How I Once Was a Hare Krishna…

Marko Milosevic, “Dark Night of the Soul”

I have blooped.

This is the term, in the world of the Hare Krishnas, for someone who has left the flock/fold. It refers to someone who has dropped from the “spiritual paradise” of the sangha (community) back into the “material world.” Like a sad raindrop leaving the heavens only to splash on the hard concrete…

I think that I am glad that I did. At least, this is the choice I am consciously making. I am not the only one. There are more than a few of us who are “disappearing” right now.

Do we owe you an explanation? Yes and no. No, in the sense that spirituality is always at its core a very private and personal experience. This is why spiritual abuse and trauma can be so violent. If someone has decided to leave the community because of trauma, they do not owe you an explanation. Demanding an explanation only adds to that trauma.

At the same time, because I am a public intellectual, I feel this essay is, at the least, the beginning of an explanation to you and to myself and to the general public. A public that should be aware and be wary of the abuses which have gone on in the Hare Krishna community.

If you are reading this as a friend of mine, as a fellow (former) community member, please don’t take the silence you are experiencing from me personally. The emotions I am feeling right now are incredibly turbulent. The anger and embarassment I feel is feel is incredibly tangible and present. I am just now beginning to learn how to process this with the help of friends and therapists.

As I will explain below, I cannot fully trust anyone in the Hare Krishna community with my heart and mind right now. It is a deeply frightening thing to lose one’s faith and practice. I’m not going to say that I don’t want to shake your own faith because, as I will explain below, we ALL need to have our faith a little shaken right now.

I had a lot of joy recently teaching my graduate students at Union Theological Seminary, in our course entitled The Yoga of Ecology, about the worship of shilas (sacred stones) in the region of Govardhana in Uttar Pradesh, India. To my students, the idea that God could reside in a stone was deeply attractive. For my students, to read about and watch devotees’ worship of the shilas made much more sense to them instinctually than the Western/Christian conditionings of mind over matter. For my two students who are Buddhist nuns it brought reminders of similar Buddhist teachings and practices revealing to us the divinity in tress and houseplants and houseflies. It made me very happy to see their interest and their own joy in experiencing what these devotees experience, yet I was also left with a profound sadness.

I always recall what one of my mentors, someone very well known to those of us in our academic devotee community, told us. One can become very critical of one’s tradition/community and yet still develop a deeper faith from that very criticism. I do not know if that is what is happening to me right now. All I know is that, however we describe this most intangible thing we call faith, I haven’t lost it completely. It just is changing, all the time now, into something quite different from you might experience as faith in Krishna.

We are always so careful as devotees to not criticize each other. Our idea of aparadha (spiritual offense or rupturing of relations) is crippling. Criticism, when done in a constructive way or with an intention to reveal necessary truths, is at the heart of any healthy religious tradition/community. Those of us who understand this can often feel like we’re speaking to emotionally crippled children who continue to insist that all criticism is verboten.

My sadness also comes from the fact that, while I am sharing with my students what I find most encouraging in this tradition, I have become unmistakably ruptured from the tradition itself. By ruptured, I mean that I am not following our principles, somewhat intentionally so. If that is where you get off this train, because I had fish for dinner last night, because I haven’t done my mantra meditation in months, because I enjoy a fine cocktail, because I think sex is an incredibly wonderful spiritual experience in and of itself, then yes please get off this goddamn train. I do not need your judgment. I condemn your judgment. If you stop here, then I am grateful, because I do not desire your association anymore.

With my students we have also learned about the ecotheological teachings within the Tantra tradition. Increasingly I feel called to explore spiritual identification with this tradition. So much of the Tantra tradition teaches that there is no sharp line between the material and the spiritual. That the material is actually a vessel for the spiritual. I also find myself drawn to practices of Zen Buddhism, especially piqued by the curiosity expressed by one of my primary spiritual teachers and friends, the late Catholic monk/mystic/activist Thomas Merton. I also think Jesus of Nazareth is quite correct when he says (and exemplifies) that we should care about the material/spiritual (not separate) concern of the poor and the oppressed and the vulnerable first and foremost. Justice is the vessel of divine love in this world. I think our sanghas do a generally terrible job of following Jesus’ teachings. I think most devotees haven’t the faintest fucking idea what justice is. I think too many devotees think of justice in a pejorative way, which is absolutely sickening to my stomach and soul. That is also a big reason why many of us are disappearing.

