He motioned, "It is yet too soon." I could have died with grief when I felt his words.1
As a child, Norina had had an experience of God. On one occasion, she recollected:
Since my childhood, I knew of God. When I was twelve, he came as Jesus Christ and spoke to me. He explained to me in words of sublime wisdom that this love which had begun to surge within me was an imperative for the fulfillment of the highest form of spiritual love.
He spoke to me in the unforgettable words: "I am your first and last love."
The significance of these words was fully realized by Norina when she met Meher Baba for the first time and recognized him as Christ personified.
Without her ever mentioning this incident, Baba spelled out, "I was the one who came to you in the form of Christ to lead you toward the Goal."
From their very first meeting, the Master established in Norina unconditional faith in him — which was to last a lifetime.
Mary Antin, 50, was the author of a best-selling book, The Promised Land , and she was helping Jean with the household affairs at the retreat.2 Mary was a sincere, loving seeker, who had previously suffered mentally for many years, and had sought treatment at different sanitariums. At the end of 1923, "when I had been beaten to a pulp spiritually, I abandoned the doctors and entered on a life of prayer."3 When Mary heard of Meher Baba from Milo, she wrote to Meredith and received an encouraging reply. During Baba's visit, she found herself unexplainably happy with tears streaming from her eyes.
One day she telephoned her 24-year-old daughter Josephine Grabau to tell her that she too must meet Baba. Josephine had also had episodes of mental turmoil (from being bipolar) for which she had been hospitalized a few years before. When Josephine was ushered into Baba's room on 10 November, she hesitated. Chanji told her not to be afraid. Baba held out his hand to her and she knelt at his feet. "I was lost in his luminous brown eyes," she recalled. "Almost at once, I felt I knew him. Here was the living Christ. There was no doubt in my mind Meeting Baba was like going to heaven and meeting God. He was gentle, kind, beautiful, holy and, most important, he was natural."
Footnotes
- 1.Rom Landau, God Is My Adventure (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1935), p. 141.
- 2.Mary Antin knew Thomas Watson through her husband, the noted geologist Amadeus W. Grabau, whom Watson had met years before when he enrolled in a class at MIT where Grabau was a student. In 1917, Antin separated from her husband, and Watson had given her financial and moral support.
- 3.Allan Mazur, A Romance In Natural History: The Lives and Works of Amadeus Grabau and Mary Antin (Garrett, Syracuse, NY, 2004), p. 255.