For more than forty-one years of my life I saw the Path of Christianity from a brick wall I put warning signs and graffetti on every chance I got. The message was delivered clear to me over and over. Stay away.

When young I saw the ugliness of certain divisions of the Christianity Tables on the Maya Express. It was always filled with vitriol and hate on television through the infamous eighties Evangelical television agents of Maya.

Always talking about who was going to hell and hammering things down. Always the same overbearing, angry, preacher type.

As I got older I saw how the same beliefs made my cousins not be allowed to watch some of the oddest things.

From Bambi to Dungeons and Dragons, Christianity really likes to target things that they think isn’t on their Path.

The Christians on my Path were always insisting everyone must follow THEIR PATH. They can’t accept anyone especially those closest to them, taking any other Path.

Look over here a “sinner”

If you sin. Oooh boy did they let everyone know.

As I stated in the Path of Walking, we fall and fall often. What we need is someone there to lift a hand. To give support. To cheer us on.

As with the story of the Pharisees told to me during the Path of Jesus and the Swami, many want to point out other people’s sins. They act as if they have the right to throw the first stone; all the while trying to do so, they end up committing even more atrocities and sins themselves.

Everywhere I travel along the highway is billboard message signs of repent or hell, deployed by Maya. Even from home, people will come to the door or call the phone to insist you follow their Path or they get upset. Even when they say they aren’t angry their choice of words indicate they believe your Path is wrong no matter how right you feel it is.

As we learned in the very beginning those are all tables of the Maya Express designed to keep us off our true Path. Any Path that doesn’t say Love is the answer can’t be found in Bhakti, or on the Path of Love.

The New Table

As I stepped back on after the Path of Intention, I noticed a chair open at the Christianity table that reveled itself during the Path of Jesus and the Swami. There were quite a few new tables also in the distance. Some of my old friends from other tables in my past sat there as well. In the future, I would sit and we would talk about new subjects, with a different more mutual spiritual connection.

One of my new friends was sitting at the table volunteering to do audio and visual for a local Community United Methodist Church. My friend didn’t even bat an eye at my Spiritual Path. They needed some help and asked if I would help out.

“but I’m a Hare Krishna. Not a Christian.”

“Does that make a difference using a computer? Pull up a chair”

With great reluctance I sit down.

Acceptance

Open Hearts

Open Minds

Open Doors

Open Tables

That was their mantra on their t-shirts.

Sounded a lot like my friend Leon, a Missionary at Communitas International. Another table I visited often even before the Path of Bhakti, when helping out with the homeless community.

I started talking to the two pastors at the church Ben and Kelly. Talked about Jesus, Krishna. I briefly explained my beliefs.

Afterwards Pastor Kelly said “Okay, hope to see you next week.”

Wait? What?

So each week help was needed, I would come in and follow along each hymn and verse and press the space bar to keep along for everyone on the big screens.

I would meet more and more friends at the Christian Table. Each one not thinking much about the Hare Krishna aspect. More appreciation for helping fill in a void.

The stories though. They resonated differently.

Breaking Bread

A few months into helping out, the most amazing thing happened. I was there on a Sunday as usual, but this was the first time I was helping out during communion. They only do communion one Sunday a month.

Growing up with Christian family members and having had a spouse from a Catholic family, I know all about what is REQUIRED to go to the Communion tables.

As they followed along all the prayers, they mentioned that Open Table again.

What exactly does that mean?

Everyone stands up and walks up to the front get some bread and little cups. As the line wraps up, Pastor Kelly and Ben pick up the bread and cup and walked to those who can’t get up. They hand bread and say a prayer to some elderly in the back. They break off a piece and hand some bread to my friend.

Then I hear Pastor Kelly saying a prayer near me, and I look up and the most emotional thing happened.

He was talking to me asking me, for my permission, to say the prayer to me.

Pastor Ben was handing me, this Hare Krishna, bread and cup.

Open Table.

Krishna and Jesus together

Something changed that day. Jesus literally broke bread with Krishna in my heart. They used the hands, the voices, and the hearts of Pastor Ben and Pastor Kelly.

