My Dear Lord – Bhajana Kutir#128

Satsvarupa dasa Goswami – July 10, 3:30 P.M.

My Dear Lord Krishna…

Srila Prabhupada has written that it is a great embarrassment for the spirit soul to live in a material body in the material world. I wish to write to You some of my embarrassing moments in this lifetime for the purpose of impelling myself not to return in another life to have to suffer more of these. You know everything about me, and so You know the embarrassing moments, but I would like to reveal them to You in writing, just to accumulate them and feel the sting of them for the purpose of extricating myself from the embarrassing condition of bodily life.

My first memory is one of embarrassment. I was so young that my mother always dressed me in my clothes. But one day I decided I would dress myself. I hid myself in the corner of my room and began to put on my underwear and pants. But in the midst of my secret endeavor at acting grownup, my mother walked into the room and caught me dressing! I was so chagrined and embarrassed that I burst into tears, threw a temper tantrum, and flung myself on the bed. It was with great difficulty that my mother calmed me down and told me everything was all right and that it was very nice that I had tried to dress myself by myself. Do You remember that, Lord? It is my very first memory, and an unpleasant one.

I was always embarrassed when huge adult women used to bend down and put their face near mine and tell me how cute I was. My Aunt Mary used to call me “lover boy,” and acquaintances of my mother would pinch my cheeks, or even kiss me, which i hated. I am telling You these things because, although they may seem trivial or amusing in retrospect, they caused me great distress when I was so little and helpless. Once a neighbor girl who was much bigger than me in size threw me down on a bed and lay on top of me until my mother laughingly made her stop.

I was very short as a young boy, usually the second-shortest boy in the class at school, and this always caused me frustration. (It wasn’t until my third year in high school that I suddenly grew up to five feet, ten inches.) All the girls were taller than I was, and that was an insult to my masculinity. I was also thin and was easily bullied by bigger boys.

Going to high school caused me many embarrassing moments. I didn’t want to be teased as being a “good boy,” so I didn’t study, and I fooled around in the classrooms with the bad boys. This caused me to get low grades, and once, for misbehaving in the classroom, I was sent to the principle’s office, where I was reprimanded, and a permanent bad mark was put in my record. By my third year in high school, I realized my low grades would not qualify me for entry into one of the city colleges (my parents couldn’t afford to send me to a private college), and I had to enter the city community college that had just opened. Many of my peers were accepted to the four-year city colleges that I could not enter. I was very embarrassed to have to go to the low-class, new community college for two years before I could enter a regular city college, Brooklyn College. Being a student at Staten Island Community College was a shame for me.

After graduating from college, my father forced me to enlist in the U.S. Navy. There was no draft, but he warned me that there would be a draft, and coerced me into going into the Navy. I joined a Reserve Officer training program, where you could become a commissioned officer after spending two summer sessions of six weeks each at Newport, Rhode Island. I went for one summer and passed all the courses, but disliked it so much I decided I would rather opt for two years as an enlisted man than be an officer. But wearing the uniform of an enlisted sailor was a great embarrassment for me. I didn’t like the uniform and all it stood for. By then I was a wannabe college intellectual and considered sailors low class. The sufferings I underwent spending two years in an aircraft carrier were among the greatest in my life, my worst years.

So here I am telling You all these embarrassing moments, and I’m not sure it even has a proper place in my “prayers.” But I wanted to confide them to You. Not until I met Srila Prabhupada and began to live the life of the soul and serve You did I free myself from the basic embarrassment of being a spirit soul in a material body. I was not embarrssed wearing a shaved head and devotional robes in public, because that felt right (not like the Navy uniform), even though people laughed at me and mocked me for dressing like a devotee. I am still embarrassed to be in a material body. I get headaches and other aches, and I am growing into an old man with new inconveniences every year. I want to get out of this combination. I want the eternally youthful liberated body of a spirit soul in the spiritual world. So I hope reciting these embarrassments has served a good purpose. If I take another material body, I will just have to suffer more embarrassments. Please help me to take shelter of You and free me from the incompatible entanglement of a spirit soul in a material body. On my part, I will try to avoid it and join You where there are no more embarrassments.