"I have the same religion as God"

The original author of this piece is not known. It was published in Hindi in two parts in a 2007, in महामार्ग का प्रकाश (Mahamarga ka Prakash), a journal that is now defunct. In the hope to retain its raw authenticity, it is published here with the least amount of editing.

Ordained as Mar Yusa, in the Ancient Church of the East. He served in what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. Ancient CofE was on its last leg because over many years already members and congregations capitulated to various Thomas Christian Churches under continuous pressure of islamization.

He was adopted to a household with some familial relationship to his birth parents. They had “Hindoo culture”, he once said to several of us in a class. We don’t know what that means for Beloved +Yusa, his philosophical mind ran deep.

His mother was a practising Sufi. His family’s relationship with the Kurds and Turks was tenuous when it came to religion and his father’s business showed the signs of stress because of that. Therefore, they knew all about humiliation and religiosity. He was named Nerem Narayan and by his physical looks as a young man he could have fitted in with his society, was it not for his principals. His family relied heavily on his income. Those were hard times with the Kurdish Rebellion, the Ottoman Empire building. He studied scriptures at the Assyrian Church, but when the inevitable happened that he was confronted by the military with the interrogation of, “what is your religion”, he infamously answered, “I have the same religion as God”. He was asked, ‘and what is the name of that religion?’ He said, “God never told us the name of a religion.” After upheaval, he was granted several opportunities to recant and “come to his senses”, but he didn’t. His family paid a deer price for that and it was deemed better for him to go East. He arrived in Kashmir in 1938. He never saw his family again.

Of the few things in Beloved +Yusa’s private belongings were xeroxed photocopies of newspaper clippings from the New York Times of the period 1914 to the 1930s about Turkish brutality in which sufi and non-moslem women and children were massacred and brutalized in an ongoing ethnic cleansing that cost thousands, some say millions, of lives. There were also clipping of 6 million Jews killed in Russia in those times, and Jews asking for donations from Americans to help the victims – and that was before the second world war. Nobody knows why Beloved +Yusa held on to those clippings and who brought it to him, he never spoke of it.

He was however not a stranger to brutalities even later in life. He suffered severe physical tortures on numerous occasions in Kashmir from the time he arrived to the mid 1960s when he finally left for a position in Ancient Church of the East in Tiruchirappalli.

Beloved +Yusa led a group of Kashmiris to safety to settle in towns in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, by a deal that he brokered with some of Assyrian and Thomas Christians. Not long after, he took a “back seat” as he called it in matters of clergy. He concentrated his efforts in mystical studies and teaching. His relationship with the Wayist mystics of the Ashambu hills was notable.

He was also friends with several Kanikkaran people who know the forests well. This too is where I attended my first retreat with Beloved +Yusa, in the biodiversity of the Western Ghats. Slowly, he opened my eyes to the wonders of the OM and the flow of the Way. The area is known for its views, waterfalls, ancient temples, forests and the river Tamirabarani, the lifeline of the region. Teacher explained to all that the ancient Ajivika ( आजीविक ) who lived there were early Indian Wayists – and Buddhists and Jaina misunderstood Wayism then, and now, and that was in 300BCE. The Tamirabarani was also the lifeline of modern Wayism in these modern days.

In those hills, Avalokiteshvara is more alive and closer than anywhere else I have searched to tune in. Many a Wayist teacher were groomed and inaugurated in those nature reserves.

Always discrete and esoteric, Beloved +Yusa continued to help Indian Christians come to peace with their inherited religion by showing the real teaching of Teacher Jesus and he traveled to Mumbai and Srinagar and back to the mountains to do this work. He helped Muslims understand the mystical side of their own religion and find peace and tolerance there. He helped Shaivites and Buddhists and Vaishnavas see the deeper mysteries and the oneness of all spiritual teaching—never asking anyone to accept Wayism as their “new” faith, he always said, “…we help souls find Spirit, we are not in the entertainments of politics of social movements”.

Yusa always had, it was said, “one foot in Sufism, one foot in Ancient Church of the East and his head in Wayism”. Head of the Wayist movement. Had Sufi, Christian, Vaishanvists, Buddhists, Jain, Shaivists and Ancient Church of the East clergy in his Wayist Council.

Media-shy. +Yusa was kidnapped in the 1970s by Muslim extremists, made the newspaper upon release. In old age he still suffered from arthritis due to multiple wounds on bones sustained during years of religious persecution. Pneumatherapy teacher, Yogi Philosophy teacher, Wayist teacher, and Mystic.

Beloved +Yusa died in October 2002, a poor but happy soul, and Wayism, still poor as always and a still a happy soul, is the better off for having had him with us.