You see just like the very first devotees in Krishna Consciousness I met, Pastor Kelly and Ben did what most churches do not. They just accepted me for who I was, and talked to me and responded to my concerns, my words and my views with the most remarkable thing. The true teachings of Jesus and Bhakti. Kindness and Love.

They were not the first ones in Christianity to offer the same. I have friends for decades offer the same kindness and Love. They were the first ones to do so, since I broke down the walls around the table of Christianity. Had either of them rejected my viewpoints and said Krishna and Jesus can’t walk with me together, this entire story may not even exist.

As each week went by, I recognized how the teachings of Jesus sound a lot like the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita. The oddest thing for me is I had heard these verses all my life. I had rejected every one of them. Now something felt different.

Remakes or Reconnections

If I’m being totally honest there is a new pallet of bricks waiting to be put up around the Christianity table again.

So my mind went back to, the teachings sound too familiar. Are they just retelling. Like a remake of Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast it’s the same but different.

Why do they have to retell it differently, the original is always best right?

Then one day, Pastor Ben and I met in his office for lunch.

The only day our schedules aligned put a kink in where to meet for lunch. It was Ekadashi. Which means fasting meals of no beans or grains for me. It’s a practiced on the 11th day of the waning and waxing moons.

Now finding a restaurant in small town Florida that is vegetarian is hard enough. Throw in Ekadashi, I asked if I could cook us lunch. So, a Bhakti Ekadashi lunch I prepared for us. I tried not to be too spicy but provide the seasonings that is accustomed to Bhakti.

Open Table.

We sat and chatted and shared spiritual books. We talked about the similarities and differences.

I talked about how that’s where my teachings in the Bhagavad Gita actually comes up and in my interpretation says to accept Jesus’s story as a necessary retelling.

Chapter 4 verse 8

To deliver the pious and to annihilate the miscreants, as well as to reestablish the principles of religion, I Myself appear, millennium after millennium.

I mentioned how the ISKCON founder A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada’s wording in some of his purports for the Bhagavad Gita were similar in some ways to sermons by Ben and Kelly.

In Bhakti Spiritual Masters have given their sermons in the form of “purports” to the verses and Prabhupada was published in the book “Bhagavad Gita: As It Is”. I even mentioned how Prabhupada thought of Jesus as a person who walked a similar Path.

I had joked about some of the obvious wording in the purports that was something people would say in the 1960s and not the 2020s and that is where Ben got me.

He mentioned “Hey we can all accept things were looked at differently in different times. Thats why the retellings have to happen. Just because an analogy worked for Prabhupada in the 60s to attract a religious movement, those same words or person may not today.”

Just because an animated cartoon in the 1990s connects to the same “children of the 90s” today, doesn’t mean it connects to children of the 2020s.

Not the message

I paused; the message was the same. The message has always been the same.

Pastor Kelly and Ben weren’t up there on stage teaching me any new messages I hadn’t heard before. Why, why was it so different?

It wasn’t the Bible, the Gita, the Church, the Temple.

Our Spiritual Path doesn’t come from places.

Our Spiritual Path has never been about the messages.

Our Spiritual Path can’t come from words alone.

The messages that Pastor Ben and Kelly deliver are the same exact messages I had heard before.

Why is it different now?.

The only difference is the messengers.

You see, only when the messenger is walking their true Path and only when the messenger is walking their own Path of Love, can the real message be received.

Messengers Are All Around Us

Kaustubah, Raghunath, Mara, Leon, Mirabai, Gopal, Varsana Swami, Pastor Kelly and Ben they had all delivered messages to me when I needed them most the exact same way.

They opened

Their Hearts

Their Minds

Their Doors

Their Tables

They didn’t say “you’re not like us”. Instead, they stepped ON to MY Spiritual Path. Then with open arms and Love and acceptance said:

“Our Paths are a little different, but they are running parallel right now. You are welcome to join us, at our Open Table”.

Yours Forever Grateful.