Receiving His Gift

I left the room weeping after talking to Malcolm Clay. Malcolm worked at the center for 45 years, his job evolving until he was, for the last 30 years, in charge of the Center’s grounds. When I asked to talk to him about his life and work at the Center, I was not sure he would agree, as he appeared from a distance to be a very private person. But he met my wish with love and respect. When he opened his heart to me, I felt my own heart melting in Baba’s love, which permeated between us.

Malcolm was convinced of Meher Baba’s Godhood before he came to the Center for the first time in the fall of 1970. He came with his wife Barbara and friend Andy Lesnik, and Malcom’s younger sister Mary. “The Center was closed for repairs when we first came. We decided not to leave until it opened, so Elizabeth Patterson put us to work before we ever stayed here,” he said. Malcolm and Barbara went on to Chicago soon after, leaving Andy behind in Myrtle Beach filling a relatively new position of cleaning cabins and assisting Frank Eaton, the Center’s long-time caretaker. When Andy left the Center at the end of April,1971 to create Sheriar Press with Sheila Krynski, Elizabeth asked Malcolm if he wanted the job. Barbara worked that job alongside Malcolm, for a short while on one paycheck, and they never left! Did they consciously decide to dedicate their lives to serving at the Center? “I had no purpose other than being in close connection with Baba,” he said.

I was curious about the changes in his life as he worked the sacred grounds all these years. Malcolm does not waste time. He goes right to it. “The biggest change has been my growing recognition of Baba’s ever present love and care in my life. My time at the Center has been incredibly blessed. To be at His home when He had so recently been among us in physical form and to be, for many years, in the company of His Mandali and close lovers who had lived and worked with Him—I was basking in Baba’s love. I didn’t come to the Center to serve or to give, I came to receive His love.”

Looking back, Malcolm sees Baba’s hand in his life from the beginning. “I have learned that everything in my life has been handed to me by Baba, precisely as I have needed. Everything. From the wounds of a difficult childhood, to the trials and rewards of close relationships. My health challenges and my many accidents on the Center. It has all been and, of course, continues to be to this present moment, given by Baba’s gracious hand. All has been, as Arlene Stearns once described my bad fall from a tree on the Center, a ‘spiritual push.’”

In talking with Malcolm, gratitude comes up again and again. For the last 23 years, his has been a journey about exploring the experience of gratitude. “In 1996 I was having a very difficult trip to India. Try as I might, I was unable to loosen my anxious mind’s grip and experience love for Baba. One day I asked Bal Natu (one of Baba’s close Mandali) how he made intimate contact with Baba, and he said that he laid his whole being at Baba’s feet. The next day, he pulled me aside and told me that he had asked Baba my question, and Baba told him that for me the answer is gratitude.”

A number of years later Malcolm was meditating in Baba’s cave in Assisi and heard very clearly, ‘Gratitude is the key.’ Along with the words came an image of a key in a centuries’ old padlock.

So how has gratitude been an evolving part of his inner life ever since? He needed time to look deep within for answers to that one, and several days later he brought back some thoughts: “My experience of gratitude has changed over the years. Decades ago I felt the experience in my chest cavity, in the heart. Thanking Baba was a powerful tool, and I used it to slice through my mind’s resistance, freeing me to experience love and longing for God. But it was always ‘my’ love, and ‘my’ longing, and I held on to that separation from Him.

“But with His ongoing guidance my experience evolved, including my growing awareness of Baba’s ever present love and care in my life and my recognition that the only thing ever available to me is the present moment, and for the last number of years it has been quite different. Feeling gratitude now means ‘Thank You, Baba, for giving me this present moment with You,’ and that experience takes place in the Del (a Persian word that means the ‘source of being,’ or ‘bottom of the heart,’ or ‘seat of the soul’, which I feel in the abdomen between the sternum and the navel). Baba has given me the freedom to trust that everything I am, everything I have ever been, is a gift from Him. Gratitude is the experience of receiving His gift, making available this present moment, infinite and pure, with Him.”

I remember when the staff at Meher Center had bid adieu to Malcolm at a gathering, he shared a quote from Baba that has stayed with me ever since. “I have come to help you to surrender yourself to the Cause of God and to accept His Grace of Love and Truth. I have come to help you to win the one victory of all victories—to win yourself.”