The Divine Names: An Adventure - Part Two
A group of us gathered in the bedroom after the wedding, and as the large reels of the tape recorder slowly revolved, the room filled with the sound of “the Swami” leading the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra. I sang in response, answering his call. Looking back, the chanting on that August afternoon in 1967 appears to me now as a rare moment in time, a kind of karmic singularity, like the pinched waist of an hourglass, into which my whole past poured and from which my entire future would expand.
The wedding took place in the same neighborhood my wife Connie and I had lived as students at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, after only a year’s absence, we’d returned. In 1966, after Penn had awarded us each a bachelor’s degree—mine in Philosophy and hers in English—we had gone off to Amherst, where I had enrolled in a Master’s program in English literature at the University of Massachusetts. We timed our return to Philly to make our friend’s wedding, which took place two weeks before I was to begin doctoral studies in the new religion department at Philadelphia’s Temple University.
