A Sankirtana Story.....

[Krsnanatha]

In the fall of 1983 I found myself out on the road on traveling sankirtana. I was teamed with two very nice devotees who were senior to me in every sense, age, experience, association ect... We had been traveling since August and it was now December. I had not stepped foot in an actual temple since we stopped off in late September at the St. Louis temple.

We had been told that the then Guru/GBC would be visiting the temple so we headed our van off to Missouri to hear a class or two and to get “fired up” to continue our travels until the end of the Christmas Marathon.

After a brief stay in the company of Their Lordships Sri Sri Krsna Balarama and Their kind servants, back to the road we went. Our travels took us to numerous cities and towns all across the Midwestern and Southeastern states. The selection of these locations was predicated on a general plan based upon being in a particular area scheduled to host a weekend college and/or professional football game. By the sheer numbers of people in attendance these football venues greatly increased the amount of Laxmi which could be collected.

 

As time passed I found myself increasingly unhappy. I had joined the temple to get the association of the saintly beings dwelling within those confines and to get relief from the constant engagement of material society, not to be tossed into a van and made to go out and sell books and collect money for months on end.

It was hard. No temple, no Deities, no steady morning program. Sleeping in an unheated van night after night when the temperatures would regularly dip into the low twenties. The lack of sleep from the cold reminded me of a novel I had read as a teenager, “One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich” the tale of life in a Soviet prison camp in the post World War Two communist gulags.

Our daily breakfast was a block of cream cheese, a couple of cups of trail mix and orange juice, not horrific but a bit tiresome after the third or fourth week (or month). There was no lunch and dinner prasadam was typically boiled vegetables in a sour cream sauce, rice and halvah.

Oh, how I lived for that evening dose of halvah. The heat from the buttered grains would pacify me as we read Bhagavad Gita together before taking rest.

Our camps were typically anywhere and everywhere, from actual campgrounds to simply parking in the vastness of a Midwestern farm field. Staying in a hotel was never considered, it would be a waste of Krishna's Laxmi.

One morning in mid December we were camped in a field somewhere in the midst of the nowhere, corn producing regions of Iowa. The temperatures that night had fallen into the teens. As I exited the van in the wee morning hour to take my bath it was snowing and the wind was blowing hard enough that my gamcha was flapping in the wind like the flag over Iwo Jima. I walked flashlight in hand to an irrigation faucet in the middle of this barren field. As I made my way, the ice and snow covering the ground transmitted the pain of coldness into my feet like the claws of a panicked cat. As I filled the empty water jug from the spigot I thought how much I wished I could be taking a warm shower. I actually said to myself “Krishna, I would give anything for some warm water right now.” As I poured the water over my head the strangest sensation occurred, due to the relative warmth of the water in comparison to the swirling snow, the air temperature and the wind chill factor, the water felt quite warm. Krsna was kindly granting my petty little wish.

These were the rough times, not to be confused with the sum total of my experience, as there was an undeniable degree of accord to be found along this trail of austerity. While my life of physical comforts was greatly diminished during these times there was also the kind rewards which austerity brings. The internal comforts that come from being forced by circumstance to ignore the trivial pleadings of the animate corpse and the concomitant detachment which saturates one’s existence.

Nevertheless there is always the mind. That subtle mechanism of preservation which is always proposing that one’s material condition could always be improved upon. The mind endlessly presents scheme upon scheme to the intelligence, a constant, sometimes relentless stream of proposals of how the senses could be countersigned by a variety of adjustments. If I could simply eat more, or sleep more, or if I was warmer, or had a girlfriend or went to see some films ect...I would find myself in a much greater position of satisfaction. The happiness, which derives from being forced to ignore such pleadings, to the point where the mind eventually gives up it’s petitions, is hard to communicate. I acknowledge that many readers of this account have found similar experiences through a variety of personal sacrifices and share this conclusion. For me these austerities delivered theory from the pages of the Sastra and created a relevant world where the collisions between material desire and the will to resist produced the benefits voiced by the outspoken saints. In my neophyte condition I was both completely attracted and utterly repelled by these internal psychological struggles. Much like the swimmer who at first finds the water uncomfortably cold but who after perseverance to remain can hardly be dragged back to shore.

