The Quest Continues...

...and tomorrow we'll meet a saint along the road.

Timothy Conway, Ph.D., author of the book Women of Power and Grace, describes the "hugging saint" Amma as "one of the most glorious lights to appear in the history of religion. Just her stamina — embracing these millions of people one by one, day after day, without a break, all over the world — is some kind of divine gift. No mere human resources could accomplish this."

Amma has reportedly hugged over 50,000 individuals in one day in India. Personal accounts from people who have met her (a woman in NYC here, a physicist and writer from California here, two young Americans in India, a whole family in Australia) compare the depth of her love to the feeling of their own mothers embracing them, and admit to sobbing uncontrollably at the experience of her darshan (a sanskrit word meaning "vision" in the sense of beholding or giving audience to visions of the divine, a holy, self-realized person, or a sacred object. Darshan is meant to be an interaction, and the intended effect is a heightening of consciousness or spirituality. In Hinduism darshan is an important way of developing one's relationship to the divine Self.)

Tomorrow J and I are heading to Boston for Amma's darshan. I'm definitely both excited and nervous about the experience, completely unlike anything I've ever done before.

Love is our Mother and
The way of our Prophet.
Yet it is in our nature
To fight with Love.
We can’t see you, mother,
Hidden behind dark veils
Woven by ourselves.

— Rumi, from Whispers of the Beloved