In this, I find no qualitative difference in my own devotion for Krishna. I do not think Krishna intends for us to become so distasteful of the very world and the very bodies we inhabit. In this, I think we have made a categorical mistake.

At heart I am still a practitioner of bhakti-yoga. What exactly is this bhakti-yoga that we all attempt to practice? The eminent Indian poet, philosopher, and litterateur A.K Ramanujan describes bhakti as that which “is necessarily anti-structure…unmaking, undoing, the man-made. It is an act of violation against ordinary expected loyalties, a breakdown of the predictable and the secure…The Lord is the Illicit Lover; He will break up the world of Karma and normal relationships.”

I think so much of what we consider sacred in our sanghas is worthy of unmaking and undoing. I think we have too many sacred cows which are actually ordinary expected loyalties. I am also someone right now who can’t even physically bring himself to be in the presence of my fellow community members at the moment, because of the pain I have experienced over the last two years. Because of the betrayals of conscience which are routine to every religious community but especially painful when you have to experience it in person and not in theory. On top of the strange dark fluid and strangely wonderful spiritual tumult going on inside me personally, where Krishna is pulling me somewhere different from whatever I may have expected…

Perhaps there is something more ancient and more enduring and more original and less patriarchal and less prone to ethical compromise and our own brands of idolatry which is underneath our ordinary expected loyalties. Something which everyone from Rosemary Radford Reuther to Murray Bookchin to the Haudenosee people to even our own shastras point to. Something more Earth-bound and Earth-devoted. Something in which the shame of/for the body is non-existent. Something in which we meet Krishna in the actual forest, instead of in huge carbon-intensive temples.

Perhaps our faith is a lot more blind than we think it is. It’s painful when you start opening your eyes.

So I now I have been probably been labeled an irreparable offender and a Mayavadi and a crazy paranoid lost soul and so many other things and names and terms our other audience wouldn’t understand unless they were inside our world…

To those who remain, thank you. Trust emerges again. Because I also know quite clearly that some of you are going through the same experience.

I like to think we can write our way out, pray our way out. The problem is I’m still within it. Nearly twenty years of practice, faith, adherence, a sense of surety, a sense of identity…if not entirely gone now, changed in a way which both thrills me and frightens me. I am frightened because these questions arise…was it all a waste of time? Did I forever damage my chances at the life I would truly want? Have I been gaslighting myself? Have I been gaslighted? Who am I now?

The problem with trying to write myself out is that our-their language is still baked-in. I was going to text message a close friend who is going through the same un-conversion I am going through. I was going to call her “prabhu” by instinct. Prabhu is our/their respectful term of endearment we/they use when greeting a fellow devotee. Prabhu means, essentially, “I am your servant and you are my master.” Essentially, we/they are the (ideally) loving servants of all people and (ideally) of all living beings. It’s an idea and a practice at the heart of most religious traditions. It’s a truly beautiful intention, especially when put into genuine practice. Unconditional love. The kind of love that is so easily taken for granted. The kind of love which is easily abused.

I was going to call my friend a devotee. Again, by instinct. Are we devotees? Devotees of what? We have seen enough from the institution, and even from temples we used to call home, to know they deserve no devotion from us. What I am trying to figure out, as I grope and stumble and cry my way through this dark night of the soul, is how someone so beautiful, so playful, so erotic, and so captivating as Krishna can be covered over by so many mundane perspectives and so many mundane sins. The exact same damn sins as every other church, as every other temple. We/they are no different. I suppose I should have full theoretical understanding of this having a whole-ass doctorate in theology/religious studies, but it still hurts, profoundly and deeply

Why I am holding onto so much pain? Why can’t I just forgive?

