by KartaPurkh Khalsa
My memorable interfaith event is a very personal one, in a very yogic way, in a very faithful way, and, of course, in a very INTERFAITH way. It was the morning of the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council’s Table of Faiths in 2007. As usual, I was in our meditation space on the first floor of Sat Tirath Ashram — meditating! (I might also have been meditating on or thinking of my duties as part of the day’s events at the Hyatt Hotel.)
Sat Inder Kaur, my wife, was upstairs in our third-floor apartment, “sleeping in” as she sometimes did because of her physical exhaustion from taking care of this and that, much of which had to do with helping in the planning and execution of the Table of Faiths. It should be noted that this was, of course, in the days before personal cell phones. When she felt some serious chest pains that morning, she had great difficulty getting to the phone to call 911. After a few attempts, she was able to make the call. She remained in bed as the most restful place to deal with her back and arm pains.
I was, of course, still downstairs, doing yoga, meditating, chanting, fairly oblivious to my surroundings which I thought were required to be ”in deep meditation.” Our meditation space at the ashram is on the first floor just off the lobby where the front door was located. When the EMT’s arrived along with a KCFD pumper and ambulance and tried to enter, no one was there to answer. They called her on the upstairs phone and she said I was there on the first floor, I was meditating!
They knocked on the door and window, no results from yours truly, I was meditating, chanting, and attempting to quiet (ignore) the world around me at 5:30 AM. They tried a third time to get in, finally raising one of the other ashram residents to convince him that someone in the house was having a heart attack. Of course, he couldn’t believe that someone who lived in a house based on a healthy, happy, and holy (3HO, Kundalini Yoga, vegetarian diet) lifestyle could possibly be having a heart attack.
Just about at this time my meditative experience for the morning came to a conclusion. As I walked out into the lobby area, a crew of fit young firemen and EMTs were tromping up the stairs to my third-floor apartment. “Someone’s having a heart attack!” one of them said in passing.
I followed the ambulance to the hospital (St. Lukes) where she received some of the best care available in the Kansas City area. She survived that day with an assist by a few minutes of silent prayer by some seven hundred or so participants at that day’s Table of Faiths. There was also the insertion of a surgical stent in one of the offending arteries. Lama Chuck Stanford visited her in the hospital, offering his kind Buddhist slant on illness, as she was emerging from anesthesia. He told her of all the people in whose prayers she was remembered that day.
As it turned out, it was not a minor cardiac episode but neither was it fatal. Nearly all of the arteries around the heart were clogged but only a single stent was required. We came to find out that Sat Inder had a genetic defect that prevented her liver from processing cholesterol correctly. That has been remedied by a prescription
I know, I know, I could and should have been a more attentive meditator but I like to think that even though I was at the time partially deaf, perhaps my faint prayers played their part in her survival. Or maybe, it was all the sincere people praying for her well-being. Or maybe it is the diagnosis that saved her life. But more likely it was all three.