Welcoming Back His Lovers

Last Saturday, after fifteen months of not being able to enter the Barn or the Lagoon Cabin, Jeff Craddock walked up the old brick steps to the Barn door, opened it, and went inside.

It was the beginning of Jeff’s first shift at the Barn since it opened for visitors, and it was one of the many intimate reunions in these two special buildings over the last two weeks. Jeff stepped into the vast, quiet, sun-dappled space that so many of us have missed so much, and as he waited for Baba’s lovers to arrive he opened the other doors too, the ones facing the lake, letting in the breeze.

Jeff’s main feeling in the Barn after all that time was of Baba’s overwhelming presence. “I guess I was really taken aback by how powerful it was,” he says. “I had forgotten! Either that or it was more powerful than it was before. Just being on the Center and being near the Barn is powerful enough, but going into the Barn—wow. How can I put it? His Presence is huge in there.”

I don’t think that Jeff had forgotten. In the first number of months that the Barn was closed, I had the immense privilege of helping to clean it; entering into the hush to run a gentle brush over Baba’s chairs, to check the corners and windows, to make sure everything was tended to. And in that hush, there was always an expectancy, as though Baba’s presence was full, ready to overflow, ready to pour over His lovers when they returned.

Jeff had a similar experience when he entered the Lagoon Cabin. It was, again, the first time he had been inside in fifteen months. There was someone behind him waiting eagerly for their turn, so he knew he only had a few seconds. But he walked into that precious, familiar space, and, standing directly in front of Baba’s chair for the first time in so long, folded his hands to God. “Oh boy,” he says of that brief initial moment. “Wow… all I can say is, whatever I was looking for, it was there in thirty seconds.”

On that first day in the Barn, after Jeff had opened the doors, a few more people came in very quietly to sit with the Beloved. “I guess I’m most moved by just seeing how happy and moved people are when they come after they’ve been away for so long,” he says of the guests. And the atmosphere is “like all the quotes that we’ve read: that it is the quiet where Baba is found, the profound silence. It’s very sweet.”

At one point, into the silence walked a family on a tour, coming to the Center for the first time ever. They had a connection with Baba; Jeff recalled that one of their family members had met Him, long ago. And they came into the indescribable atmosphere of the Barn and just sat; the young boy in the party sat on the floor facing Baba’s chair, quietly. Jeff said of the moment: “Their presence felt very holy to me. In fact, I guess the Barn feels very holy to me at this point, since it’s reopened.”

Finally the group got up to leave, and, as he has begun to do these days from his seat in the corner, Jeff quietly acknowledged them as they passed. In that moment, he says, “for some reason I was moved to stand up, do a full namaskar. It just felt like the right thing to do.” To be one more small part of Baba’s welcome, welcoming His lovers home.