I already have such a reputation anyway. It’s why I finally had to quit Facebook, because so much of the toxicity and my own toxic feelings from and about my spirituality is there. I have spent so much time over the last decade arguing, raging against, pleading, and condemning so many devotees who chose the usual banalites of evil one finds in a religious community: lack of respect for the body, for women, for queer people, for the “other” in general, Islamophobia, conspiracies, etc etc etc. I even helped start a page for progressive devotees on Facebook, which despite the best of intentions, was soon infected by paranoia and the same old dogmatic conservatism which the group was founded to get away from. It became an unsafe space for some of my queer devotee friends. It became an unsafe space even to dare to have a pro-choice position (I would argue Hare Krishnas are even more pro-life than the Catholics now). I feel quite ashamed by that. I’m also fucking exhausted by it all.

If someone criticizes you, with any type of good intention, that is a blessing. If they go silent, then you are fucked. On a fundamental level, I simply do not care anymore. I choose not to fight for the well-being of the Hare Krishnas. I don’t know if that’s permanent or not. It has come to the point where I feel I have to protect myself from my spiritual community. For my own mental and spiritual health. The only people who can understand how heartbreaking this is are those who have gone through or are going through the same dark night.

***

One of the reasons I was called to write this essay, besides the obvious therapeutical need to try to express the jumble of unsettled and unprocessed emotions currently residing in my body, was a resonance with man named Mike Rinder. Rinder is the author of A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology. As I have been reading about his experience within the abuse-riddled paranoiac fortress/Hole of the Church of Scientology, I have felt a strange sympathy.

The worldview of the Scientologists felt way too familiar. For a long time, I have had a long fascination with Scientology, which was only enhanced by my doctoral study of that strange and horrible phenomenon we call religion. Nor for the first time, especially in recent years, my theoretical interest in something has become something much more personal. The ache I am feeling in my body and soul for the ways Rinder was trapped in an apocalyptic us-against-them us-against-the-world consciousness is particular and peculiar. It crystallizes and collapses into a question which haunts me: how much of my experience as a Hare Krishna has been genuinely spiritual and how much has been rather cultish?

For Boomers primarily, the impression of the Hare Krishnas are they are some kind of cult. They were treated as such by any number of official/unofficial organizations up until very recently, although ISKCON (International Society of Krishna Consciousness) has been recognized as a legitimate religious entity since a legal ruling in 1976 My poor mother and my poor grandmother had thoughts I was joining a cult when I ran off to a Krishna monastery in West Virginia in my 20s.

While the tradition itself emerges from an ancient strand of Hindu Vaishnavism, it’s not offensive or untrue in the slightest to say that Hare Krishna communities have been infected with strains of cultism for a very long time now. When the COVID pandemic was overtaking us all in 2020, I found myself very consistently enraged at the small but LOUD group of Hare Krishnas who dove into the most paranoid, hateful, inconsiderate conspiracy theories concerning COVID and the development of vaccines for COVID.

This is not just a lunatic fringe within the Hare Krishna movement. For example, a prominent podcaster within the movement, who has a wide range of influence and has interviewed a wide range of Hare Krishna devotees, decided to use his platform to trumpet such paranoia (along with enabling/engaging in the cover-up of sexual abuse within ISKCON, which we will talk more about below).

I have let this podcaster know very clearly how I feel. As have others who feel similarly offended and disillusioned by his choices to give such content a platform. This podcaster isn’t just a random acquaintance to me. He is someone I literally lived right next to in my time as a Hare Krishna monk. Someone who I used to consider a close friend. Someone I used to trust and value. Someone who claims to be “objective” as a way to justify what he is doing. Someone who does not seem to genuinely care that he is contributing to this exodus of people from the community.

I cannot look a Hare Krishna devotee in the eye and fully trust them anymore. Besides this podcaster, there have too many devotees who have revealed too much about their own prejudices and paranoias in the last two years. Too many of them who spend too much time with people like Alex Jones and Jordan Peterson. Again, these aren’t fringe devotees. These are prominent teachers and personalities. The cumulative effect of this has led me to this state of doubt. A state of serious doubt not only in the personal integrity of the people I used to feel at home with, but serious doubt about the teachings themselves.

It is absolutely unfair to say that only the Hare Krishnas have these kinds of infections of paranoia. It is also absolutely unfair to say that only religious people have these infections as well, but religion absolutely has a uniquely intense way to fuel these kinds of fires. Especially the kinds of religions which have significant anti-reality viewpoints at the core of their teachings. Teachings which deny the validity and importance of creation, of the body, of our sexuality, of the everyday joys and pains we all experience. As much as more mature, integrated Hare Krishnas try to dance around, ignore, avoid, or just straight up not follow or adhere to some of these teachings, they are still there at the core of the tradition.

