treadmill--a point, you might have guessed, that I always look forward to on these runs--my personalized radio show of hip-hop and old soul suddenly switched gears and out came the hearty strum of Jaime Newell's guitar and his voice singing of the New Life. And I felt Baba--that wink, that utterly transcendent smile--on the treadmill beside me, saying "Yep, L.A. Aren't these machines funny? Come on, let's see how fast we can go!"

This relationship with 225 is, of course, simply one of the ways I try to remember Him. It keeps me at the ready to be graced by His company any old place in the everydayness of life, like a game of peek-a-boo. But remembering Him amidst my daily life is something I'm continually trying to work on and it is always changing. Sometimes feeling Baba's company takes so little effort I feel like I should whisper to Him that He can stop babying me--His face in the grain of the kitchen table, Begin the Beguine playing in my morning coffee haunt, someone seeing His picture in my office and asking about Him, church bells chiming me awake just when the afternoon slump sets in. And then there are the days when the train comes late, my socks don't match, my work piles up too high, I disappoint a friend or feel disappointed and realize I haven't thought of Him, not once, not even when I woke up in the morning, not even at 2:25 in the afternoon. In those moments, when it feels like He's disappeared behind the curtain of the world, I want to whisper, "come back, come play, I need help living this day." Lately, instead of waiting for Him to peek His smiling face back out at me, I've been thinking about what I can do to make this game more of a conversation, to court His company, to do more than wait for Him to surprise me.

My old answer might have been: look at a photo of Him, talk to a Baba lover, say the Beloved God prayer, repeat His name, read poetry. All good fixes to be sure. But my search for His presence keeps pulling me past the sweetness of His photograph or the company of His name--to unexpected places, like I'm trying to find where He hides. Lately I've felt pushed to recognize and know Him in the things that feel least "holy"--a mother slapping her child, a man left to sleep out in the cold, miles of strip malls and SUVs and tired eyes in hotel bars. What I am trying to learn is to look for my Beloved not only in the presence of great beauty or pain, but in places where God feels absent, places I have mistakenly excluded from my vision of what He is. At the same time, I know that, at the deepest level, I am trying to find Him not only in the parts of my heart that leap and long but the parts that sink and freeze. Maybe that 225 practice, my invented game of hide-and-seek where He always found me first, has made me want to discover Him in places I forget to look. Baba loves us without dividing our lives into good and bad, holy and not. I would like to learn to look into those dark corners of the world, of myself, and see His shine.