We were sitting around the Colon house talking about how cheaply you can live if you really tried. I recalled how my household lived on about $100-$150 a month (including property payment) when we were living “on the land” in Oregon in the early ’70’s. José Manuel said he got by fine on $25 a week of his church pay. He donates 2/3 of his $75/week to the poor. He’s still not hurting: he lives rent-free in the rectory of the local parish, shared with his boss, Fr. Allen, and another novitiate like himself. The excellent food is included and is sumptuously prepared by their cook. They have big-screen TV with satellite reception of all the channels plus high-speed internet.
Throw in the use of three cars, free travel to anywhere that they can convince the bishop is for business purposes, and free room and board in any rectory in the world that they happen to visit. Catholic priests live in the relatively exalted status that their faithful believe is deserved. It seems like an easy life to me. The only problem is the celibacy thing. I expect it adds to the mystique of these characters. There surely is no religious foundation for it and José confirmed that. It started out as a purely economic strategy by the Catholic Church: keep the overhead as low as possible out in the field. If the church had to pay for more than one person to open a church and keep it running, there would have been a much higher failure rate. How much more money would it cost to build a bigger house, buy more food and clothes and all of the other expenses that a wife and children incur? Too much; and I suspect that it’s still too much.
Elijah related his experiences while on a tour of ashrams in the south of India . He lived for free as long as he donated his time to help with chores while he was at each ashram. His only expense was travel between ashrams and the $1000 round-trip air fare. He ran into an Englishman who had lived in India for more than three years and only spent about $100 a year. He was still traveling: he had two years to go on the remaining $200 of the $500 savings he’d originally brought. I’d love to go to India some day. One thing I would take advantage of is the cheap Ayurvedic purification treatments called “panchakarma”. What would cost at least $200/day in the USA would cost only $100 a week over there and would be far more potent.
Speaking of things Indian, we met a friend of Nadja’s named Diego, a Colombian who lived in her barrio. She wanted me to meet him and teach him to meditate because he was into that kind of thing. Fine, we went to see him. His home was a Vedic shrine: the living room was set up like a church meeting hall covered in white satin drapes, with chairs and an altar up front. On it was a picture of his guru, whom he had first met in Colombia three years ago. I forgot the guru’s name and I had resolved to write it down, but we got so caught up in the tour of his place that I forgot. One bedroom was strictly a meditation room, draped in white satin and bathed in red light except for one tiny point of white light high on one wall.
The walls of the hallway and dining room were covered with posters of colorful diagrams with illustrations of Vedic themes, reminiscent of any TM center. Most of them were about the yugas: cycles of time that the earth goes through. Diego described his technique of meditation: he focused (uh-oh, another concentration technique!) on a point of white light and then moved that point to his 6th chakra (between his eyes). He did that for a couple of hours each day and was pleased with the results. So who am I to disrupt his journey? I told Nadja that it would be a conflict to have Diego attempt to do two techniques, especially ones that were so diametrically opposite in nature and practice. I congratulated him on his accomplishments-and they are significant: to be so devoted; I wish I was as one-pointed as he.
