Essay for Guideposts

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Hey all,

Here is an essay that I just wrote (and have yet to revise), looking at my experience with Sahaya Mary from a different, and for me, more powerful perspective. I know there should be some comments on this one. Happy summer to all.

Hope everyone is doing well,
Nate

Essay for Guideposts

A couple of times a year, often when I'm home from school, my mom and I wind up reminiscing about my childhood.
"I'm sorry for all the anguish I caused you," the conversation usually starts, often over a plate of rice and beans in San Juan Cafe, a neighborhood restaurant.
To this she would nearly always respond, quoting a Barbara Streisand song, "Mama may have and Papa may have, but God bless the child who's got his own."
From birth, my mom is proud to point out, I attacked the world with an uncommon vigor. I cried for the first two days of my life, drank breast milk until I vomited, and took advantage of every slight opening to crawl, and later, stumble away towards freedom. I refused, almost by definition, to take part in all family activities, from dinners to museum visits.
If this bitter stubbornness sculpted my childhood, then the perennial fight over church defined it. It wasn't so much that I disliked church; I was fond of the musty smell of incense and I had friends with whom I would covertly wrestle in the back pew. My parents let my brothers and I draw, play word games and generally be distracted by our own, concocted entertainment.
Yet what I, from a young age, disliked so much about church, was the idea of God. Even as an impressionable seven year old, I debated God's existence. And since I concluded that God must not exist, I refused to pray before going to sleep or at dinner, to say the Apostles Creed, or to "accept Jesus into my life."
Little changed by the time I reached high school. Though I attacked my parents with argument after argument proving the nonexistence of God, my parents did not battle back, preferring to extend to me simple intellectual freedom. Convincing me about God was not why they made me go to church, they said, but rather my attendance was required so that I would be a part of a community. And, they seemed to repeat near the end of every conversation, I would understand better when I was older.
In college I was no longer compelled to attend church, and this relieved me, to some degree, of the vehemence with which I looked upon religion. But as a proud skeptic and, I can now admit, self-righteous college freshman, I still basked in my holier-than-thou atheism.
For my junior year I decided to study abroad in Madurai, a smallish city in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Before going to India, friends and acquaintances told me tales of people who, while in India, had found spiritual teachers and been irrevocably changed as a result. I wasn't going to India, I assured these supportive people, looking for that sort of change. Unlike those wayfaring hippies, I didn't need to find myself. I had already found myself.
India, with its trash and its caste system, its strong family ties and its unruliness, appealed to me. And its faith! Every house I entered had a corner devoted to the Gods, often with a burning candle and resinous copper figurines. Most conversations that I had with strangers lead to questions about my beliefs, and neighborhood families tugged me along with them to pray at temples. But as a reaction to this beautiful, but I thought irrational faith, I found myself moving in the other direction, towards what I found to be the pinnacle of rationality, economics.
In India, living among families so destitute that it tore my soul to pieces, I saw people so pious, so peaceful, and really, so happy. There was an old woman who shelled peanuts outside of my language classes who was so shriveled that each knee, though three times as thick as her legs, were barely larger than a tennis ball. Her ears sagged down all the way to her shoulders and she had four black teeth and weathered, leathery skin. But her eyes tinkled magically.
One day while I was walking in a poor district on the other side of the city, I saw her come out of a tiny hut. She waved to me, and before I knew it I was inside of her hut drinking a bottled coke that she had sent a neighborhood boy to fetch for me. Her hut, no larger than my wingspan in any direction, was barren. On each wall was a cheap, yellowed picture of a deity, and on the floor in the corner, she burned incense and candles. This woman, who I was to find out had been widowed at a young age, had crafted a happy life from what could have been misery, a story so prevalent in this, I had to admit, deeply spiritual land.
Looking at her, and really, at all of the people who throughout my life had believed in some sort of God, made me realize just how much I craved the happiness that they enjoyed. Believing in life after death, or one's larger cosmic significance surely assuages fears and imbues life with purpose. But, I desperately argued, because it so clearly makes one happy, and there is great practical reason to believe, then it is less likely to actually be true. I stated then, and still agree, that I would not delude myself for personal gain, but rather pursue truth where it could be found.
A few months into the year, I met a gorgeous girl of about my age who worked in a tailoring shop down the street from my apartment and next to the dosai stand at which I ate all of my dinners. She had cavernous brown eyes that seemed to at once be crying and tinkling with happiness and on her left cheek was a brown birth mark. Her name was Sahaya Mary and she was the fourth of five daughters. Her father had died and so, after the marriage of the oldest daughter, Lord Mary, the family had no money for the other sisters' dowries.
Yet this family of women, as destitute as any I had met in India- and I had encountered over and again crushing poverty- were the bravest, most genuine, warmest, compassionate, beautiful people I had ever met. And, after seeing them be moved to tears both in a Christian church and Hindu temples, I had to say that they were the most spiritually deep.