Members of the Hare Krishna community need to deeply interrogate where this all comes from. Is it primarily a result of the surrounding madness in the culture permeating in? Is it something within the culture and theology itself which encourages such paranoia from within? Is it some combination of the two?

It’s very easy to stick one’s heads in the sand. In my experience, Hare Krishnas are very good at this. Why worry about the world burning around us when this isn’t our eternal spiritual home? Why worry about issues of justice when people are just getting what they deserve because of their karma? One of our primary teachers would often describe “material welfare work” as putting a band-aid on a deeper spiritual wound. While, to an extent, I understand this teacher’s point, I also increasingly disagree with it. The result of this teaching is an insular, naval-gazing culture which has little tangible substance to offer to a world on fire. What little we have to offer might just be making things worse.

The same teacher was told by his own teacher, back during the Indian independence movement days, that his adherence to Gandhian values was meaningless because they did not rise to the ultimate, purer spiritual level most Hare Krishna devotees aspire to. I am also coming to disgree with this profoundly. What good is your purity when your view of the world, the everyday world, the everyday lives of people, their everyday pains and struggles and joys and pleasures, is so jaded and condescending? What good is your purity when you are being taught to ignore and belittle the very real struggles and very real hopes for justice people experience everyday? What good is your purity when, at best, justice is a concept very poorly understood and, at worst, justice itself is a dirty word within your community?

Like the Scientologists, Hare Krishnas imbibe a message that we are the ones who will save the world. Like the Scientologists, Hare Krishnas have done such a shitty, culty job of attempting to save the world.

***

My old Hare Krishna friends keep reaching out to me, wondering how I am. I have quite vanished off the radar, intentionally or unintentionally, for many different reasons over the last two years. Haven’t we all? I don’t know what to say to them. I don’t even know how to respond. My old Hare Krishna friends who have already left…I’m not sure what to say either. You may not know what to say to me. I completely understand. This is my effort to say what I want to say, especially to you.

What can we say? What is spiritual heartbreak? One of my wiser friends, a Quaker-witch I went to divinity school with, put it simply: you’ve lost what has been, in so many ways, the core of your identity. From the age of 22–23ish until just oh so achingly recently, I have been spiritually a Hare Krishna. If Krishna still sits in my heart today in mysterious ways, I still find myself low, lost, blue, like a riven cloud.

What is spiritual heartbreak? I find myself so, so angry at times. The personal and professional disruptions I have experienced in the COVID spacetime are hard enough. Whenever I have had what I consider a more-or-less genuine astrological reading, I am always told that I must have a spiritual foundation to my life to have any modicum of happiness. I must meditate. I must have some sense of regular solitude. I must have some of regular silence. Regular engagement with materials (books, music, art, sports!) which I find spiritual. I haven’t performed any of the meditative practices of the Hare Krishna tradition in quite some time. I haven’t been in our sangha (spiritual community) in some months. There is this combination of rage, grief, disbelief, and confusion within me. It doesn’t entirely feel like a “toxic” combination. My gut and my heart tell me it’s the truth I have to honor right now, whether I like it or not. Whether I know how to honor it or not. It’s frightening because there is no center anymore. It’s also exhilarating because there is no center anymore.

How are these old Hare Krishna friends going to react when they read this? I expect the whole gamut of emotions. Sympathy, but at a distance. Disbelief and confusion directed right back at me. Reflected heartbreaking. Even their own rage, because some of my friends look up to me from back in the old monk days. What if I shake their own faith? There are implications to that.

To those old friends whom I join outside the walls. I imagine you might feel the tears in these words. You might be shedding your own. In our own strange way, we have our own sangha of heretics which brings me a lot of comfort, because it’s a sangha I can once again trust. As to where the lanterns take us in our dark night of the soul, only Krishna or whomever we may be devoted to truly knows. We walk in our truth, which is enough to take us to the next step.

