August 4, 2009
Dear Friends,
After nearly 12
years of dedicated and honorable service to our temple and our community, our
senior priest Sharmaji has decided to move with his
family to the Dallas area to be priest at the Sri Ganesha
Temple in Plano, Texas. His last day of service at our temple is August
7.
We thank him for his services and wish him and his family a warm goodbye. Let
me express a few thoughts to reflect on how very fortunate our temple and
community have been to have had Sharmaji as our
priest for so long.
Sharmaji came to our temple from India in December
1997. It was a kind of “first” for both him and our temple. For him, this is
the first temple at which he has been priest, because in India he had been
working as an independent priest and later in group practice. (Yes, it is not
only physicians who have group practices!) For our temple, his coming was a
first because we did not have any priest until then. As the first and senior
priest at our temple, who has remained at our temple from its infancy to this
day, Sharmaji has been responsible for developing the
worship practices for our deities, in particular the way the weekly worships
for the different deities are conducted. He has also helped establish several
traditions at our temple, that without him would not have been established,
such as the six-day Skanda Shashti
festival, the Brahmotsava festival for Lord Venkateswara, and the twice-daily chanting of Lalita Sahasranama every day
during Navaratri. He has encouraged and inspired
different groups of devotees to participate in these traditions. These devotees
will doubtless strive to continue the traditions after he is gone to Texas.
Again, it was Sharmaji who initiated many things we
take for granted today, such as the practice of putting dresses on the deities.
Initially, in our innocence, we left the deities unclothed and later, until Sharmaji came, we just used to
drape pieces of cloth around them. One of his first acts when he came here was
to dress the deities properly. He continues to develop new and attractive
styles of dressing them, as he did for Sri Ganesha
just a few days ago.
The elements that distinguish Sharmaji’s work as a
priest are his mastery of Hindu ritual practices, his flawless chanting of
Vedic mantras, and his absolute devotion and sincerity. I have already
described how his mastery of ritual practices has benefited our temple. As
regards his Vedic chanting: For devotees who attend any of his Abhishekams and listen to his chanting, it is a thrilling
experience to hear the Vedic mantras recited in the authentic tradition and
reflect that what they are hearing today is the way these mantras were recited
thousands of years ago, with their verbal and tonal purity preserved intact
over the centuries. And his devotion and sincerity as he performs the worship
are transparent to all the attending devotees. Watching him is in fact a
learning experience for the devotees, for they learn how devotion should be
practiced.
We have also been the beneficiary of Sharmaji’s
ability to build harmony in temple worship practices. When I say this, I have
two thoughts in my mind. The first thought is that Sharmaji
has been able to develop harmonious modes of worship at our temple while
working with the different priests who have been his colleagues at our temple
and who have belonged to different schools of the Vedic tradition. Especially
noteworthy is the cordiality, friendship, and mutual respect that exists
between Sharmaji and his colleague of 7 years, Shastriji. Not only between Sharmaji and Shastriji but also
between their spouses and their children. The second thought in my mind
when I talk about harmony building is that in the worship practices at our
temple, Sharmaji has been able to accommodate the needs
of our diverse devotional community without compromising the Vedic tradition.
All these great qualities of his have been a blessing for our temple and our
community. He has served our temple with excellence and devotion all these
years.
On behalf of the Board of trustees and the community, I wish Sharmaji and Seetha and their
children the Lord’s Blessings in their new home and we invite them to come back
to visit us anytime they wish.
Manohar Naga
Chairman
Board of trustees
Bharatiya Temple of Lansing