Photo: Swami Satchidananda and Br. David: An enduring love and spiritual friendship.
It’s hard to trust that any words of wisdom are dependable until you experience their truth in your own life. So, when as a child I first came upon Jesus’ words, “Seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you; ask and it will be given to you,” I could only wish and hope this was so.
But our connections with our spiritual guides in this life are more amazing than we tend to realize. From the 1960s through the 1990s, I kept almost crossing paths with my cherished spiritual friend and mentor Br. David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk much loved by Sri Swami Satchidananda. Br. David was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, when I was growing up there.
He was involved with a Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I attended Catholic masses in high school. He was a close friend of Chinook Learning Community on Whidbey Island in Washington State, where I spent a month on retreat in college. He spoke at an interfaith gathering in the 1980s at Middlebury College in Vermont, where I’d gone with my meditation community to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I brought home and read one of Br. David’s books, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer.
That in all that time Br. David and I never personally met is a little bit surprising. But how I finally actually did meet him was even more uncanny. One evening after a powerful group meditation with a saintly visiting yogi, a friend and I chatted about his recent trip to New York City. When I discovered that my friend had gone to meet with Br. David to discuss helping him build a website, I was thrilled and told him that if space ever opened up where they could use my skills, to please let me know. For the record, I think that the state of mind we were in following the meditation had a lot to do with the natural ease of this important exchange of information.
A year later, I’d been looking for a new job, finding several opportunities in succession, each better than the last. And then my friend, who knew nothing about my current job hunt, called. His job-sharing partner unexpectedly had to quit. Would I like to take her place?
So, I went for an interview with the new web team of grateful.org, and Br. David and I agreed—as though it were a foregone conclusion—to work together on his correspondence, other writing, event coordination, and website projects. It felt almost like picking up where we’d left off: a familiar kinship, a feeling he excels at evoking in people.
Photo: An enduring love and spiritual friendship.
Similarly, I have a sense that Sri Swami Satchidananda, affectionately known as Sri Gurudev, guided me for a long time before I even knew about him and in spite of the fact that I never met him in person. For one thing, when I was going through a dark night of the soul as an orphaned teenager in an unfamiliar city dealing with a caregiver’s alcoholism, the music of Carole King—a student of Sri Gurudev—helped hold me together. I had such an indescribable longing at that time, and her song “Canaan” in particular spoke to my sense of having been granted bliss and, holding on the that fragrance, knowing that I couldn’t rest “until I go back again.”
Once I was working with Br. David and learned about his friendship with Sri Gurudev, I felt quite sure that Sri Gurudev watched over him. When I had dilemmas about what to do to help Br. David, I would visualize talking with Sri Gurudev about them, and I always received the guidance I needed. This held true even when I became executive director of Br. David’s non-profit, A Network for Grateful Living: a demanding position that was a lightning rod for intense and sometimes conflicting energies.
But since Sri Gurudev passed in 2002 and I’d only learned about him shortly before that, I never expected to meet him. Now we get back to the mysterious nature of our relationships with spiritual guides. In 2006, amid a big Yogaville celebration of 40 years of Integral Yoga, Br. David and I were able to visit Ananda Kutir, which had been Sri Gurudev’s residence. On the way there, in the backseat of the car, I glanced down on some cards prepared for an evening service, and one line jumped off the page at me as a chronic worrier: “Don’t worry, you are in my hands.” I even read the line aloud to Br. David, highlighting its impact.
We took time to see and meditate in the blessed atmosphere of Ananda Kutir. On our way out the door, I noticed a Big Mouth Billy Bass singing fish on the wall, not plugged in. (For those of you who missed this fad, Big Mouth Billy Bass was a realistic mounted, animated fish created in the late 1990s; when activated, it would wiggle and sing cover songs.) I wondered aloud what on earth that unusual item was doing in this sacred environment. A kind attendant explained Sri Gurudev’s sense of humor: When guests would knock, he would get the Bass going and sometimes hide behind the door and surprise them!
Photo: Spiritual brothers from the late 1960s onward.
We wondered if the Bass might still work, and when plugged in, sure enough, it started to sing, first its own song and then Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t worry; be happy.” Right as the Bass was heading into the refrain, it sang “Don’t worry” and then literally jumped (plaque and all) off the wall. Talk about startling!
You can see how this strange, objective event underscored my subjective experience of having the “don’t worry” line jump off the page at me in the car. This much-needed mantra medicine wasn’t in Sanskrit, and you can chalk up the form it took to Sri Gurudev’s sense of humor.
These experiences with Br. David and Sri Gurudev were not the only ones in which unusual connections with teachers happened in my life. Another seemed to me to be the direct result of an evening in my 20s when I was deeply depressed. Looking for help, I happened upon a friend’s copy of Ram Dass’ book Be Here Now, which included this Tibetan Buddhist Guru mantra: Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padme Siddhi Hum (which Ram Dass translates as “unmanifest, imminently manifest, now manifest lightning-bolt Guru of unbearable compassion and infinite strength who dwells in my heart”). This mantra proved so powerful that it had the rather unexpected result of actually bringing me within a few months to my root spiritual teacher (I had anticipated some more mystical, formless outcome).
This is simply to say that our longing draws guidance to us. Sometimes it takes the form of a human teacher. Sometimes it takes the form of a scripture (whether formally acknowledged as one or simply a font of wisdom, as poems so often are). Sometimes it takes the form of a rainbow, a numinous dream, a stone, a song, a star, or a sudden inspiration. Sometimes it even takes the form of utter desolation, the kind that causes us to intuit the difference between the unreal and the Real.
If you had told me in some of my darkest moments that I would have been this well guided through all my days, I would have raised an eyebrow quizzically or shook my head no. But the great “Yes” of the universe kept intervening. May it be so for you, too.
About the Author:
Patricia Campbell Carlson has run a youth program in Belfast, Northern Ireland; edited Sojourners magazine as a member of a Christian community devoted to radical social renewal; and served as the anonymous voice behind Cornell’s acclaimed “Dear Uncle Ezra” column, a forerunner in online counseling. From 2001 through 2013, she worked closely with Br. David Steindl-Rast at A Network for Grateful Living, both as his secretary and as Executive Director. Currently a freelance writer and editor, she still supports Br. David in various ways.