Beloved +Yusa was not the man who would unite Wayist teachers and create for the first time a Wayist movement as so many of us hoped for. He never had money and regifted whatever was gifted to him that he did not need for food and travel up and down to communities. At one time Beloved +Yusa inspired younger blood, very well qualified, and we hoped that they would be the ones called to do that for Wayism. We had high hopes and we were all very disappointed that it did not happen as we had envisioned. We urged the new Teacher. We urged Beloved +Yusa to make him promise to fulfill his Teacher’s wishes, which he did. We urged the new teacher’s wife who, was a dedicated scholar and mystic in her own right, to urge her husband. But it did not happen. It was foolish of us to think that we, who are teachers of the Way ourselves, could not see. It was when, in 2014, Teacher +Yajn said to us, “Why don’t you do it? You look the part, with your grey beards and brown skin and all. You speak Hindi, you read Devanagari, your Sanskrit is better than mine and you spent years upon years learning at the feet of the Master, why expect it of me to be the guru”, that we knew we were wrong. We were old then. Too old to start and too lazy to change our lifestyles and step into limelight on public stage. Who in their right mind volunteers for torture? So nobody stepped up.

The life of a mystic tradition teacher is all too easy. We have more privacy that almost anyone. We have quiet and peace, we choose our audience and we live simply. The idea to live in public limelight, always on the move from one town to another and public appearances and writing books, suffering the insufferable academics who demand your time because they are writing a paper, a paper, as if their writing a paper is a world-stopping thing all should bow to; there was not one of us prepared to do it yet we expected others to do it.

It was at that time when our eyes opened and we, the teachers, learned that we did not even notice that in the past years under Blessed +Yusa’s guidance not only did a first edition of the Eastern Bible get published and to our shame was printed in an ashram in Africa, not India, also scholars from China, Kerala, Kolkata, Srinagar, Canada and the USA worked on a team to gather Wayist teachings unique to the tradition for the purpose to publish it in one book. It was under our own eyes, those eyes that don’t see for blindness of the mind, that Pneumatherapy became available in English-language and therapists were trained worldwide; without our help, all because of the inspiration of Beloved +Yusa all happened in quiet, without fuss, without begging us to wake up make a sacrifice. That is the hardest kind of teacher, those who don’t expect anything from you. When a teacher does that, everything is up to the student, and some things can go by the wayside because the inherent laziness of people—like me and many of my longtime fellow teachers who were once even, I dare say, critical of Beloved +Yusa for not being more of a charismatic leader for the masses, not caring to make any money to make a movement possible.

How did Wayism survive pristine for three thousand years, without money, without corruption or political power? Beloved +Yusa told us in Mumbai that at critical times Wayism always attracted honourable wealth, not because of Wayism but because the gods, buddhas and angels inspired the most worthy whose souls would benefit with spiritual realization to ensure the perennial philosophy is broadcast to souls in need all around the world. “It happens when the time is right, it always happens like that”. When that happens he said, people from all walks of life, old souled Wayists from many lifetimes, come together to contribute to uplift the awareness of the Way. In awakenings like that, even unlikely kings and influential people are spiritually awakened by it. He recalled from history how King Gonophores the Wayist was moved to sponsor the ministry of Teacher Jesus, how King Asoka gained the Light for his darkened soul by lighting the world this way, how King Jayavarman VII created miracles of civilization and how millions of people volunteer their services and thousands give their lives to be teachers, and the cycles of incarnations come and go, order in spiritual realms and energies around earth again restored.

To say that Beloved +Yusa was unassuming is an oversimplification. He would mist away without anyone seeing. He would gently disappear without people realizing he was there, until he had gone. In collecting material for this book we asked people for many years to send us copies of their photographs with Beloved +Yusa. When I complained to my wife recently that people are not forthcoming, she asked, “how many photos do have, and why do I think other people have more?”

That got me thinking about the man Beloved +Yusa, and I recalled how his peace was so tangible that few ever had the gall to impose on him to stand for a photo. He exuded the kind of presence at which you would not aim a camera, you just knew in your soul it would be disrespectful. He would appear that presence among us and we recall how he gave so much of himself when engaged with people that they glowed as he took leave, but you never felt that he had left. It has only been a few years since digital cameras and he died before smart phones, and in past years we were all too poor for film cameras. Naturally we don’t have many photos of ourselves prior to the year 2000. It dawned on me that most of the photos of him were at church, before he retired. That made sense because in church the leader is a figurehead who poses with uniform and regalia, for show. But in person, Beloved +Yusa was not the kind of man that compelled one to impose upon him a filming opportunity. Yet, that is what I tell myself and that is what my colleagues agree, but still it is inexcusable how few photos we have.

And that leads me to his funeral. He made his own arrangements, paid all expenses, wrote final letters to us, and died. By the time we received the calls, his personal letters to each of us were in the mail and the funeral was already in progress. Present with him on that day were a handful of Vaishnavi, Shaivite and Wayist students who had expected a retreat but got to have a funeral—our Beloved +Yusa at his best.