The Fairfax meeting was duly held, after which Rabia Martin advised her mureeds separately that she would give them two weeks to make their decision to follow their Murshida under Meher Baba's spiritual guidance, or to ask her to release them from their initiation vows in the Sufi Order. All of Rabia Martin's mureeds present at the Fairfax occasion reported their adherence to their Murshida in following her under the spiritual guidance of Meher Baba.
In the following months, Rabia began to share her understanding of Meher Baba with her closest Sufi students, which included Ivy O. Duce, Don Stevens and Samuel Lewis.1 During regular meetings involving her total membership from the San Francisco Bay Area, she utilized primarily for her presentations the small blue booklet titled The Divine Theme . She had one of the mureeds greatly enlarge the charts from this work, which she pinned to a movable board, and referred to it constantly as she lectured.
During this period, Rabia also moved to formalize her commitment to Baba by giving him all the material resources and possessions of her Sufi Order, which included her Sufi School at Fairfax. She dedicated everything she had to Baba, and wrote to him: "Feeling is living — I feel what you awaken and teach — so I must cry out and ask you to come and fill my heart and our hearts so full of love, that only Love can remain."
Baba replied, through Adi Sr.:
"Baba knows you. He knows how you feel. He knows how you aspire. He knows how you love. He knows what you desire. He sends his deepest love and blessings from his Infinite Heart."
Rabia fully accepted Meher Baba as the Avatar, though she had not yet met him face to face.
On Monday, 14 May 1945, Baba left Hyderabad for mast contacts in Udgir and other places with Baidul and Eruch. He traveled 25 miles in a bullock cart to go to the remote village of Sangareddy, and it was late at night by the time they arrived.
Footnotes
- 1.Ivy had met Rabia in 1941, after more than a decade of searching for God and life's deeper meaning through various forms of religion, mysticism, occultism and astrology; Samuel Lewis (1896–1971) corresponded with Baba briefly, but formed his own Sufi organization.