An appeal for some Catholics
Some find Indian guru better for their souls than the Church
In June, the Indian guru Mata Amritanandamayi visited California, touring the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and spending several days at a center dedicated to her teachings in Castro Valley. She is called the “Hugging Saint” because, said the June 18 San Francisco Chronicle, for 35 years she “has dedicated her life to giving people big hugs,” embracing over 25 million people around the world
By hugging, Amma (“mother,” as she is called), teaches selflessness, according to a web page dedicated to her. “If you want to learn about serving the world selflessly, sit by Her side one evening as She embraces 12,000 people,” it says. (Pronouns referring to Amma are capitalized.) She teaches silence, beginning “Her birth itself” when “She entered this world in silence.” She teaches “renunciation, but only in the midst of a lifetime of refusing to consider Her own comfort.” Amma’s every breath bears “testament to Her inability to see any man, woman or child as different from Her own Self.”
Amma has an appeal for some Catholics. Musician Prashant Michael Rao is one of the former Catholics to take Amma as his guru. In California for Amma’s tour of the state, Rao, 56, shared with the Chronicle his reasons for exchanging Holy Mother Church for the Hugging Saint’s “Universal Motherhood.”
Rao, a native of Bangladesh, said as a Catholic he “used to go to church every Sunday. I did everything that Catholics do until I went to boarding school when I was 13,” he said, when he entered a Muslim school.
As a teenager, Rao was “influenced by the 1960s sort of philosophy that had nothing to do with religion — it was more to do with spirituality. And so I dropped my Catholicism. I like the path of yoga and meditation.”
As a follower of Amma, Rao said his goal is to transcend the ego and the body — as have “saints” like Amma, because “they live from their essence and know they are one with everything.” One has to know himself completely, said Rao, by stopping “the chatter” and stopping “thinking.” Masters like Amma “tell us that there is nothing to find. There is only stuff to remove. There are clouds to remove so that you can see that the sun is shining. There are doors to open so that you can see that it’s daylight outside.”
Rao is not alone. According to a 2001 Reuters article, Catholic nuns in France went to see her. In 2004, Eric Perez, 33, a former Catholic, said he found in Amma a unique spirituality. “She’s the feminine face of God,” he told the New York Daily News. “This is the true meaning of religion.” Another former Catholic, Bill Gasko, 65, told the Chronicle during Amma’s 2005 visit to the Bay Area, Amma was “like Christ becoming a reality.”
However, Amma does not claim such high honors for herself alone. “Everyone is an avatar,” she said in 2005. “Everyone is self-realized. Everyone is enlightened. My god is people. My god is creation.”