Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #7 – Is Teatime an Item of Devotional Service?
Dhanurdhara Swami February 10th, 2025
Joking. Not really. The story:
I was holding my fourth annual BIG (Bhakti Immersion Govardhan) Retreat. It was a motley group of devotees from a professional clown and a lead hard-core guitarist to the housewives of New Jersey—three middle-aged ladies with twelve children between them with at least one of their teen girls here to boot. Sure, we would have morning and evening program and daily parikramā, but this group, I thought, also needed “fun.”
Before the evening program I scheduled a get-together in my ashram in the downstairs apartment next to mine. I had our charming Middle Eastern lady and her beautiful and talented twenty-four-year-old daughter arrange teatime with the ambrosial brews of orange blossom and saffron infused teas they brought from their country. At least I thought such “fun” was needed. Their non-stop raucous cacophony of laughter pierced the Braja sky, and certainly the wall of my adjacent room, with what sounded like bhakti-killing “prajalpa” (idle talk).
What kind of offering was this before the sacred mount of Govardhan, just fifty yards before us and visible from their courtyard? A thought spontaneously arose in my cloistered Hare Krishna monk mind, a kind of, “Is this authorized, prabhu?” I thus happily broke up the party just in time for evening kirtan.
Young Satya, our middle eastern tea brewer, was designated to lead. She closed her eyes and for two hours with deep bhāva and a simple but melodious melody gradually built up the tempo. As I looked around the room, I couldn’t find a single devotee soul not deeply lost in the experience, all immersed in the holy name. Then suddenly the collective bhāva of the kirtan finally merited an explosion of the tempo and we all danced and danced. From the quiet male hairdresser to the former lady infantry soldier, we all danced without attachment and without inhibition. Parmananda of the old music band Shelter called the kirtan epic. For me it was arguably one of the deepest kirtans I ever experienced.
So I was wrong, “Teatime is an item of devotional service.” Well maybe not an item of devotional service, but certainly of value to our devotion. I guess I owe an explanation.
Day after day the devotees, mostly the ladies, joined for joyous teatime and shared their lives and thoughts and jokes, and more jokes. Each day the kirtan reached new heights. I saw a connection.
People today generally live in a lonely world, and if they are blessed with a community, their gatherings are too far and few between. A tight trusting community allows us to shed our self- interest for a spirit of common interest. It helps us to drop the self-centered and limited concept of “I” restraining us from the uninhibited and non-detached open heart required for full immersion in the nectar of the holy name. It’s thus a principle of rasa that shared bliss is higher than individual bliss, and thus saṅkīrtan, chanting with community, gives special feelings of heightened devotion. We did start with many people who had a deep connection already, but I don’t underestimate the power that our teatime had to bring everyone into the fold of community.
Wait—isn’t prajalpa one of the obstacles to devotion? Isn’t sense gratification antithetical to pure devotion? We are not against sense gratification. We just need to understand it’s not the goal. We take what we need to forge a peaceful mind for the higher endeavor of Krishna consciousness. Teatime may not be for everyone, and it wasn’t for me, but most people today desperately need community . It brought our group, from the clown to the housewives of New Jersey, together in the saṅkīrtan of the holy name with a depth and relish unimaginable weeks before, even for me.
Teatime anyone?
- Monday Morning Greetings
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