God’s Father

It is Sheriar Moondegar Irani’s 169th birthday this month. Meher Baba’s sister, Mani, recalled that their father “was a living example of what Baba tells us to do, to be in the world but not of it.”[i]

It started early. By age twelve, Sheriar’s longing for God was so intense that he left his home in Iran to seek Him. The boy became a wandering ascetic, filling the role desperately, authentically, and devotedly. For eighteen years he roamed throughout Iran and then India, owning almost nothing, living on alms, and constantly repeating his lovesong—the name of his beloved God, Yezdan. Baba later said to the women Mandali on the Blue Bus tour as they chugged through rugged patches of desert and mountain: “He wandered all around here on foot looking for Me. In search of Me.”[ii]

There were moments during Sheriar’s travels when Yezdan announced His hidden presence. Like the incident that Sheriar loved to tell his daughter decades later when she requested a “true story”: that he was wandering through the scorching Sind desert when he realized he had gone too far, that he was going to die of thirst. A man and a boy suddenly walked up to him out of nowhere, carrying flasks of water. The man admonished him, “Why have you come here? Why do you distress the Almighty with your foolish behavior?”[iii] But the two eventually let him drink his fill. Then they disappeared, suddenly nowhere to be seen in the vast exposed expanse of the desert. Sheriar knew that Yezdan Himself had saved him and sang His praises alone in the desert.

But despite these moments of enticing nearness, God remained hidden. Finally, after eighteen years of seeking, Sheriar reached the end of his capacity and hope, unsure if he would ever find the One he was looking for. He decided to do a chilla-nashini, a severe spiritual penance where seekers desperate for their goal draw a small circle and then stay inside it, not eating, sleeping, or drinking, for forty days. After thirty days, Sheriar had to stop. He stumbled, anguished, heartbroken, and wishing for death, to a riverbank where he fell asleep.

In that moment, Yezdan reached down again. Sheriar heard a clear voice: “O Sheriar! He whom you seek—He whom you wish to see—His attainment is not your destiny. It is your son who will attain it. And through your son—you.”[iv]

Sheriar had not been “of the world” since he was twelve; his intention and his devotion were only for God. But he had also not been “in the world.” He didn’t know what this divine message could mean, but it was a harbinger of what I find the most inspiring part of his life—and the part that allowed him to become the father of the Avatar, God in human form.

About a year later, despite never having intended to lead a family life, Sheriar found himself engaged to a girl much younger than he (a tricky twist of circumstances that Mani always loved to tell in Mandali Hall). They were married nine years later. And taking it as the will of God, as Mani put it, he “kept to his pledge not only in word but in spirit.”[v]

Sheriar went to work to support his family. He started out at as a gardener (“anything he touched just bloomed…”[vi]), then ran a tea shop, then a toddy shop, then many toddy shops, always with an ineffable presence that made people seek him out “just for the peace of mind”[vii] they felt around him. The only fault in his work was one that Shireen sometimes noted—he would often leave for work with a blanket and return home without one. “Oh Shireen, he was so cold,” he would say to her when explaining his irrepressible charitable impulses. “But Shireen, she was so old.”[viii]

Sheriar did not attend only to the material needs of his family. Despite their immense difference in age and experience, he treated Shireen with exquisite attention, devotion and care. He taught her Persian, and they would often read Hafiz together in the evenings. He conversed with her each night about all the mundane elements of her day. And, as Mani remembered, he always gently drew out the deeper meaning, the truth, the spiritual element of whatever story Shireen happened to be recounting—a perspective that would invariably “comfort and soothe”[ix] her.

Over time, Sheriar became father to six children. Even down to the last, his little girl Mani, he was a caring, calm, constant presence. They would go on walks together, the stocky man in his late sixties hand in hand with his tiny daughter. When Mani asked him for prayers, he shared them with her—including the one that struck her most deeply, the prayer of never wishing ill of anybody. And in the midst of this regular and meticulous care, she would sometimes look up at him from her childhood pursuits to see his lips moving—still moving to the name of his constant companion, Yezdan.

Of course, it was through this being “in the world but not of it” that Sheriar finally found what he had been looking for. Meher Baba said of His father, “in the whole world there’s no match for him. There’s none like him. That is why I was born to him.”[x] Sheriar knew who was coming when Shireen became pregnant with their second son. Mani describes that once, when Shireen recounted a dream she had about the baby in her womb, “he just looked at her and said, with great feeling and reverence, ‘Shireen, you do not know who this child is that is to be born to us!’”[xi]

The child came on February 25, 1894. Sheriar continued his life of fathomless devotion to God and fathomless commitment to his worldly responsibilities—and God, in human form, joined him in the very midst of it all. Mehera put it simply in the name she chose for a play about Sheriar, Shireen, and Merwan’s birth. She called it: “Sheriarji’s Wish is Granted.”

[i] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 14
[ii] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 7
[iii] Lord Meher Online, p. 92
[iv] Lord Meher Online, p. 98
[v] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 9
[vi] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 14
[vii] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 64
[viii] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 24
[ix] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 63
[x] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 6
[xi] The Joyous Path, by Heather Nadel, p. 10