How the faith of little Mayan gave her a new life Howard Murphet and his wife Iris met the Harrison family in 1976 and through them could see the unfolding of ‘a great Australian miracle’. For a detailed account of this incident, over to Howard Murphet: Early in 1976 in Australia my wife and I became acquainted with Pearl Harrison, a retired secretary of the medical faculty of a university in Sydney. At first we thought this seemed to be just a chance meeting, but later we wondered. At that time the manuscript of my book ‘Sai Baba Avatar’, after much rewriting, was ready for the final, publisher’s draft. Pearl, although busy with volunteer welfare work, expressed a desire to type the manuscript. Why she should have this desire she did not understand, but she does now. Anyway, arrangements were made for her to do the typing, and thus she was introduced to the miracles of Sathya Sai Baba. One of her two grand daughters, eight-year-old Mayan Waynberg would, at times, help Pearl by reading aloud the material to be typed. While the grandmother felt sceptical about the miracles, the granddaughter accepted them without question. To the child they seemed quite natural. The typing of the first few chapters had been completed when Mayan, who had lately been looking very pale and had been bruising too easily, was taken to a doctor for a blood test. The doctor was appalled at the results. He phoned Mayan’s mother, Helen Waynberg, and strongly advised that the child should be collected from her school and taken home to rest without delay. He also made immediate arrangements for her to be given a bone-marrow test at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney. At this stage the family became very worried indeed. Pearl told me about it when I called to find out how the typing was progressing. I could see she was afraid, very afraid, that her little granddaughter might have some drastic, killer disease, like leukemia. It proved not to be leukemia, but something equally lethal – aplastic anaemia, in which the bone-marrow fails to produce the vital blood components in sufficient quantity to maintain health and life. Her blood picture at that time showed the haemoglobin count at less than half normality, the white components of the blood about a third the normal level and the platelets way down to one-fifteenth of the normal count. Mayan was put under the care of a specialist who told her mother that the only treatment was the use of certain drugs, one a male hormone named Prednisolone and another, Fluoxymesterone. From both of these, distressing side effects could be expected, such as stunting the child’s growth, causing puffiness and obesity, hair growth on the face while causing baldness on the head. The patient would need to have constant blood and bone marrow tests to monitor her condition. As Mayan had a deep phobia about needles piercing her skin and blood vessels, this was a frightful ordeal for her and everyone else concerned. But the most tragic part of the situation was that, after going through this treatment and suffering its side effects, she would still not be cured. The best that could be expected was a few more years of life, with very limited activity. The drug therapy was not a cure, the elders were told; all it could do was to delay the inevitable for a time. No one could say how long that period would be. In this sad situation Pearl thought about the Sai miracles she had been typing. She writes: “I must admit to complete lack of faith in religion, considering myself a Jewess by tradition but not by observance. I had typed about many miracles that Sai Baba had performed, and had thought how interesting it all sounded intellectually, but had not this dreadful illness occurred to my own granddaughter, I might have let it go at that. Then it was as if my mind suddenly opened with a jerk, and I began to think that perhaps there was something real in all I had typed. Howard and Iris Murphet were most concerned when I told, them about Mayan. They said they would bring some Vibhuti over and Mayan could start taking it immediately.” It has often been said and written that Sai Baba is specially interested in anyone in whom his devotees are interested. So the link was there. Yet, I remembered him saying emphatically that two necessary ingredients of divine healing are faith and surrender. Could we find such ingredients in this Sydney suburban home, where no one seemed to have religious or spiritual interests, and Sai Baba was a remote, almost fictional, figure in a far-off foreign country? Well, we could but try. To Mayan I said earnestly, ‘You must really and truly believe in the power of Sai Baba!’ ‘Oh, but I do’, she replied, and in the way she said it I sensed the simple, child-like faith that Christ had put of first importance. A little later, Grandfather Jack Harrison made me feel that he too may be fertile soil for faith. He said, standing in the garden of their home, ‘I am going to India as soon as I can to thank Sai Baba for curing Mayan.’ He did not say, ‘If he cures her.’ The Sai treatment had hardly begun, yet he seemed to have no doubts about its effectiveness. We may be born with faith, that inner certainty of the omnipotent Supreme, or we may acquire it, but we can never acquire it through reasoning and logic. In fact, the reasoning mind can be a handicap, blocking the birth of the deeper knowledge that men call faith. Grandmother Pearl had her intellectual barriers but a very warm heart. Mother Helen was non-committal. Judging by her talk, she was atheistic but she was willing to try the Vibhuti treatment. We kept assuring the family of the importance of prayer – constant