At sixteen I turned Hare Krishna.
Granted, it was but for a single day, one which also happened to be Hallowe'en. The mother of my friend Steve brought home from the fabric store yards of cloth closer in tone to the ochre of Tibetan Buddhists than the lighter saffron worn by the dancing devotees of Krishna. Ignorant of the proper technique of arranging the robes, we ended up swimming in our lengths of orange like anemic Romans in colossal togas.
Our shoulder-length hair, so proudly cultivated over many months, didn't strike us as at all inconsistent with our new, monkish identity. Steve taught me the words, or at least half of them, that comprise the famous, liberating mantra: "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare". Of course, I had no idea what I was tunelessly chanting, nor had any idea if Steve really knew better than I. We were a misinformed, multicultural mess, but that didn't stop us from receiving an honorable mention for the best costumes in Parkside High School.
Since that glorious, misguided initiation, I've had little to do with the Hare Krishnas. Several times my frugality invited me to the all-you-can-eat, $5 lunch they laid out in their tiny, Ottawa restaurant called Govindas.
As a rookie "spiritual care provider", I met a very pleasant patient who would covertly slip me japatis, which I gratefully ate in contravention to hospital rules. She invited me to the Krishna Temple on University Avenue, which I sincerely intended to visit, but somehow every Sunday afternoon found me somewhere else.
Finally, to celebrate my forty years on planet Earth, my Jesuit superior offered to wine and dine me where I wanted. Colombia has no shortage of restaurants, but these latter undoubtedly suffer a grave shortage of greens. In this country the Hare Krishnas enjoy a relative monoply on vegetarian food, and thus I entered middle age chewing spiced gluten amidst a hungry crowd under the serene watch of the aqua blue "Supreme Personality of Godhead".
After half a lifetime of superficiality, my Krishna relations took a dive into the depths last week. Having caught wind of the existence of an "eco-village" a short distance out of Bogotá, and having nothing to keep me from excusing myself for a couple of days from my eight million urban neighbours, I took up temporary residence in Varsana, a self-described yoga-farm. Neither my 15 years of yoga practice, nor my many seasons on various farms quite prepared me for what I was to learn.
It turns out that the Hare Krishnas, besides being international proprietors of veggie-restaurants, also own not a few beautiful parcels of land around the globe. On these they dedicate themselves to nurturing Mother Earth, just as they receive nourishment from her.
With explicit ecological principles that could as well have been lifted from Pope Francis' encyclical, Laudato Si, the devotees put their faith not only where their mouth is, eating in a way that does least damage to the biosphere, but equally where their hands are, manually working towards a voluntary simplicity that thumbs its nose at consumerism.
No stranger to Catholic monasticism, I was surprised by the make-up and run-down of this Krishna monastery. Whereas among my Trappist and Benedictine hosts I have always been a pup, amidst the monks in Varsana, I certainly was showing my dog years.
Very few of them topped twenty five, and equally few had completed more than two years in the cloister. As far as I could tell, nothing equivalent to an abbot or superior existed, which lent to the place a chaotic flavor, most perceptible in the kitchen sink after meals. There great heaps of metal dishes and cups waited for some charitable and undesignated soul to take mercy on the wreckage.
Not that anarchy rules the Hare Krishnas. In many ways their monks rival the rigor of their Catholic counterparts, and in some ways they dance right past them. At 4am they rise to one full hour of communal chanting, followed by another hour of private repetition of the sacred name of Krishna. Then comes another hour or two of philosophical instruction based on the Bhagavad Gita and other Vedic texts.
At eight o´clock the fast is broken with a substantial feed of fruit and granola and other delicacies on offer. Then work, lunch, work until 6pm, when more chanting is followed by more instruction until sleep folds up the day around about 9.
Admittedly, some of the monks came across as rather far-out, but they get there honestly. Strict is the policy against alcohol, drugs, even caffeine, not to mention, of course, meat of any cut. Sex is off the table and out of the question.
In fact, the Hare Krishnas border on a prudery that we Catholics have left to our great-grandparents. They avoid nakedness at all and any time, regardless of one´s state of solitude. To bathe in the buff is to contaminate the purity of the water. Some of their notions of cleanliness and contamination seem ripped straight out of the Book of Leviticus.
Like the disciples of Christ, the devotees of Krishna are by nature evangelical: they are called to go out to the highways and byways to spread the good news of Krishna consciousness. Hence their apparitions in airports and manifestations in marketplaces. They look to Jesus as a first-rate Guru and one more revelation of the infinite, universal Godhead. Indeed, if a visitor attending their hours of instruction were hard of hearing, prone to catching “Christ” when “Krishna” was pronounced, she could easily mistake herself in a Christian prayer group, so similar is the talk of compassion, love, mercy and forgiveness.
The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON—the official name of the Hare Krishnas) claims that anyone can plug in, as it were, regardless of religion, because the movement is a science not a faith. A science because it produces predictable results.
In spite of this assurance and, moreover, despite my long-standing, if superficial, association with the Hare Krishnas, my Jesuit brothers need not fear my permanent defection to one of their yoga-camps. However, I´ll likely seek out other temporary sojourns among them, now that my appreciation for them has moved beyond my stomach. They aren´t nearly as spacey as my ignorance had made them, although a fair bit more prudish than my imagination could have foreseen.