The Hand Inside the Clay

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” — Jesus, Matthew 10:34, King James Version

“Sometimes the longing is too great for a human heart.” — Irina Tweedie, Daughter of Fire

“If it’s really bad, go sit in the chair.” — Kathy, The Importance of Attention, March 26, 2000

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Years ago, two of my closest girlfriends and I went to the Siddha Yoga ashram in upstate New York, where my friend Kim and I got into a terrific fight. We both wanted to find God so badly, and that weekend we had some beautiful moments chanting with Gurumayi and sitting in the meditation caves. Then somewhere in the middle of this argument I stopped and asked, “Why are we fighting?”

Our other girlfriend had gone off to meditate by herself, and when we saw her again she said it was because we were so close to the Guru. I didn’t understand it then the way I do now. I believe the Guru was showing me my own shadow, which was rather hard to see while I was so busy looking at Kim.

Years later I heard initiates tell almost the same story about driving to The Highlands, where my own Teacher, Kathy, lived. They would be arguing in the car and suddenly remember they were getting close to Her. Something was being brought up to be seen, often before they had any idea what was happening.

I had a different experience of that confusion the first time I went to see Amma in Virginia. After hours on my knees, scooting forward with hundreds of people, I finally reached the platform and suddenly everyone was hurrying me along. Then she held me and whispered what sounded like “Mama, Mama, Mama” in my ear, and I had an intense spiritual experience.

I had no idea what she actually said, or how to explain what had happened. Living with Kathy helped me understand how the confusion could empty my mind enough to receive something without my even knowing it. With Her, though, it could go on for years, and I often felt exhausted trying to make sense of it.

Sometimes Kathy would say my own words back to me and I could hear something I had missed entirely in my own voice. Other times She spoke to a thought I hadn’t said aloud, or someone else in the room understood while I was still wondering. I never knew whether I was getting the Empress, the High Priestess, or the Queen of Swords.

When Jesus said He came with a sword, I think He was telling us something about how this can feel. On our Path we call the impressions carried from one lifetime to another sanskaras. I believe Kathy knew which one I was ready to see, even while I was still trying to follow what She’d said.

Of course, before giving anyone that kind of trust, we need time to ask our questions and see how the person lives. In The Path of the Masters, Julian Johnson describes spending a year alongside his Master, watching even how He treated people who argued with Him. Once I knew Kathy was my Teacher, I was all in, and I had to take what She taught me into meditation and see for myself.

Still, knowing who your Teacher is doesn’t mean you always know what to make of what you’re seeing. In Ahmad Shah’s 1917 edition of The Bijak of Kabir, Kabir arrives at his disciple’s court carrying a liquor bottle, accompanied by people the king disapproves of. When He pours the contents over His foot and soaks the carpet, the bewildered king learns it is water, which Kabir says He is using to ease the pain of a priest in Jagannath who has burned his foot.

I have some sympathy for that king, and for what Bhai Sahib tells Irina Tweedie in Daughter of Fire. His own Guru scolded him more than anyone else, and for a time he thought his Guru hated him. Only years later did he understand how deeply he had been loved.

Someone on a podcast this week suggested asking why something happened for me instead of to me. I can ask that about my years with Kathy now, although I doubt it would have occurred to me in the middle of them. There was so much I couldn’t understand until much later.

Kathy gave us a beautiful image of this in Her satsang God’s Hand Is Always There Within!, sharing Her own Master’s description of a potter making a jar. From outside you see his hand striking the clay, while inside his other hand holds it steady just where the blow falls. I spent years trying to understand the hand I could see, though looking back I can recognize moments when She was quietly holding me steady.

One of the strangest moments happened in Baltimore, during a visit to Kathy’s eye doctor. He may have been removing stitches, though I’m no longer sure of that detail. What I remember clearly is that he asked whether I wanted to see what he was doing, and squeamish as I was, I said yes.

I stood directly in front of him, with him behind me, looking down at Her eye while he worked. It was so unusual that sometimes I still wonder whether I dreamed it, and then I remember David was there too. Looking back, I’m quite sure Kathy was in charge of that situation.

If I had to guess what She wanted me to see, it was Her complete surrender to the whole thing. Somehow, being there with Her allowed me to watch with something of Her scientist’s curiosity, when ordinarily I would have needed to look away. She was the one being treated, and somehow it was me She steadied.

I saw that same surrender through broken bones, internal bleeding, and more surgeries than I care to remember. I heard Her cry and sometimes scream in pain, yet I never saw Her turn away from God. Besides the love that poured from Her, that fearless submission to His will was the most extraordinary thing I witnessed in nearly two decades.

Maharaj Charan Singh taught that Masters can shoulder some of the karma of others. I believe their presence also lifts people who may never hear their names. Kathy never called Herself a Master, and someone standing beside me that day might have seen only a woman being treated by her doctor.

