As a lover of Meher Baba, I am also a big fan of His disciple and poet, Francis Brabazon. There was a point in my life when I always had, wherever I went, his book, Stay with God, close by my side. It was akin to an emphysema patient needing a canister of oxygen always close at hand.
Somehow, while reading his book, I was transported into a state of bliss. It was as if it were a direct channel to the Infinite Bliss of which the mystics throughout the ages have sought. It is one of four books that have had that effect on me, and all four focussed heavily on the subject of illusion, reality, and Oneness. The other three books were Meher Baba’s God Speaks, Bhau Kalchuri’s The Nothing and the Everything, and Christopher Ott’s recent offering, Essentials of a Spiritual Metaphysics. I was always struck by what Meher Baba said of Stay with God: “It is a perfect commentary on God Speaks.”
These books are so powerful, that if I were to seclude myself away for a period of time and re-read these books consecutively, non-stop (except for sleeping and eating) that I would drop dead from the inner dormant forces released.
Anyway, back to my story. In the early 1980s, one Sunday I went to Westwood Village (the section of Los Angeles where UCLA is located) to see a movie. Not able to find any parking, I went to the small parking lot of the Avatar Meher Baba Center of Southern California, which was nearby on Santa Monica Blvd. I figured since the Center was closed, there was no harm in parking there for a few hours.
It turned out, however, that there was a meeting there that afternoon, a Board of Directors meeting. When the board members arrived, and seeing a car in the parking lot (obviously someone taking advantage of free parking), their first inclination was to have the car towed away. But then, a woman named Kathleen O’Quinn Havens, saw the book Stay with God on the front seat, and announced to the board members, “It must be Greg Butler’s car because Stay with God is on the front seat. She knew I loved this book so much, that later she bought me an autographed copy of it as a present. I’ll never forget that. And I’m also grateful to her that my car wasn’t towed that Sunday afternoon.
Fast forward a few years to when, due to my wife’s career at the University of Missouri, my family and I ended up living in Columbia, Missouri. I was sure that there was no one in this town who shared my passion for Meher Baba, but it turned out, I was wrong.
I received a call one night from Meher Baba’s nephew, Dara. He told me he was coming to Columbia. I asked him why. He said there was a close friend of the family living there named Janice Reiman. (Janice had helped take care of Meher Baba’s brother, Adi, at the end of his life. She now lives in India helping to take care of Bhau Kalchuri.)
I contacted Janice and we became friends, and we both got to spend time with Dara when he came to town.
But one day, Janice called me and asked if I would join her for a presentation on Meher Baba at the local Unitarian church. And when I agreed, she asked that I bring some of my books about Meher Baba, in case some people wanted to browse through them.
So of course, one of the books I brought was my autographed copy of Stay with God. And to my surprise, Janice brought the same book, along with several others.
When the event was over, I collected my books, and was walking through the parking lot, when it occurred to me to make sure I had the right copy of Stay with God. I surely didn’t want to lose my autographed copy.
So I opened the book to make sure I had the right copy. It was autographed all right. But not by Francis Brabazon. It was autographed by Meher Baba. So like an honest autograph collector, I had to go back to Janice and exchange her Meher Baba autographed copy for my Francis Brabazon autographed copy — a painful but correct thing to do.
But back to Francis and why this book was so important to me. He wrote, in less than four paragraphs, words that set the course of my life in motion, about the hesitancy in Man to surrender to the God-Man, of self’s hesitancy to surrender to Self:
We have become cowards making out we are heroes. We demand proof that first, Self is One, that our brother is our brother; second, that an individual man can be the conscious totality of that Self; and third, that he whom others declare to be Him, is Him.
The first two proofs may be obtained by (1) an honest intellectual inquiry — as stated in the Katha Upanishad, “Go back from effect to cause until you are compelled to believe;” (2) a thorough examination of suffering and its causes — as recommended by Gotama Buddha; (3) practising renunciation of oneself as one is — as required by Jesus; (4) living the attributes of real humanity (trying to become a real human being) as demonstrated by Mohammed. The third proof rests upon the evidence of His authority and His works — the authority of love and the works of love. This proof must be sought personally in His presence.
We are required, paraphrasing the opening lines of Sankaracharya’s Viveka Chudmani, “to surrender ourselves to this One who is the end of all knowledge and its questing, the goal of all love and its suffering — the only Self, the Bliss.” But He, although the only one with real authority, unlike the authoritarians, demands nothing of us; we are left free to make the demand of ourselves — we may remain surrendered to our own inadequacy and futile aggressiveness or we may surrender to our own realized Completeness and Unity as manifested in Him; we may retain our hardness of separate identification or willingly dissolve ourselves in our own Being of Love.
“The Ocean becomes drop. The drop-becoming-Ocean has to drown itself in itself to realize that it always was the Ocean.”
In hindsight, I realize that even though I don’t have the Meher Baba’s autographed copy of Stay with God, he gave me something much more valuable. He gave me his presence and a drop of His bliss, and the conviction that He is the Ancient One, the Avatar, God in human form. He is Infinite Love, and as the late singer-song writer Bob Brown used to sing to Him: “You are so close, you make my breath seem far.”
