The Real Flowers

On an early spring afternoon at the Center, while doing my rounds checking each quiet, unoccupied cabin, I stopped my golf cart in front of the Guest House. As I entered the wooden gates, I was greeted by pink flowers overflowing from the bushes all around me, each petal alive in the breeze and sunlight. I opened the door and walked into the house where Baba’s women Mandali had stayed, stopping in the bathroom to wash my hands next to the tub where Baba Himself had bathed.

Then, in that mirror, right next to Baba’s bathtub, I started to cry.

I walked tearfully through the living room where I always half-expect Baba to sit chatting with the women on the sunlit daybed, and out to the porch. Baba’s swing drifted quietly left and right on the breeze that wafted up from the lake, tumbling the leaves in a perpetual dance. I couldn’t imagine this waste of beauty, with no guests here to enjoy the unearthly vibrancy of the flowers that will wilt before they return, each precious square inch of dappled sunshine, every gust of breeze over the quiet lake that seems to proclaim in its shimmer that all is well, that God’s so close you can almost touch Him.

The only thing I could hold on to, in that moment, was that Baba would enjoy it, that He would have to enjoy it even if none of His lovers could.

And in that moment, I felt an answer. That that’s not the kind of beauty Baba enjoys.

I remember a story that Sheela Fenster wrote in her book about her childhood with Baba, Growing Up with God . During a program in 1962, as she watched everyone else bring Baba flowers, the most lush and beautiful offerings of the season, she grumbled to her mother that they hadn’t brought Him anything.

Baba called Sheela and her mother into the hall right after the program. With no preamble, He started talking to Sheela, through Eruch, about the people bringing Him flowers. “You shouldn’t worry about flowers, garlands, or this and that. I don’t need all those things. Let other people bring them. I don’t need flowers from you; your flowers are in your heart… People bring flowers because the flowers smell fragrant. Flowers make you happy; they are nice to look at… [but these people] forget about me, they forget that they have to increase their love for me internally. It doesn’t require flowers.”*

God has made millions of blossoms dripping with beauty, millions of springs, millions of vistas on a perfect day, millions of moments of birdsong in the new warmth. And they are precious, as the Center is precious, because they can make us feel His presence at the core of that beauty, bursting at the seams of these temporal forms. But what Baba really wants is infinitely more real and infinitely more precious than anything we can see. Yes, sometimes, we might be on the porch of the Guest House at the very tip of spring, seeing God shimmer in the breeze over a quiet lake. Sometimes, it’s easier than others. But all the time, wherever we are, we have the unequaled, unimaginable privilege of trying to give Baba what He really wants— the only thing that lasts, the only thing that matters, our love.

* Growing Up with God , pg. 239