Page 12 of The Love Thief
CHAPTER SEVEN Does God Make Mistakes?
The next day I again woke up before dawn and strolled over to the Bliss Café and Spiritual Bookshop, hoping to find my caffeine fix.
Through the window, I saw Deepak sitting in the one worn-in, torn, big cozy recliner with a book in his lap.
When he saw me peering through the glass window of the Dutch door, he quickly got up and welcomed me in with a big smile that felt like the sun warming my frozen heart just the tiniest bit.
Like a lighthouse of love, he radiated waves of compassion and care, and it felt good to be on the receiving end.
It was a bit crazy that I was noticing such things as generally I thought all this “energy” talk was just a bunch of nonsense Mom and her friends liked to speculate about.
I was here to attend cooking school and get my life back, not philosophize.
I didn’t know whether it was karma, dharma, or drama that drew me back into Deepak’s place, or maybe it’s true that we all grow up to become our mothers.
After arguing back and forth with myself for a few silent moments, I finally concluded that if, when in Rome we do as the Romans, then when in India, I might as well have a conversation with a man named Deepak about the nature of the Universe.
As Deepak prepared my cup of chai, I picked up his book, Conversations with God , and flipped through it randomly.
It seemed to be a dialogue between a man named Neale and God, and suddenly I had an idea.
. . maybe Deepak knew the answer to my question from Heaven Can Wait and, if I were lucky, maybe he would know the answers to some of my biggest questions about life.
As always, I was anxious to know just when I would find my one true love and get married.
“Deepak, may I tell you a story about a movie I recently saw?”
“Yes, of course, Holly. Tell me anything and everything. You have my full attention!” he said with a delighted smile.
I proceeded to share with him Joe Pendleton’s story of mistakenly being carried off to heaven at the wrong time. When I finished recounting the film’s story, I asked him, “Do you think God makes mistakes?”
“You know, Holly, you and I have something in common. One of the reasons I have been reading this book over and over again is because, after my wife died, I had the same question.”
“Your wife died?” I asked sympathetically. Hot tears shot to the outer rims of my eyelids. The idea of losing a beloved spouse seemed utterly unbearable. I silently nodded as he continued.
“Yes, she passed a little more than ten years ago. Pancreatic cancer. She was just fifty-five. We were living in Ann Arbor, where I was a professor of psychology at Michigan. We had a beautiful life together, three kids, all grown now, and after she passed, I moved home, here, to Rishikesh.” He told me this with a very wistful look on his face.
“I became driven to understand why God would take the love of my life from me. I know it wasn’t my fault that she had gotten sick, but the deeply irrational part of me wondered what I could have done differently. I was filled with grief, guilt, and at times rage at God,” he continued.
“This book is among the many things that helped me to make peace with the situation and to know God again.
So, in answer to your question: No, God does not make mistakes.
Mistakes are impossible in the Kingdom of God and impossible in the experience of God.
Therefore, mistakes are impossible in your life because you are an individuation of God. Me, you, everyone: we are all God.
“Difficult as this may be for you to believe, you have never made a mistake in your life. Nor has anyone else.”
Who was he kidding? I thought. I made the biggest mistake of my life getting involved with Barry, a mistake that not only broke my heart and took my money but nearly cost me my life.
“Think about it like this,” Deepak began.
“We came into a body with temporary amnesia about who we really are. There is a gift in forgetting. It allows you to ultimately remember who you are and re-create yourself. We must first forget in order to re-create and remember. I discovered that instead of wondering why what happened happened , it became essential and useful to be in a state of gratitude for what IS right now. Right now, you are here. Your feet are here. Your understanding is what it is right now.”
I looked down at my feet, understanding absolutely nothing about what he had just said. My mother might understand this kind of language, but I sure didn’t.
As if he had heard my thoughts, Deepak continued while uncrossing his legs and leaning farther back into his old chair. “Everything that has ever happened is happening now, and the only question is what to make of it. And knowing that, you can remember into being that which you most desire.”
We sat in silence for a while, me clueless and him in contemplation, sipping our chai. While I heard what he had to say, and I had a vague feeling it might be true, I didn’t fully understand. I really wanted to get what he meant, but it felt like I had cotton in my ears, which distorted everything.
The confusion on my face must have been evident because Deepak motioned me to join him at the window overlooking the Ganges.
In the faint early morning light, Deepak pointed to the bridge on our left and the little ferry boat below, and then across the river to an ashram that had a large Shiva statue on a platform in the river.
He suggested that just before sundown, I cross the river, either by walking over the pedestrian bridge or taking the two-minute tiny ferryboat and attend the Ganga Aarti Ceremony at Parmarth Niketan Ashram.
He explained that aarti is a sacred ceremony performed at sundown, in which prayers, chanting, bells, incense, and flaming lamps dispel darkness.
Often people made offerings to Ganga in small palm-woven baskets filled with candles and flower petals.
He told me all I had to do was to sit quietly and let the love of Mother Ganga and the prayers fill my soul.
It sounded like a promising proposition, but I wondered if my soul, with all its punctures and holes, could be filled with anything but grief.
Deepak told me that after the ceremony, I could attend the satsang, and I would have the opportunity to ask questions of the American-born holy woman, Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati.
I wondered, What the heck is a satsang ?
I made a mental note to google its meaning later.
(According to the internet, satsang is a Sanskrit word that means “gathering together for the truth” or, more simply, “being with the truth.”) I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be with the truth just yet, but I had a sinking feeling I wouldn’t be able to ignore it forever.