This week I have had to change the name of my blog, because an acquaintance started using the name "The Accidental Hermit" in her advertisements that then obliterated all the search results for my blog when anyone Googled it. Even when the name of my blog was typed exactly, "Diary of an Accidental Hermit," pages and page of ads for her podcast popped up, and my blog of ten years, with more than 350 posts, was nowhere to be found. It was as if someone took a match to thousands of hours of work and made an internet bonfire with them.
My next concern, of course, is that the two of us would be confused for one another because we are doing a very similar thing. Though I've been occupied with it for two decades, and she is a newby, that is not enough of a distinction for the purposes of Mr. Google. We are "urban hermits" living in apartments in smallish towns in the Southwest, advocating for the contemplative life.
In the process of renaming my blog and refining it so that I can differentiate myself from that person who started using the moniker I have had for more than a decade, I realized that there is a huge elephant in the room that I have to clean up, and I am happy to have found the silver lining in all this mess, because we all know that there usually IS a silver lining to any conflict because that is what God typically does. He can and does bring good out of bad.
I have realized that some readers may not understand my religious affiliation(s). Is she Catholic? Is she Hindu? Who IS this woman, anyway?
The short answer is that I am Catholic. I was a Hindu renunciate when I converted, but it is a complication story that has a lot of "moving parts" and will take some time to tell adequately, so I will just give a partial answer here and then provide the whole story in a book I am writing and will make available at some time in the future.
I was raised without any religion whatsoever. My parents hated religion, especially Catholicism, but I was always interested in God and immediately began learning about various religious traditions when I left home at 16. I spent some time with the Scientologists. I dabbled with Nicheren Shoshu Buddhism. I became interested in meditation and searched for something in the "yellow pages" phone book in Sacramento, California, where I found an advertisement for the Vedanta Society, which began years of close involvement, mostly in Los Angeles, where I moved after a year with the Vedantists in Northern California.
What I loved about the Vedantists, in addition to the peaceful presentations in their temple, the discussions about spiritual life and practices, especially meditation, is the respect that Vedanta has for all religions. They say that "all religions lead to God" and that one can remain a Christian or Buddhist or whatever other faith and a Vedantist at the same time! Of course, at that time, I had no other religion, so I threw myself totally into Vedanta, especially the meditation.
I asked the swami about the Vedantists' claim that all paths lead to God and asked if he really believed it. He said, "Yes, but our way is faster!" Very clever.
Oddly enough, though I knew very little about Christianity and I had never even attended a Christian church service, when I presented myself to the swami for initiation in the formal ceremony in which they do this, he gave me the Jesus mantra. We had not discussed it, and it was a shock to me, because I thought he would give me a different one.
Within a short time, I expressed interest in joining the convent, which I did do in my early thirties. But there was always something that did not quite fit. I loved the life, but something was not working within me. It did not help that the nuns were exceedingly uninterested. They were afraid that because I was the Swami's friend, I would try to "take over." It was ridiculous, but that was the situation.
Also, the physical work we were required to do was very hard on my body, and I hurt my back at one point and never really recovered. I have the same weakness in my back, to this day. (At that time, the ersatz head of the convent went to the swami and made the claim that I was "faking" a back injury, which he told me about immediately. This is an example of how cruel those women could be toward one another, but, as I have said many times elsewhere, the reason men are in charge of the world is because women do not support other women; they actually work to undermine one another at every opportunity.)
Vedanta is remarkably like Catholicism in MANY ways, but unlike the impersonal God of Vedanta that "became all this" the God that I eventually met and fell in love with was the personal God. But it wasn't Ramakrishna. His image left me cold. Nor could I comfortably believe in reincarnation, a central theme in Hinduism and Buddhism. I struggled with these ideas. I loved the life but could not accept these concepts because it was not what I was experiencing in my meditation. I remember standing in the kitchen chatting with one of the nuns who said that she was looking forward to "merging into Brahman" when she died, and my immediate response was, "that sounds revolting!" I began to realize I was in the wrong place. It was a very sad time for me, as I love the life, but there were these other pressures. I left once, then returned, then left for the final time. The swami was sad to see me go. When I told him I was leaving, he said, "but who will smile at the devotees?"