***

In 1990, Lokanath Swami, one of the leading spiritual gurus (sacred teachers) in ISKCON, sexually molested a young girl during his stay in the girl’s family home in New Jersey. Over the last three decades, the Governing Body Council (GBC) of ISKCON has adjudicated his case on three different occasions, the most recent being in 2022. Some fundamental questions arise here

• If the accusation of molestation was proven to be accurate during the first investigation, why was Lokanath not immediately removed from his position as guru? Why was he not reported to law enforcement authorities? What exactly were the “certain restrictions” imposed on him by the GBC in 1993?
• If the victim comes forward again in 2010, with the argument that Lokanath was not properly held responsible by the GBC, the same questions remain.
• Why was the abusive event brought up again, officially, this year? Thanks to the fierce courage of devotees from a Facebook group called Vedic Inquirer, momentum built again for the GBC to re-examine the initial event and the follow-through in terms of holding Lokanath accountable. With additional evidence supporting the uncomfortable truth that Lokanath was never held properly accountable, the GBC, nevertheless, under undue pressure from Indian temple power-centres which rely on the charismatic influence of gurus like Lokanath (and the economic stability they bring), chose to “throw it back to the states.” Lokanath was not officially stripped of his role of initiating students officially into the tradition. While some regions of ISKCON, such as Europe and North America, have gone as far as banning him from initiating students and from visiting local temples/communities, the entire institution of ISKCON is, as Arjuna says in the Bhagavad-Gita, like a cloud riven into many different pieces because of this scandal and its deeper implications. Frankly, there are way too many devotees who are either completely oblivious about what is going on or those who actively choose to ignore what is going on.

In December 2022, the ISKCON Central Office of Child Protection has announced that Bhakti Vidya Purna Swami (BVPS) is to be banned after an investigation revealed a string of sexual abuse, harassment, and abuse of a female minor occurring during the period of 2005–2010. One can note that, like Lokanath, this sad fucking excuse for a guru had been previously investigated multiple times. One can note that he was actually in charge of the Bhaktivedanta Academy boys’ and girls’ schools in Mayapur, India, the world headquarters of ISKCON, for decades. One can note how many big time gurus in ISKCON held this sad fucking excuse for a guru in warm regards for years and years, despite the allegations floating around him. One genunely wonders what they knew and what they didn’t do about it. One can also note that, despite all the other necessary and justified restrictions and punishments on him, after three years he could be welcome in your local ISKCON temple if the local authorities decide it’s okay.

I have encountered both of these individuals in my time living as a monk in Hare Krishna communities. I drove Lokanath from the airport in Pittsburgh to New Vrindaban, the run-down “shangri-la” in the foothills of the panhandle of West Virginia, where I was living at the time in the ashram (monastery). Lokanath was kind to me and nothing like a diva for someone of his stature. He was and is famous for his incredible devotional musical ability. He has thousands of students worldwide. I knew he was a big deal and it was a big deal for me to serving him, even if I was just his chauffeur.

Yet, over the years, I would hear the rumours about what Lokanath did. There was always a lot of whispering and backbiting and gossip and straight up strange vibes living in a Hare Krishna temple. I didn’t know what to think.

During my time as a monk at New Vrindavan, I also took my first pilgrimage to India, including to the Bhaktivedanta Academy gurukula (boy’s school) in Mayapur. We met BVPS, heard him lecture, saw his library full of Vedic scrolls, and met some of his young students, who seemed happy, if running colds all the time. For some reason, I was fixated on the fact that BVPS had the rugged Italian-American features of my dad’s side of the family. He looked like one of my uncles. The gurukula was ideal-looking too, an ancient treehouse of a school in the middle of the beautiful yet still feral jungle-forests of the ISKCON Mayapur campus.

I heard the rumours about him too. I also wondered about any parent who would send their young devotee child to spend much of their formative years of their life at the gurukula. How were these kids actually doing? I actually met one of the young students when he visited New York to visit his family when I was living at our temple there in the East Village. Picking him up at the airport (I did this a lot as a monk), my new friend seemed well-adjusted, if achingly tired from endless early mornings of meditation and whatever menial/medieval tasks the big guru had them do. I did not detect any signs of sadness or abuse or desperation to leave. I hope he was one of the lucky ones.

***

Now I’m pacing around wondering if I should be writing all this? I’m trying to tell my own story here. I’m trying to write/pray through the most complicated spiritual emotions I have ever felt.

