Blessings of the Milk Baba

Yesterday I was blessed by the Milk Baba.

All of us visiting the Greenwich Yoga studio had the option of being blessed by this little Hindu holy man who sits under what is said to be more than six feet of dreadlocks wrapped around his head - 52 years of hair.

In the previous hour, I'd understood little of what he said. I heard him mention Krishna and Buddha and Shiva, but his English was minimal and my Sanskrit worse. I'm pretty sure he said nothing about Jesus.

Which raised the Christian question for me - Can he be holy? Is he really in a position to bless me when he's clearly idolatrous?

I liked his smile, though, which lit whenever the yoga students sitting upright on bolsters around the room in front of him forgot to chime in with his call and response singing. I also liked his words on inner light and the love that people can share with each other, even when they're from Nepal and claim to find divine insight by drinking only milk for 17 years.

By living on only 2 litres of milk a day, I gathered, he was able to clear his mind of craving, first the craving of food, then the craving of other bodily desires, and then the larger cravings of his ego. This brought him intense happiness. And he is travelling the U.S. to share the bliss of simplicity.

So I left the studio wearing the string of red and yellow that he tied around my wrist. They are the colors he wore on his forehead to signify that he had said his morning prayers. I know the string is meant to stay on until it has absorbed as much of my bad karma, or sins, as it can bear, and then it will drop away. It was the perfect accessory to my outfit: a long pink shirt-dress I bought in India a few years ago, tan A&F capris, and silver ColeHaan flip-flops.

Driving home from the Milk Baba, smelling the rose oil he rubbed on my hand, I could also smell the lilacs in season in Greenwich. The Avenue, our Rodeo Drive of the East, was packed with shoppers. And despite the fumes rising from the cars ahead of me, I thought "Why go see the Milk Baba for blessings of happiness when Greenwich is plenty lovely? Kate Spade has great bags; and the woman who just walked by looked like a movie star."

And I rued the fact that I would probably need to make a second trip out to the grocery store as I hated to go in wearing the long shirt-dress.

So today, in Quaker Meeting, when a man stood and spoke of religious fanaticism and intolerance as the greatest root of war, what he said rang inside me for a few minutes.

I believe that to be tolerant, every person has to explore their own spiritual edges - where does my soul end and yours begin? Is holiness so deeply universal that we might each understand it even if you pray to Shiva and I pray to Christ?

I stood and shared the blessing I received from the Milk Baba and my thoughts on why he might actually be holy. Others also stood and spoke of their own exploration of other religious traditions and what they had learned and how they had grown. And this, as part of the Quaker process, is to describe and define how we bring the idea of peace into the world. For my part, it meant accepting and cherishing a little piece of love and blessing from the Milk Baba.

These seemed like fair questions and thoughts in the context of the Iraq War, where the US is fighting to claim oil that does not belong to it, and where the issues of religious intolerance are large.

The last person to speak was a plain-clothed, plain-spoken woman sitting next to me. She shared that she sincerely hoped people understood that the earth is plentiful and there is plenty to go around, that we need not be scared. That was all.

She didn't look at my shiny ColeHaans, or mention consumerism by name, but the greed of some in the face of the true need of others is the more material cause of our current war and it will be an even larger problem as the planet's population grows.

So it's her and the Milk Baba. And me and my karmic string that I'm not sure is going to match my interview suits this week.