After leaving the convent, I tried to get baptized by the Catholics, but the nun in charge of the RCIA class was operating under a confusion that the Catholic Church would not BAPTIZE me until a previous non-sacramental marriage in my teens had been "annulled," which is NOT the policy of the Catholic Church and makes no sense at all but I could not dissuade her and did not have any Catholic friends to advocate for me. In fact, I had never even known a Catholic, personally. This is how The Catholic Church pushes people away. If you look different at all, if your experience is not the old-fashioned nuclear family model, if you don't have money or children to give to the faith, no one welcomes you. (Please do not write me telling me how wrong I am about your faith. Understand that I am speaking about my experiences, not yours.)
So, there I was, having left the monastic life I loved. I could not join a Catholic convent, as I had intended, because I could not even get BAPTIZED by the darn Catholics. I became unchurched and unaffiliated to anything for many years. I continued my Vedanta meditations, but I felt that the universe had bamboozled me. I had left the monastic life that I loved, that allowed some time for advanced spiritual practices, ostensibly to do a better thing in the Catholic Church, and they would not even baptize me - not because of a requirement of the faith but because of a prejudice and misconception by a local functionary. The months and years ticked by, I tried to get on with my life, but I was out of place. Just surviving.
When I became disabled in my late 40s and had to stop working outside the home, my swami agreed that I should take sannyas (final monastic vows) in the same way that one of our Vedanta saints had done "directly from Ramakrishna" in a spiritual ceremony. He gave me a few instructions and named me "Sannyasini Kaliprana." This was an unconventional arrangement, but he was an unconventional swami.
Then he asked me to take over the administration of an ashram house in the Southwest, but my disabilities were a concern to me, and I would have no security once I moved in there.so I ultimately turned down the posting.
Instead, I stayed where I was and decided to live as an independent sannyasini. By this time I was in my 50's and was living on my Social Security retirement funds. There IS a tradition in India of people giving up "householder life" for sannyas in their later years, and this arrangement made sense to me. I settled in to become a hermit and spend my time in silence, solitude, and contemplation, while leading an occasional lecture or workshop on meditation.
But The God of Catholicism continued to call me. I had been very much affected by the works of the Catholic mystics I'd read about while in the Vedanta Convent and every once in a while would feel the pull again. Eventually, I met a woman who lived in my apartment complex who was an independent Catholic nun. One thing led to another, and I was accepted into the Catholic Church in about 2006, I believe.
Around the same time, my genealogy research began to reveal that I am descended from many famous Catholic saints, and that helped to make me feel I belonged to a particular group of people. I began to learn about and commune with my grandmothers and grandfathers, like Saint Olga of Kyiv, Saint Margaret of Scotland, and many others, and gradually began to feel more and more like I belonged SOMEWHERE at least.
Unfortunately, nearly all of my Catholic friends and relations are dead, but this is what happens when you belong to a church that is disconnected from its mystic, contemplative tradition, as the American Catholic Church is at the moment. Most of the parishes seem uninterested in anything but abortion and politics, which leaves me cold. Actually, the most popular topic is FAMILY, and I do not have one of those. Most of the family I would want to discuss are dead.
In this process, I learned that the principles and practices of monastic life for Catholic and Vedantist are nearly identical. Both have a tradition of hermit monastics. My niche is very small, but at least I have one now! I particularly enjoy corresponding with other independent monastics and had an idea in the back of my mind that I might like to create a loose association of independent hermits - to support them, spiritually - but I have a lot on my plate.
As is probably obvious, I do not have any "official" designation from anyone, nor is one required. Anyone who wants to lead their life in silence and contemplation is free to do it and both Hinduism and Catholicism have a long tradition of people taking off into the wilderness to commune with God as hermits, swamis, sannyasinis, or whatever you want to call it. In February of 2023, I will celebrate my 20-year anniversary of my commitment to this life, and I intend to continue on in this vein for as long as The Lord will allow, in addition to which I make a little art and write a little. It is not a bad "retirement."
I hope this blog post answers any lingering questions anyone may have about exactly who I am and what I am doing here, as opposed to that OTHER woman who was raised as a Catholic, joined a Catholic institution while very young, and eventually left to live as a hermit in an apartment in Arizona. That is another person - someone else who is being advertised as "The Accidental Hermit" but whose background, story, and orientation is quite a bit different than mine. We are not the same person.
But no matter WHO we are, may God bless us all!
May we all be blessed!
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