The Why of Youth Sahavas

Center staff and volunteers are in full swing preparing for this year’s Youth Sahavas. It feels a little like being in an anthill: we’re swarming, putting in flooring and setting up tents and washing load after load after load of dishes. Every regular staff and volunteer has their duties, not to mention the over sixty young adults who are taking time out of their busy lives to volunteer as Sahavas staff, coming in days early to ensure everything is ready for the teen participants. If you caught a glimpse of all this without knowing the history or the impact of Sahavas, you’d wonder what kind of week-long event could possibly warrant such an expenditure of effort and love. And then, you’d talk to just one of the young people who was impacted by the event, and you’d understand.

Regina, a current member of the Cabin Crew, is one of those young people. Long before she spent her days on Center keeping it clean and beautiful for guests, Regina was a teenager who had been told about Meher Baba by her parents, but had no personal relationship with Him herself. She remembers her family praying before meals and everyone else saying “Jai Baba” while she stayed silent. “I didn’t believe in all that,” she says.

In part because of that lack of belief or interest, Regina didn’t come to Youth Sahavas for the first couple years. When she finally decided to try it out, it was with some trepidation— she still didn’t have a connection with Baba, and she was also afraid she wouldn’t be accepted by the group.

But when Regina arrived at Youth Sahavas, she was swept up by this wave of welcome. It’s something that you can still feel, when you walk onto the Center during the event: partly it’s those early-arriving young adult staff who create an intentional culture of acceptance, and partly it’s something more, this overtone of love that Baba tops it off with. Regina started feeling at home more quickly than she’d expected to.

Not long into the week, Regina decided to attend Dhuni, a ceremony begun by Baba many years ago. She found herself sitting around a fire with all these strangers who would soon become friends and family. After a while, they started singing a song— “Wagon Wheel”— that she’d never heard before. On the chorus, out of the darkness people started singing in harmony, these unique parts coming together to form something beautiful and whole. “That unity was crazy,” she says, and it gave her a new glimpse of how this community of teens and young adults comes together for Meher Baba.

Regina didn’t instantaneously develop a deep relationship with Baba. But in that atmosphere, and in a place where different beliefs were accepted, she started seeking— thinking about and talking about and feeling into what that kind of relationship might look like. At the same time, of course, as she ate burritos and taped ping pong balls to her face (don’t ask).

By the end of Youth Sahavas, Regina found herself standing in a long line, holding hands with dozens of the unique individuals who she’d sung with, laughed with, prayed with, and danced with over the past week. The line wound its way in silence toward Baba’s House. When everyone had arrived and had said Baba’s prayers together, she found herself looking out over the lake and feeling something she hadn’t felt before. “I don’t really know how to describe it,” she says, “It was like all I could really do was say ‘thank you Baba. Thank you so much.’ And that’s what I do every year, now. But it’s just… it’s just a crazy feeling. It’s like you’re filled up with love.”

Regina has come back to Youth Sahavas, as a camper and a counselor, year after year since then. When asked how Youth Sahavas has impacted her, Regina says she can trace so much of who she is— her love for Baba, her self-confidence, her identity, her living in Myrtle Beach and working at the Center— back to the Youth Sahavas. And she’s not the only one: time and time again I hear this story, each time totally unique but with that same thread, that the Youth Sahavas was what opened someone’s door to Baba’s love, and to a real relationship with Him that has become a foundation for the rest of their lives.

So that’s what I think about, as I’m scouring the linen garage or moving dozens of mats back and forth. And I know that the tumult of June, full of activity and love, is totally and unequivocally worth it.