 

Then there were the practical activities of the day. The time spent distributing books and collecting Laxmi. The mapping of the city or town by the senior man and the assignment of spots for book distribution.

On a typical day I would be dropped off around Ten AM at a shopping center or a mall. I would find a near by pay phone, record the number and make a timed schedule for the devotee driving to call me periodically during the day in case any need for adjustment to plan occurred. I would then generally assess the location’s security means or lack there of.

This was commando activity. We were not legally allowed to distribute books in these places as they were nearly always private properties and our commerce was not typically welcome. As I began to approach people exiting the stores a steady awareness was paid to cart boys and other store employees who seemed to be taking any notice of my activities. Generally a blase turn of the head and a timely meandering in an opposite direction was enough to throw an interested party away from taking to much notice of my activities. Sometimes even if found out the store manager would be kind enough to allow you to stay apparently ignorant of or in defiance of typical store policy. When confronted I was vague about the activity at hand i.e. “Oh me? I’m just a volunteer passing out these nice books to people who are interested.”

“What are the books about?”

“Oh these books encourage people about the value of embracing higher education.”

I would tell them I was a student teacher volunteering that day to distribute information that stressed the importance of pursuing such higher studies. Most of the employees wouldn’t question too much beyond this broad presentation, what reasonable person could rationally find fault with a volunteer teacher taking some time out to encourage people to appreciate the importance of higher learning?

In fact most of the people who I encountered probably realized that it was their own lack of determination in the field of studies which had them in their current position, chasing shopping carts or had kept them confined to a check out stand for the previous twenty years of their lives. What was generally not revealed to them was the specific goal of these “higher studies”, one of the most provoking and polarizing of subjects in American society; God realization.

Most people of course would assume the pursuit of “higher education” to be the indulgence in the various material sciences which not only produce a deeper understanding of the causes and effects of the world around them but that knowledge which could be exploited in some manner for making money. All of these statements on face value were absolutely true but would probably not be considered so from a Western mindset.

Sometimes people knew exactly who we were. We were not volunteers or teachers or students out making some small attempt to improve human society but members of some army of mindless cult robots, manufactured at some cult compound sent into the community to seek money and fresh fodder for the cult machine. We were seen as a threat, a gang of hoodwinkers meant to rob the good Christian folk of their money and even worse their offspring. In some of the smaller towns when word got out at a shopping center or mall that one of these robots was being detained either by a store employee or a local law enforcement official locals would gather to stare as if they were trying glean some tell tale sign of what a person who has lost their mind and free will to the dictates of a cult looked like. I will tell more of these travels in the future.

In the meantime I would truly love to hear from others out there who played out similar Sankirtana experiences.

In the meantime I remain your servant, one small Krsnananatha dasa, a dirty soul striving to become purified.

Thank you all for your kind attention.

[Kulapavana]

great story prabhu! all glories to the sankirtana devotees! true austerity and true sacrifice...

[Guest guest]

i have similar experience as you in distributing books, i sadly think that everything nice and funny i remember is because i was young. In itself giving the holy name and the holy books of prabhupada is spiritual, but my experience was simply an austerity in ignorance. The demonstration is that it has not generated durable spiritual bliss.

 

Your message has filled me with compassion.. especially for the leaders who, not understanding that you were and are a valuable and worshippable vaishnava, a desire tree, a companion of srikrishna in goloka, have sended you to suffer these great pains..

 

Now where are they?

[Kulapavana]

it is amazing how we could have accomplished so much more in sankirtan if we were just a little more compassionate to all these young book distributors back in the late 70's and early 80's... so much potential was wasted by our immaturity and coldness of heart... /images/graemlins/frown.gif