A young woman my wife and I adore––and have known for some 30 years––came to call with her two year-old daughter. The four of us had not been together since soon after her daughter’s birth. On the day before their surprise visit, I happened upon an anecdote that set me wondering what it would feel like to live so that nothing came between me and God. In the couple of hours with our dear friend and her child, the universe provided an answer.
Here’s the story.
For more than 55 years prior to her death at age 96 in 2010, Daya Mata (Sanskrit for Compassionate Mother) was the president of Self-Realization Fellowship, the organization founded by Paramahansa Yogananda in 1920 to be the steward of his teachings. Yogananda died in 1952. Twenty one years earlier, when the woman who would become Daya Mata was 17, she met Yogananda and realized she had met someone who could fulfill the lifelong yearning of her heart: “perfect love, divine love—the all-consuming love experienced in communion with the Eternal Beloved of our souls.”
Today, Self-Realization Fellowship has over 500 temples, retreats, ashrams, centers, and meditation circles around the world. It has a solid monastic order of monks and nuns. The establishment of a vast catalogue of spiritual publications by Yogananda and select disciples was a natural part of the organization’s expansion during Daya Mata’s tenure. As, of course, was the growing number of devotees of Yogananda who are part of the worldwide SRF community, I among them.
All that isn’t really relevant to the story I’m about to tell except to state the obvious: as president for decades, Daya Mata experienced intimately the full range of joys and heartaches inherent in the long-term unfolding of any organization committed to the highest possible ideals of love and service.
I happen to have personally witnessed one of those challenges. I’d been asked to write a story about it. To do so I had an extended conversation with Daya Mata about her response to the adversity. I asked her to address not the challenge itself, but how it served her relationship with God. Which is why the following anecdote I read the evening before our friend’s visit was so inspiring, and humbling, to me.
It came from from an SRF monk. He had been with Daya Mata in her office on one occasion when a particularly exacting issue was hotly percolating. He said to her that he was sorry she had to endure this kind of burden. She looked at him with what the monk described as “Pure Power.” Then said: “You don’t have to worry about me, my dear. I resolved very early in my discipleship that I would allow nothing to come between my and my God.”
Wow, I thought, if that isn’t an attitude I aspire to have I don’t know what is.
The question, of course, is how do you get it? What do you actually do? Sure, meditation, surrender, forgiveness. Sure, live beyond the inner obstacles of the ego: grief, anxiety, worry, fear, regret, unworthiness and so forth. Sure, my happiness requiring nothing from the world. Sure, sure, sure. But what does it actually look and feel like moment to moment?
There are times it seems God is just sitting around waiting for his cell to buzz with my puss on the screen. Because next morning our friend calls: “Hey, I’m going to be in the neighborhood today with the little one. Can we see you?”
Not surprisingly, since this was the first time our paths had crossed in a couple of years, our conversation enjoyably pin-balled in every direction over the two hours they were with us. And in all that time, her daughter in two year-old perpetual motion, there was not a moment our dear young friend was not completely, gracefully and joyfully present and aware of her daughter’s every move, every utterance, every look, every need––while carrying on a fully engaged sharing of lives with my wife and me.
I remembered that, when my eldest son was an infant, no matter how sound asleep I was, if he sniffled in the night, I heard it.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons children were invented. To help us realize that, no matter what worldly obligations, challenges or surprises demand our attention, our consciousness also can be fully attuned to what we cherish.