Your Friday photo is in remembrance of Avatar Meher Baba’s automobile accident in Prague, Oklahoma, on May 24, 1952…

Avatar Meher Baba and His mandali (close disciples) were traveling from the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Meher Mount in Ojai, California, for a planned nine-day stay.

On the morning of May 24, 1952, near the town of Prague, OK, Avatar Meher Baba suffered a severe automobile accident.

“…the personal disaster, for some years foretold by me, took place in the form of an automobile accident while crossing the American continent… It was necessary that it should happen in America,” Meher Baba said.

He explained that this accident would “result in benefit to the whole world."

The date of this event was foretold by Meher Baba many years earlier. During His first trip to America in 1932, He gave Elizabeth Patterson a small pink wildflower telling her to always keep the flower and write down the date—that someday she would know the meaning.

It wasn't until years after the accident that Elizabeth rediscovered the flower He had given her that day. She had placed it in a family bible and wrote next to it the date, "May 24, 1932," exactly 20 years before the fateful day she would be driving Baba when the accident occurred. 

Credits

• Quote: Meher Baba Calling, pg. 44, 1992 ©Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust, Ahmednagar, India.

• Photograph: Avatar Meher Baba, Poona, India, 1952. ©Meher Nazar Publications, Ahmednagar, India.

Sources

• Wayne Myers, “…the personal disaster, for some some years foretold by Me took place…”, Meher Mount Story Blog, published May 23, 2017.

• “Meher Baba’s Accident in America,” Avatar Meher Baba Heartland Center.