When Mr. Reddy died, Mother Meera settled into a quiet life in Thalheim for the next six years, rarely venturing out of Germany. The arrival of an Indian holy woman in this sleepy Catholic village was tolerated remarkably well by her neighbors, some of whom sent their children to Mother’s house to receive her private blessing. The mayor of Thalheim came to Mother Meera with a liver complaint and is said to have been cured. The parish priest came for darshan. From her ordinary lifestyle, it was clear to her neighbors that this was no exotic cult. Passing her modest home, neighbors might find Mother Meera hauling bags of cement across the driveway or pounding shingles into the roof, and were greeted with a friendly smile. The influx of visitors from around the world brought revenue to local businesses as well, which didn’t hurt her popularity, either.
Unlike most Eastern masters coming to the West, Mother Meera refused self-promotion and gave no interviews, preferring the quiet life of a private citizen in her adopted country. In fact, Germany was more to Mother’s taste than India had ever been. The weather was blessedly cool, for starters—Mother Meera dislikes the heat—and with its emphasis on efficiency, cleanliness, and order, the German work ethic pleased her more than the catch-as-catch-can style of India. Here she was free to move around as she pleased without fanfare or unwanted attention. In India, even in those early years, it was hard for Mother to venture out in public without devotees dropping to her feet in pranam or assaulting her with garlands of flowers. In Thalheim, there was no such hoopla. Locals who encountered Mother Meera and Adilakshmi walking to the grocery store or visiting Mr. Reddy’s white marble gravestone greeted the foreign women politely and went on their way without making a fuss.
This period of reclusion was interrupted in the fall of 1989. After years of Andrew’s pleading with Mother to give darshan in the United States, she agreed to offer three public meetings in New York City and a question-and-answer session at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in upstate New York, where Andrew was on the faculty. I had seen Mother only once since our first meeting and was especially eager to be there for her first interview in the United States, particularly in an academic setting. On the day of her arrival at JFK Airport, I was with the small welcoming party waiting at the terminal. Andrew paced back and forth, watching the information board and holding a bouquet of white roses. The rest of us were scattered around the arrivals lobby, on the lookout lest we miss Adilakshmi and Mother Meera somehow.
At long last, the customs doors opened, and there they were. Mother Meera looked petite and slightly disheveled, her purple sweater half-buttoned over a navy blue sari, handbag slung over her shoulder, with Adilakshmi at her side, scanning the room for familiar faces. When Mother saw Andrew, her face lit up; he touched the flowers to his chest and offered them to her with tears in his eyes. We followed the three of them to the baggage carousel, and when one of us managed to ask Mother Meera how she was feeling, she simply replied, “I am fine. And you?” That was the extent of the conversation.
The following afternoon, a few dozen academics and students gathered in the colleges’ wood-paneled library for the interview. The group was diverse, ranging from tweedy professors to undergraduate girls wearing midriff-baring tops and short shorts. To my right, a teacher corrected student papers, turning to her friend at one point to say, “This isn’t really my thing. But Andrew is very persuasive.” I felt protective and apprehensive all of a sudden. Had it been a bad idea to invite Mother Meera into the brain-heavy halls of a highbrow American college, unschooled as she was? The bar of doubt might be too high, I feared, the intellectual rift unbreachable.
At three o’clock exactly, the door opened and Mother came in with Andrew and Adilakshmi close behind her. Without being instructed to do so, the attendees rose to their feet all at once, and Mother made her way to the front of the room, settled into a chair, and tucked a tissue into her sleeve. She was wearing a cream-colored sari trimmed with iridescent green, with four gold bangles on either wrist, and looked more beautiful than I’d ever seen her, closer to sixteen than twenty-nine. Andrew delivered a glowing introduction, during which Mother avoided eye contact with the audience and Adilakshmi grinned at the people in the front row. As Andrew offered the highlights of Mother Meera’s life and the basics of darshan, I sensed the crowd beginning to listen. The teacher next to me took a notebook out of her bag. After Andrew finished speaking, Mother closed her eyes and that eerie quiet fell on the room. We sat together in pin-drop silence for a full three minutes. Then Mother opened her eyes, nodded at Andrew, and the interview began.
Andrew asked the first question: “Mother, I’d like to start by asking if you always knew you were an avatar?”
“Before coming here, I knew who I was,” she said in her deep, incongruous voice.
“You have said that you are not a human being, Mother, although you are in a physical body. What do you mean?”
“Although there is a human form, I have never been born a human being,” she replied. Her tone was matter-of-fact. “There has never been any separation between me and my divine identity.”