I was free to recognize Her as my Teacher, and learning about Deb Haaland’s grandmother Helen while writing this made me more aware of that freedom. Helen was eight when a Catholic priest put her on a train to St. Catherine’s Indian Boarding School in Santa Fe, where she spent five years. She was one of the Native children taken from their families by a system that sought to replace their languages and spiritual traditions.

Here in this country, freedom of religion is supposed to belong to all of us. Helen’s family deserved the same freedom I had to follow the spiritual path they loved. Instead, their little girl was taken away to be taught to leave it behind.

When Helen told Deb how much she had missed her family, grandmother and granddaughter cried together. Years later, that granddaughter became secretary of the interior and ordered an investigation into the very system that had taken Helen from her home. She couldn’t undo what happened, but she could hear those families and help bring their stories into the light.

Knowing that gives more meaning to Haaland’s words this week, after becoming the first Native American woman elected governor of any state. Standing on Laguna Pueblo land near the road where Helen had been taken, she said, “Yet we are still here.” During the campaign, she and her Republican opponent, Gregg Hull, both spoke about listening to tribal families about their children’s education.

I can find hope in that wherever anyone stands politically. I wish someone had asked Helen’s parents what they wanted for their little girl. When I sit at home repeating the Names Kathy gave me, I am exercising a freedom that should have belonged to her too.

Being free to choose Kathy, though, didn’t mean I understood everything that happened between us. In Living Meditation, Hector Esponda retells a story from the introduction to Nobody, Son of Nobody about a disciple whose Master grows cold and has him sent away. Heartbroken, he turns to God’s mercy and experiences a peace he has never known.

When his Master returns, the disciple asks how He could have treated him that way. His Master explains that he had given up everything except his dependence on the Teacher’s outward presence. The story is in the chapter “The Source of Love and Devotion,” and I know something of that pain.

Kathy sent me away, and because to me She was God, I experienced it as being sent away by God. It was the worst pain I have ever suffered, although the separation itself lasted a year. When I began coming back to The Highlands, I saw Her again, but I no longer had the time with Her that I once had.

For many years I came after work on Fridays, did the grocery shopping for The Highlands, took care of the birds and attended satsang. By then I had a regular job, which I worked from the lodge on the property before leaving on Tuesday nights, sometimes driving home through ice and wind and storms. Occasionally there was an interview with Her, and I treasured those opportunities.

It was during those years that I slowly began to understand what She had taught me about the inner Master. I still wanted to be near Her, and I carried that ache with me when I sat down to meditate. Little by little, turning within to find peace, I began to understand that the inner Master was the true Master, and I could turn to Her wherever I was.

As it happened, after that understanding began to settle in me, I spent more time with Kathy again through the remaining years of Her life. I was grateful for that time, though I can’t explain how any of it unfolded. What stays with me from those years is that even when I couldn’t sit beside Her, there was still a way to be with Her.

In The Path of the Masters, Julian Johnson writes that the disciple recognizes her own Master within, and that little word “own” means a great deal to me. The Shabd, the Sound of God, is the same in every true Master, but it’s Kathy I long to see when I close my eyes. I believe She undertook at initiation to guide the souls entrusted to Her, the ones we call marked souls, all the way Home to Sach Khand.

Maharaj Charan Singh once reassured a young, uninitiated seeker that the Lord who awakened his love would keep guiding him. On July 12, 2000, the day I met Kathy, I wrote about my excitement and the possibility that God might have other plans for me. Three days later I wrote, “I want to know the Truth more than I want anything else in the world now.”

Reading that now, I’m reminded how easily we assume there will be time to follow what we know we want. On the recording from the plane that went down in Florida on Sunday, twenty-year-old copilot Nathalia Filgueiras sounds calm reporting the ice, and then so little time passes before her call of “Mayday.” All nine people aboard that flight from Austin died, and I can say the holy Names for them and the people who love them.

None of us knows how much time we have here, though we make plans as if tomorrow had been promised. A Master comes to show us how to turn within and find God while we’re still here. Kathy taught me what to do, and I can’t think of a good reason to save for another morning what I can give Her today.

Kathy spoke so simply about sitting down to meditate in Her satsang The Relaxed Mind. She said longing brought us to the chair, and once we were there we could relax and listen. In another satsang She suggested sitting in meditation for three and a half minutes, which seems a gentle place to begin for anyone who wants to know God.

On my way to see Gurumayi, I used to drive past the exit to Kathy’s home without knowing who lived there. Now, in the quiet of the early morning, I can close my eyes and spend that time with Her. If you’ve felt a longing of your own, pull up a chair when you finish reading and give yourself three and a half minutes to sit quietly, turn your attention within, and listen.