It’s public knowledge for anyone to see after all. The institution itself is taking some public accountability, which I will admit is admirable, if deeply flawed. So why don’t I let it go? Why can’t I be more constructive, and less critical, as a few former friends/colleagues have told me? What would my own guru think? What will my teachers and friends think?

Yet, when I read that article on the ban of Bhakti Vidya Purna Swami, when I read about the depth of his own abuse, when I read about how many times he has been previously investigated, when I read about the sexual abuse of children he overlooked/justified/covered-up, when I read about his culture of fear, when I read that he only has to pay the victim $5000 for counseling (when so many of these swamis have rather large bank accounts), when I read he will be welcome back in ISKCON temples in three years…

My rage is genuine, emerging from a place within myself that I never knew about. My heartbreak is beyond measure, primarily for the children who were abused. I want to burn the whole fucking temple of ISKCON down. What are the “ordinary expected loyalties” which justify such a person getting away with this for so long? These loyalties which are complicities which run like a sick groove through the entire Hare Krishna community, making the whole structure rotten and rotting.

Are the Hare Krishnas a cult? There’s enough material to make a documentary Going Clear-Scientology style or Wild Wild Country-Netflix style. I would imagine that is an active fear within the realm of the GBC. Hell, I would be happy to write the damn script…

***

I want to conclude by touching a bit upon the real bugaboo: theology. That old queen. Let me build a bridge to an upcoming addition to this series that will require some deeper thought. This has been incredibly therapeutic to write, and I’m genuinely grateful to anyone who has read/listened this far.

What I no longer believe in:

1. That sexuality is the root of all evil-bondage-being stuck in the “material world”. How can we focus on the body/sex as evil and largely ignore the actual evils of social injustice? Who is going to care for us if this remains our approach. This leads to women and queer people not feeling welcome/being actively pushed away.
2. The material world is not a place we need to escape from. The spiritual and the material work in tandem. There is not a hard dividing line between the material and the spiritual. This is the most reductive of religious teachings.
3. Krishna is NOT a gaslighting god. It is not “our fault” that we are here. Our relationship with Krishna is not that simple. Krishna is not the overlording, patriarchal “god” which he is often translated to be. We have to rid ourselves of these colonialist overtones.

Perhaps, at this point, I should try to explain what my spirituality might be right now, if there is no center, if there is no Hare Krishna…

My spirituality is the smell of the rain. It is Francis Bacon’s paintings and what they reveal about hypocrisy, especially religious hypocrisy. This whole essay is an attempt to smear the smudge of the swami’s robe like Bacon smudged and broken open the collar of the priest-turned-lecher. My spirituality is Coltrane’s saxophone, Hendrix and Prince’s guitar, “my space-face close to you, my love” and Mick Ronson’s solo in “Moonage Daydream.” My spirituality is my sexuality, unashamed. My spirituality is Leonardo Boff, when he says…

All things emerge in us as articulators of a force of emotion as ancestral as the basic elements. Then even a top quark becomes a sacrament, and the universe of stars and galaxies becomes a heavenly dance for the betrothal of human and divine love.

Each vibration translates the ineffable message enunciated by each being, grasped as a symphony of a thousand and one instruments. As in rites of love and friendship, so in the universe each thing has its meaning, occupies its place, and is related to the whole rhythm of feast and encounter. The entire universe shares in the emotion, communication, and ecstasy unifying the internal and the external, the tiniest with the greatest. But such an experience is given only to those who plunge into the spiritual depth of the universe.

My spirituality does not feel at home in a church or a temple of an organized religion, yet I yearn for community. My spirituality is the church/temple of the forest, the kiss of my beloved Lake Huron on my skin.

My spirituality is within the heart of my dear Thomas Merton, my closest spiritual friend, a teacher I know will never abandon me. He writes:

God is not only a Father but a Mother. He is both at the same time. . . . To ignore this distinction is to lose touch with the fullness of God. This is a very ancient intuition of reality which goes back to the oldest Oriental thought. . . . For the “masculine-feminine” relationship is basic in all reality — simply because all reality mirrors the reality of God.

All reality mirrors the reality of God.

My spirituality is ultimately this, once again from Merton, his…

…“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”