The woman next to me scribbled “incarnation?” in her notebook. Andrew invited questions from the audience, and an elderly gentleman wearing a bow tie raised his hand. “Mother Meera, I am a practicing Christian and also a professor of religion,” he said. “In my faith, we are taught that there has only been one divine incarnation, Jesus Christ. And he was a man.”
“That is false,” Mother said.
The professor looked unconvinced. “There are many intellectuals who have no faith,” he went on. “They claim that God is dead or never existed. I work with several of them at this school.”
“They may think that they have no faith,” Mother Meera answered. “But everybody believes in something.” The old man looked delighted at this, as if she’d confirmed what he, too, believed. The professor smiled, and she smiled back.
A student in a bright yellow peasant dress raised her hand. “Why do you give darshan in silence?” she asked.
“When people have a silent mind, they will receive more. For the mind to flower, it has to go beyond what it knows.”
Now it was my turn to ask a question. “Don’t we need the mind for discernment?” I asked, confused by the role of the mind in spiritual life.
“Both the mind and the heart must accept God,” Mother told me. “First you must accept with your mind. Then belief grows in the heart.”
“I thought it was the other way around.”
“First the mind must be pulled down,” she explained. “Then the heart can open completely to God. If the mind does not accept, there is always doubt. The mind creates every problem. Not the heart.”
Several people raised their hands at once, and over the course of the next half hour, Mother responded to a range of questions, from why she lives in a German village (“To show the world that the transformation is normal and can be done anywhere in daily life”), to the special focus of her work (“To bring the Light to human beings”), to her attitude toward human resistance (“Let people receive whatever they can. There is no desire to give”), to the difference between the Mother’s way and the patriarchal approach to God as taught in Western religions. “The Father is stricter,” Mother Meera said. “The Mother is more loving, patient, and accepting. I have come to say that all paths are as good as each other and all lead to the divine. Believers should respect each other’s ways.”
A punked-out kid in skateboarding shorts asked how Mother Meera could give darshan to everybody, including people who’d done bad things. Mother told him that, meeting someone in darshan, she sees “not one person there but many persons behind.” “The whole picture must be considered,” she said. “My love is for all.”
This prompted my neighbor to raise her hand. “I’m curious about the soul, Mother Meera. Are you able to see a person’s soul?”
She looked at the teacher and said, “Yes.”
“What does it look like?” the woman asked.
Mother gazed at her for a moment. “It is a combination of light and shadow, resting inside your body like another body.”
A palpable buzz went through the room. My neighbor’s companion spoke up then. “Can you really help people become enlightened?”
“Yes,” Mother replied with a smile. “But first you must be ripe.”
After that, Mother Meera seemed to withdraw her attention. The questioning came to a natural stop. Mother gazed down at the floor in front of her as late afternoon light streamed through the library windows. Nobody moved for several minutes. Eventually, Mother Meera looked up, removed the tissue from her sleeve, and rose to her feet. We stood up once again as a group and watched her make her way to the door, followed by Adilakshmi and Andrew.
The next night, Mother gave darshan at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In attendance were James Parks Morton, the Episcopal dean of the cathedral, and a number of religious leaders, including a Muslim imam, a Tibetan rinpoche, and a well-known Reform Jewish rabbi. I found it comforting to watch Mother give darshan to representatives of different faiths in that institutional setting, surrounded by stained glass windows and Christian iconography. In the lobby afterward, I overheard a conversation between two young men who were meeting Mother for the first time. They were talking about how shy she seemed, “like she didn’t want to be noticed at all.” “I felt like she knew me,” the first one said. The second boy had a different take. “When I looked into her eyes,” he told his friend, “all I could see was sky.”
On her last day in Manhattan, Mother visited the Statue of Liberty, which seemed to delight her (she enjoys sightseeing). That night, she offered darshan to a private group of a hundred New Yorkers at an opulent apartment on Fifth Avenue filled with enormous golden Buddhas and beveled mirrors as tall as trees. I brought two dear friends along to meet Mother, both of whom experienced dramatic healings after having darshan. One of my guests, a chain-smoker who’d been unable to kick the habit in thirty-plus years, spontaneously lost the desire to smoke and didn’t pick up another cigarette for a full three months. My second friend, who was fighting a terminal illness, received an even greater blessing. For the past few months, she’d been suffering from debilitating migraines that no doctor had been able to medicate away. After placing her head in Mother Meera’s hands, my friend felt her pain abate almost immediately. She returned to her seat, looking flushed and dazed, and instantly fell asleep. Ten minutes later, she opened her eyes, and the headache was almost gone. For the next four months, she remained virtually pain-free, and the day my beloved friend died, peacefully in her own bed and clutching her small wooden rosary, she told me that Mother Meera was with her and that she was not afraid.