Touring His Home

There have been many tours of Meher Center, but a particular one in 1952 stands out. Meher Baba arrived at the Center for the first time on April 21, 1952. The next day, Elizabeth took Him on a tour—driving Him and some of the women mandali around the whole property in her car. Afterward, Baba said to her and Norina: “I am not only extremely happy, but also touched by your love which has made you do all this for me.” [1]

Today, every newcomer to the Center, whether day visitor or overnight guest, is still greeted and personally welcomed to Baba’s home with a tour. Tour guides share information about Baba’s life and work along with the generous history of the Center and how to navigate its vast acreage. Preeti Hay, staff member at the Gateway and tour organizer, talked to me about the current system for giving tours with a tour guide assigned to each day. Before this system, tours were scheduled on an as-needed basis. “It was one of those Baba things: as soon as we created the system of having a tour guide every day we now have a request for a tour almost every day. It worked out that way. He put in us the intuition to do the framework because obviously there was a need.”

The dedicated volunteer tour guides get training, and there’s a guidebook to help them brush up on the basics of how to conduct a tour (and keep straight the dizzying array of facts and dates they might share). But of course, each tour is influenced by the personality and style of the tour guide as well as the unique needs of the newcomers. “It’s such a nuanced job because it’s different every time,” says Preeti.

Each tour guide has a favorite part of the job. Preeti expresses her own: “For me, when I give tours, my favorite part is that you get to see the Center from a first-time eye—it makes me feel that I’m there for the first time. Or I point out something and, just because they’re there for the first time, their response brings me back to that novelty.”

Cathy Riley is another long-time tour guide. She started giving tours when Elizabeth and Kitty were still alive and has taken a good deal of inspiration from them. She remembers how Elizabeth tried to keep the Center in 100% readiness for all visitors, and how Kitty shared with newcomers the “enthusiasm of Baba’s Love”— both with the interest and care you’d extend to a new member of the family. Perhaps in this tradition, Cathy starts out many tours by asking people how they heard about Baba. And she often adds how Baba stated that nobody comes to the Center who has not been personally invited by Him.

Then Cathy, like every tour guide, chooses the threads of history that she will weave into each individual tour. Sometimes, near the Lagoon Cabin, she describes how her husband Tom saw light emanating from Baba. Outside the Cabin on the Hill, she might talk about the time when Baba came to the cabin’s door to greet Tom and a few others who were walking by. Baba asked one of the women if she had anything to say, which led to her enumerating the world’s terrible pollution problems—which had been her exclusive topic of conversation throughout the visit. Baba then raised His hand and said, through Eruch, “Everything you say is true. Poisons are everywhere. But let the central purpose of your life be to reveal My presence within you. Nothing is more important than that.” At the very place where those words were spoken, Cathy will often pause the tour, as it sinks in that still, still nothing is more important than God.

Of course, people have all different reactions to their tour of Meher Center. Locals have told Cathy that they’d been meaning to come to the Center for years, that they’d driven past the gates but had no idea what it was—and that they’re “so thankful for the physical as well as the spiritual beauty that they experience when they come.” Some are surprised, moved, or changed by Baba’s messages in the Barn. Others, like those on Preeti’s first tour, might appear interested in nothing but the Center’s foliage. But no matter what the unique combination of newcomer and tour guide and circumstance, each tour holds some echo of that day when Elizabeth drove a beaming Baba around His Center for the first time. Baba says that each of us is an “imagined part of a really indivisible totality.” [2] From that first tour and over the ages, every tour guide has toured God Himself.

[1] Lord Meher, Online Edition, by Bhau Kalchuri, p. 3045
[2] Discourses, by Meher Baba, Seventh Edition, p. 25