Sahaya Mary in particular struck a chord in me. Wherever she went, dour frowns turned to smiles, and one comment from her set whoever she was talking to off laughing. It killed me to think that she would follow the spinster path that the second and third daughters, Sesu Mary and Reggina Mary, had already been forced down.
Thus, the day before I left for Spain, where I was to meet up with my two best friends, I took out nearly all of my money, about 2500 dollars and put the bills in a shoebox. I then gave the wrapped box with shaking hands to Sahaya Mary and told her not to open it until I left. The money was for a dowry decent enough so that Sahaya Mary could marry a good man with a salaried job. Although over the course of the year I had probably averaged two hours a day at Sahaya Mary's tailoring shop drawing pictures, joking, or staring longingly into her eyes, the last month heightened the feelings of yearning still further. I told her then that I would be returning with my two friends on June 23rd, a little less than two months later. When I left, we both cried.
After spending a month in Spain with Emiliano and Shane, my best friends from childhood and current roommates at college, the three of us flew back to India to travel. Having given the dowry, I had hoped that I would be freed of my desires for Sahaya Mary, an uneducated girl from another world who couldn't speak any English. Yet as we traveled throughout India and the day of my return to Madruai neared, I found myself increasingly emotional every time I thought about her.
In Jaipur, about ten days into our trip, we were introduced by our rickshaw driver to a so-called guru. We met this man, named Ajay, in the darkened back room of the jewelry store he owned. Having seen the apparent quackery of temple priests and coming from a long personal history of disbelief, I entered the room warily. Ajay, an average looking man in every way, instantly scared me. He was sunken in a humungous black chair.
"Give me your hand," he said.
I put my arm on the desk between us. With one hand he held my palm and with the other he moved up the length of my arm, about an inch away.
He stopped short, about ten seconds in and said, "Your heart and your mind are completely at odds. In this matter, you must open your heart shakra."
I was overtaken. The day before, in an internet cafe, I had written my mom an email about my love for Sahaya Mary. I began the email by saying, "my heart and my mind are completely at odds." Ajay said other things about my family and myself that were disturbingly accurate, but it was this comment that struck me hardest. Ajay's prescience shook me, for sure, but it was in what his words called me to do, that I was forever changed.
The week and a half between the encounter with Ajay and my return to Madurai were the most stressful, tiring days of my life. By now Sahaya Mary was, to me, no longer a person; she was an idea, glittering and attractive. She was happiness, she was beauty, she was everything that is good in life. It was in this overwhelming longing for someone outside of myself, that I, for the first time in my life, felt a sense of still powerlessness. In knowing that, for all of my posturing, so much of what I wanted from life depended not upon my personal heroics, but the universe's plan, I was relieved of the duty to be in control of it all.
We arrived in Madurai on June 16th, a week earlier than I had told Sahaya Mary. After dropping off our bags at the friend's house at which we were staying, we walked to the tailoring shop to surprise Sahaya Mary.
That tremulous march to the shop was a walk on a fragile, rickety bridge; I hoped to get to the other side but, feeling myself fraying, I feared that I wouldn't. How had she taken the dowry? Would she cry? Would her family swamp me with hugs? Could I really let her slip out of my life and into the ether? Or worse yet, would she leave my life, but remain as a haunting specter plaguing my thoughts, and my future relationships?
Her tailoring shop was on one side of a big open field, one hundred and fifty yards across from the bus stand. With the best friends in the world meters behind me, and quivering like a taught bowstring, I stepped out from the lane and poked my head around the bus stand. There, a mere speck in the distance, I saw her, somehow already waving to me.
I raced across the field toward her until I was nearly running, my heart pounding, my temples pulsing. As I approached the road on the other side, Sahaya Mary burst out from the shop and leapt upon me in the middle of the road, hugging me with a desperate intensity. She pulled her head back and in that moment I saw, beneath the crystalline tears pouring down her cheeks, behind her dark, beautiful eyes, under her gasping sobs, her soul.
I can only describe what happened when she looked at me as being Seen. Within the holy Presence of her gaze I was no longer the tough guy who played sports. I wasn't the intellectual who could debate any point. I wasn't the renaissance man who took a year off to go to India. Nor was I stubborn, or a skeptic, or attractive, or good, or bad, or anything at all really. What I was, I could then see, was Pure Love.
That is not the end of the story, not by a long shot, but it is as far as this essay pertains. That experience of identity dissolution changed me in a deep and profound way. Now, when I go home, I willingly attend church with my mom. Rather than listen to the words and hear that which can be disagreed with, I soak up the atmosphere, scan the glowing faces, and tune into the eternal connection that we all share. I am now comfortable using the word "God", a word I formerly associated with "idiocy" and "naivety." And now, every morning that I wake up, I kneel in front of my bed and thank God for giving me life this, the most beautiful day yet in existence.

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