“We caught it from her”: Lessons from Margaret Craske

Ella Marks didn’t know about Meher Baba when she first attended Margaret Craske’s advanced ballet class. In a video of her speaking at the Center in 1997, she describes seeking out Miss Craske because she wanted to be a professional dancer— and finding a dedicated, witty, exacting teacher, one of the best in the world. But like many of her peers, Ella also found something else. At one point early in her training, Ella looked into Miss Craske’s eyes. “There was such an incredible sense of love … It was almost like the opening of a curtain or something. It was objective, it was non-emotional, but it was … it was so … I’m not even sure I can describe it.”

Twenty years earlier, in 1931, Margaret had learned about Meher Baba in spite of herself. In the preceding two years, she had lost everything she valued: both her parents died, the man she was in love with died, two of her ballet inspirations died. It left her not only not seeking God, but actively rejecting Him. But, as she put it, “Having given up God, He decided to come to me.”* Looking for a place to collect herself, she decided upon a retreat in East Challacombe, England. The retreat, it turns out, was dedicated to Meher Baba, someone she had never heard of before. As fate would have it, she would meet Him six months later in London, and her life would change forever.

During that first meeting, Margaret felt, through intense nervousness, the need to look into Baba’s eyes. As she described it, “Courage came and I did so, looking in deeply— deeply as far as I could. I have nothing to say about what I saw. In fact, I don’t know. I only know that from that moment, whatever rough treatment He may have handed out afterward, there has never been a moment’s doubt as to His being the embodiment of love and life.”*

Margaret would spend the rest of her life following Meher Baba, including living with Him in India for seven years. As was typical of life with the Master, there were moments of extreme, ego-crushing difficulty. But Margaret hung on to her stalwart sense of humor, and she wrote in her books** scenes that will go down in history—like Baba having her dance around a Swiss countryside coffee shop, in heavy walking clothes, to the music of a dilapidated gramophone, and to the consternation of the other patrons. Then, Baba asked Margaret to go teach dance in America, and she brought her love, her humor, and her exacting training in pleasing the Master with her.

Margaret gave out information about Meher Baba slowly and delicately, “like an eye-dropper,” according to Ella. But by the time Baba first arrived in Myrtle Beach in 1952, many of her pupils wanted to meet Him. There were moments over His three visits to the Center, immortalized on film, when the dancers surrounded him: they carried His chair in and out of the Barn. They performed a dance for Him, what many of them called the most important and best performance of their life, and He smiled happily.

Baba went back to India, but His presence in the lives of the dancers remained, as did Margaret, stalwartly living for Him and obeying His orders. She became a fixture not only in New York, but at Meher Center. “She felt like a friend,” says Buz Connor of her time at the Center. “She was. She was a friend. Not just to me; to many people. And being with her, somebody who was with Him—the way she was with people, you naturally felt a part of that.”

Ella recalled Margaret’s role in her life through one of her hardest moments, which happened years after she had stopped dancing. “I had lost joy during that period; sometimes you lose joy and you lose goodness and … I thought I might be [in that state] forever.” She went to the mailbox, and found a box full of every imaginable vitamin and health food sent to her from Margaret. “It was the first lifting of it … there’s this counter-force of joy that comes again and again and again. It doesn’t stop.” Ella quoted one of Meher Baba’s discourses by heart: “Love is essentially self-communicative. Those who do not have it catch it from those who do … True love goes on gathering power and spreading until eventually it transforms everything it touches.” She continued, “And I think we caught it from her.”

Margaret kept teaching in New York until she moved to the Center full-time in 1986, at the age of 93. She spent the end of her life as she had spent so much of it: in teaching and friendship, and in full, one-pointed dedication to Meher Baba. It was a life represented by a few moments in Santa Margherita in 1932, when she laughingly agreed to give Baba a dance lesson, and they whirled and whirled together through the timeless afternoon.

*Lord Meher Online, pg. 1257
**The Dance of Love and Still Dancing with Love, by Margaret Craske