stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

464 STRIPPING THE GURUS
with known criminals and the receiving of stolen goods. (Mother
Teresa accepted over a million dollars in donations from Savingsand-Loan
fraudster Charles Keating, and wrote a naïve letter in
his defense during his trial. Following his conviction and imprisonment,
the deputy district attorney of Los Angeles County contacted
Teresa, encouraging her to return those “stolen” funds. He
received no reply from the “great saint” [Chatterjee, 2003].)
Anyway, one might even begin to sympathize with such perspectives
as Bhagavati’s, above, in the face of nonsense such as
Brooke’s (1999) position. For there, he repeatedly expressed the
desire to “out” (his word) the “wrangling bitch” and “vain effete
peacock” (his phrases) Sai Baba. He also evinced a predictably
“Christian” attitude toward female gurus in general:
I had never met [Hilda Charlton] ... and had my own personal
barriers and suspicions about women gurus. It just
wasn’t my style.
Gender-based “suspicions,” however, cannot be reduced to
mere matters of “style,” even in the case of complete flakes such as
Charlton. Nor can such dismal attitudes—whether coming from
male born-again Christians or in reverse from celebrated contemporary
female yogis—be viewed as a valid antidote toward the
problems which pervade the spiritual marketplace, or even the
saner world in general.
We should not, therefore, attempt to split the power/sexual/
psychological issues underlying these poor reported behaviors
along male/female or patriarchal/matriarchal lines, as is often
done. Indeed, should one even be tempted to do so, one should instead
consider Janja Lalich’s experiences in a “soul-crushing” political
“cult” founded by thirteen feminist Marxist-Leninists. Eleven
of those founders “self-identified as radical lesbians.” (“Marxist-
Lesbianists”?) And yet, even under their “nurturing, tolerant, egalitarian”
rule:
A well-respected doctor and party theoretician in his fifties
said he was so tired he prayed daily for a heart attack to give
him some release. A number of others said they secretly
wished they would get killed in a car accident because they
couldn’t think of any other way of getting out (in Langone,
1995).