EPPING, NEW HAMPSHIRE, USA, January 23, 2008: (HPI note: This article refers to the foreclosure on a New Hampshire Hindu temple reported by HPI here on January 4, 2008) Six Hindu men and a woman huddled together on a 20 degrees Fahrenheit January morning along a dirt road beside a series of posted “NO TRESPASSING” signs. They had come to save their deity. Having been evicted from their 100-acre temple grounds two weeks earlier, they drove from as far as 40 miles away to salvage a 3,000-pound marble goddess deity and a dozen smaller ones. But preserving the sacred, they found, isn’t as easy as renting a storage unit. Not to mention the question of what to do with an aging cow named Lakshmi. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” said Pandit Ramadheen Ramsamooj, the bearded and robed leader of the Saraswati Mandiram community. “We all came here to move (the Goddess), but my conscience does not allow it. “It would be,” he said, “like taking your mother and putting her out in the snow.”
The 11-year-old community had operated a temple, monastery and organic vegetable farm before a sheriff arrived with an eviction order on Jan. 4. According to Vasudha Narayanan, an expert on Hinduism at the University of Florida, the deity and its strength are associated with one location, as though the powers of earth and spirit have become concentrated in a single spot. Eviction poses a wrenching dilemma: to move the deity would be to strip its potency. Yet to leave it alone in the dark and cold would invite the prospect of its starvation and overall indignity. “As long as the Goddess has a form and you have the temple, you are bound by the rules of hospitality,” Narayanan said in an interview.
After prostrating, singing and anointing the goddess with incense, the devotees said they supported the decision to leave it in place. “We really don’t want to move it,” said Raja Sharma, a longtime devotee at the temple. “The deity belongs in this place.” This place has its own sense of purity, the devotees said. Christians operated a retreat center for 50 years before the Hindus bought it and continued the tradition of organic farming. Now, they said, the goddess’ sacredness exists in her consecrated connection with that place. “I will not allow anyone to force me to desecrate my own temple with my own hands,” Ramsamooj said. I’m just hoping (the creditors) will have a conscience.”